Presented by Eve Siebert, Ph.D.
Saturday, March 12, 2022, 1:30 pm
Link to live stream:
https://youtu.be/OB7gNxZnSuw
Many QAnon proponents believe in a vast conspiracy by Democrats,
celebrities, the Deep State, pizza parlors, and butterfly
sanctuaries to kidnap, molest, traffic, mutilate, and murder
children and to drain them of their sweet, sweet blood. Such
accusations are not new, however. They have, for instance,
affinities with the Satanic Panic accusations that roiled many
countries in the 1980s and 90s.
But the story is much older than the late twentieth century. It
ultimately derives from two parallel and mutually reinforcing
strands of defamatory claims aimed at religious minorities. One is
the Blood Libel, the belief that Jews annually choose a Christian
child to be murdered for any number of contradictory reasons. The
first Blood Libel accusation was made in the middle of the twelfth
century, and it has never really gone away.
The other strand of accusations is older. It was initially used against Christians during the Roman Empire, but it was later recycled by the Church and deployed against the wrong kind of Christians, particularly heretical sects. Later the same accusations became central to the great witch-hunts of the late medieval and early modern periods. As with the Blood Libel, these accusations have remained with us in various forms, constantly resuscitated like a B-movie Dracula whenever some group needs to be dehumanized as an existential threat to Christianity, nationalism, or Christian nationalism.
Eve Siebert has a Ph.D. in medieval English literature from Saint
Louis University. She has contributed to the Skeptical Humanities
blog, Skeptic magazine’s Insight blog, the Skepticality
podcast, and the Virtual Skeptics webcast. She is an adjunct
professor at Stockton University.
Questions from the audience will be entered into Live Chat and then
relayed to the speaker.
