Where is an eye-roll emoji when you need one? 🙄

I am not too young to remember the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Indeed, when I was a kid, my parents prohibited me from Halloween fare, playing Dungeons and Dragons, and similar demonic activities.

More recently, a clergy told a whole roomful of us that he and his wife say a prayer whenever they stay in a hotel room, because he doesn’t know what the people who stayed in there before were doing, and he doesn’t know what kind of sex demons they left behind.

(I swear, I’m not clever enough to make this shit up.)

And now we have a report of a mother in Central Texas, afraid of the movie Hocus Pocus 2:

“Do not watch this film,” she warned, “Everybody thinks it’s fake and innocent, but they could be casting any type of spell that they want to, anything could be coming through that TV screen into your home…

“I think it goes further than just a movie, it goes further than Halloween, it’s a year-round thing, we constantly need to be cautious of what we’re consuming… I believe whatever comes in our TV screens: there are things attached to that, I’ve seen for myself the things that I’ve watched with my eyes or heard over a TV screen, they’ve become manifested in real life…

“If you don’t agree with me that’s fine, you need to go and follow your own heart and your own conviction, but for a Christian, we are held at a higher standard.”

I have a feeling that “Texas mom” is going to become another pop denigration, like “Florida man” or “Karen.”

First things first: If demons were real, then we’d be able to track their detrimental effects the same way we do other diseases. And we can’t. So they aren’t. Q.E.D.

Bacteria and viruses are real. Demons are just make-believe.

No, really. They are. Just make-believe.

But Evangelical Christians are not allowed to think that. Instead, their minds are filled with paranoid fantasies of dangerous, demonic forces beyond their control, from which apparently not even their god is present enough to protect them. After all, God doesn’t short-circuit our free will. That’s how he can be so loving and yet so absent. So you’d better watch out! Don’t accidentally get in league with the devil!