Growing up in Warragal, Victoria, in the 1980s, David Waldron's after-school hobby — playing Dungeons and Dragons — was raising eyebrows.
"It was a fringe hobby," he recalls.
"I was quite an introvert and having a few mates around to play these games with their elaborate rules was a fun thing to do on a Friday night. It kicked off my imagination.
"[But] you started to get the Dungeons and Dragons panics."
The "panics" came from concerned members of Dr Waldron's community. Back then, his father was a minister at the Church of Christ.
Dr Waldron, who is now a historian and folklorist at Federation University, says that some locals feared that D&D players were learning to do real magic.
"In [the game], you might say, 'OK, my wizard's shooting a fireball at some goblins,' and you'd roll the dice to see if your spell managed to go off," he explains.
"People believed that playing the game had links to devil worship and would make people more vulnerable to things like satanism and witchcraft."
Dr Waldron says his minister father found some of the more absurd claims of devil worship "a bit bizarre".
"But the idea that [the game] might cause behavioural issues because kids couldn't handle it if their character died in a story — that had parental concern … it seemed a bit more mainstream."
The rise of 'satanic panic'
What Dr Waldron experienced was a small part of the satanic panic — a time of incredible anxiety in the United States and many other countries, including Australia.
Joseph Laycock is an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University, and has a particular academic interest in Satanism and new religious movements.
"The satanic panic was basically a conspiracy theory that living among us, hiding in plain sight, was a conspiracy of people who worship Satan," he explains.
The panic kicked off in 1980 with the publication of the now-discredited book Michelle Remembers, which used recovered-memory therapy — a practise no longer in use by psychologists — to claim that a global "Church of Satan" was systematically abducting and abusing children.
There was never any evidence for the conspiracy, but that just confirmed the belief in the minds of worried parents. Accusations of satanic ritual abuse continued into the 1990s.
"Weirdly, the lack of any evidence itself became evidence that we were surrounded by a satanic conspiracy," says Dr Laycock.
"They would say the Satanists are so powerful, they have infiltrated the police and the media."
The panic around Satanism extended to popular culture too, including the fledgling industry of tabletop role-playing games, such as Dungeons and Dragons.
Like Dr Waldron, Joseph Laycock grew up playing the game. He recalls it caused concern among adults in his life.
"As a child I knew it was nonsense, and this was my first suspicion that adults ran everything, but didn't always know what they were talking about," Dr Laycock says.
A 'demonic' force?
According to Dr Laycock, most opponents of the game were conservative Christians, which he finds odd.
"It's very interesting to me because the people who created Dungeons and Dragons – Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson – were themselves very devout Christians," he explains.
"They tried to keep their religion out of the game, but there are lots of references to the Bible."
Dr Laycock points to the game's Cleric character class, who could turn a staff into a snake, like Moses in the Bible.
"Instead of seeming Christian, to critics that seemed somehow demonic," he says.
"The Christians seemed almost alienated from their own religion when they were looking at this game."
Opposition to role-playing games, including Dungeons and Dragons, lasted well into the 90s.
Dr Laycock cites 9/11 as an explanation for why the moral panic dissipated.
"After that, it felt like there was something much scarier out there to worry about," he says.
"[Until then] anytime teenagers — usually teenage boys — did something incredibly violent and senseless, Dungeons and Dragons was the go-to explanation.
"The day after the Columbine Shooting in 1999, there were people saying this happened because the shooters played Dungeons and Dragons. [It] later turned out, they did not."
No place for Harry Potter
As the concern around Dungeons and Dragons faded, it was replaced with a new worry — Harry Potter.
The first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was published in 1997, and hit number one on the New York Times best-seller list in 1999.
As the series grew in size, and in popularity, many Christians in the United States banned their children from JK Rowling's books.
One such child was Alissa Wilkinson, who is now a film critic and senior cultural reporter for Vox.com and associate professor of English and humanities at The King's College in New York City.
"It's not like I asked to read them and my parents said 'no'," she recalls.
"We just kind of understood that Harry Potter was not appropriate for our family."
Ms Wilkinson says American Christian media — such as James Dobson's organisation Focus on the Family — were very suspicious of the series. Their Christian review website "Plugged In" discouraged Christian households from reading the Harry Potter books.
"If [those organisations] said, 'This is not something that parents should be putting in front of their children,' then millions of people would follow that advice."
Ms Wilkinson says she sometimes lacks a common point of reference with her fellow millennials because when she was a child "we were afraid that if we read the Harry Potter books, we would become immersed in witchcraft".
"It's a strange thing to have to explain, although I've also found there are many, many people like me."
Like Dungeons and Dragons before it, Harry Potter was an unusual target for a moral panic. After the publication of the final novel in 2007, the parallels between Harry's story and that of Jesus became obvious, and JK Rowling became more explicit about the series' Christian imagery.
Through her work as a film critic, Ms Wilkinson has now watched all the Harry Potter movie adaptations, but has still not read the novels.
"They teach these really great themes that you can use as a lesson for your children, even about your own faith," she says.
"Themes about working in community and the importance of friendship, fighting for what you believe in and against the darkness and all that. But you know, people kind of lost the forest for the trees."
The threat of imagination
The book series' The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings were popular with conservative Christians at the time, so why was Harry Potter so controversial?
Alissa Wilkinson believes it was a crisis about imagination.
"[JK Rowling's] books were coming out right when the internet was becoming a social phenomenon," she explains.
"Fans were playing role playing games, writing fanfiction, imagining new stories for the characters — and it was done in this big immersive way."
Ms Wilkinson says that imagination was seen as "scary", especially within conservative Christian circles "because as soon as you start imagining yourself as a different character or person, you open the door for imagining a different life".
It was the same issue for Dungeons and Dragons 20 years earlier, according to Dr Laycock.
He says some of the literature of the panic proposed that imagination in general — not just in the game — "is sort of satanic. It's thumbing your nose at God."
"I found this very strange, because historically we know that Christianity has often regarded the imagination not as something dangerous, but as something sacred — something that help bridge the gap between our world and God."
'She was on our side'
The panic around Dungeons and Dragons and Harry Potter can seem perplexing now, especially given that much of the opposition to both has dissipated.
Alissa Wilkinson has seen a radical shift: many communities that once tried to ban Harry Potter books are now embracing them.
"I know for certain that there are churches that will have Harry Potter-themed vacation Bible schools and sketches," she says.
"Once the story concluded and people could see what the arc was all along, a lot of the opposition just died off."
Ms Wilkinson adds that JK Rowling's recent comments on sex, gender and trans issues also captured the attention of conservative evangelicals who agreed with her views.
"It's like, 'She was on our side all along.'"
Dungeons and Dragons, meanwhile, is more popular than it has ever been.
"I have met pastors who play Dungeons and Dragons, especially with teenagers in their church, and they feel it's completely compatible with Christianity," says Dr Laycock.
"They view it as kind of apologetics for Christianity — the sort of lessons of good versus evil and love conquers all. These themes that come up in the game are a way of talking about the truth of the Gospel."
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