For a number of years, American law and religion were heavily involved with reports about satanic cults kidnapping and ritually abusing children, memories of which were repressed and only later recovered by researchers using special methods of interrogation. The truth is that none of this happened and it was all a fraud, but belief hasn't quite died off.

In the January / February 2006 Skeptical Inquirer, Martin Gardner writes about the still-simmering debate over recovered or repressed memories about childhood sexual abuse:

A more tragic application of the FMS [false memory syndrome] rested on the beliefs of countless Protestant fundamentalists that the horrors of the End Times are fast approaching. Satan, aware of the Biblical prophecy that Christ will return to Earth and cast him into a lake of fire, is now on an angry rampage. He is establishing vile cults throughout the United States, Canada, and elsewhere — cults in which unspeakable rituals are performed, such as eating babies and drinking blood and urine.

Dozens of shabby books about such madness have been published in spite of a thorough investigation by the FBI which concluded that, aside from the acts of pranksters, there is no evidence that Satanic cults exist here or anywhere else. In England a report by the U.K. Department of Health reached a similar conclusion after investigating eighty-four cases of alleged organized Satanic cults.

If revived memories of cannibalizing babies are true, thousands of Satanically mutilated infant bodies should be buried under the nation. Not one has been found. Why? Because, fundamentalists argue, the Devil is so powerful he is able to obliterate all such evidence!

As happens so often, true believers simply make up post hoc rationalizations when confronted with an unequivocal absence of expected evidence for their claims. Fundamentalists at least have something of an excuse, being immersed in a religious system which has centuries of practice at this. Other true believers in so-called "recovered" memories don't have this to fall back upon and in fact have generally tried to present themselves as scientific and rational.

It's a shame, really, that fundamentalists have been so terribly misled by the pseudoscience of "recovered" memories and those who inflicted this nonsense on the nation as a whole. It's a sign, perhaps, of just how little is understood about science by so many fundamentalists — on the other hand, they certainly weren't the only ones who were misled and harmed. While most others have managed to move on, though, fundamentalists are still caught up in it to a significant degree and they need to change.

 

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