I grew up in Greer (about 20 minutes down Wade Hampton Blvd from BJU), and my mother, even in 2005, still believed that D&D was satanic. She had converted to Judaism, never went to BJU, and still she held that belief because of the moral panic in the 80s. It's amazing to me how easily some people will accept a moral position on something they know nothing about simply because someone else told them they should.

I actually got her to play D&D with me. It was interesting. We sat down and set up the game, had little tokens for our characters (it was the starter set), and dice and all of that. We selected our characters, entered the dungeon, and were promptly killed by the first orcs we came across. We stopped playing after that, but I think it opened her eyes to the misconceptions she had of the game.

BJU would go into K-Mart and demand they stop playing certain radio stations because the students couldn't shop there if they played rock music. They also caused a shitstorm when they tried to expel some students for holding hands when walking across campus because one was black and the other white, and this was in 2001. I even had a guy in my high school get into their weird religious beliefs trying to tell us in Biology class that the world was 3000 years old and the devil put dinosaur bones there to test us.

This is similar to the moral panic that happened around pokemon and harry potter in the 90s, and the daycare rape panic that happened in the 80s. It seems like moral outrage is a way that some people band together and identify.

It's still happening now, my university I went to is being attacked for giving a summer reading book that is about a lesbian. People are viciously attacking faculty and alumni from the university, and the state legislators have even taken to fining the schools for it.