Why are religious people so messed up?

So-called "Satanic Child Abuse" was mainly the product of a moral panic of the 1980's and 1990's propagated by certain psychotherapists, social workers, Christian fundamentalists and law enforcement officials and bears resemblances to the witch hunts of the last few centuries, although fortunately this time there were no burnings. While there have been a few cases of nutters abusing children with Satanic trappings, evidence of wider conspiracies have always proved non-existent. An investigation into such allegations by the British government for instance produced over two hundred reports, of which only three were substantiated and proved to be examples of pseudo-satanic, in which sexual abuse was the actual motivation and the rituals were incidental. In the United States, major allegations of Satanic ritual abuse occurred in the Kern County child abuse cases, McMartin preschool trial and the West Memphis 3, which garnered world-wide media coverage. It was eventually determined that no satanic abuse ever took place in these cases, due to false testimony and police misconduct. Ultimately it was not access to proof that was the issue. It was the lack of any.

A book I can personally recommend in connection with this scare is Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England

www.amazon.co.uk/Speak-Devil-Satanic-Contemporary-England/dp/0521629349/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=satanic+child+abuse&qid=1605620708&s=books&sr=1-6

for which the blurb is:

"Allegations of satanic child abuse became widespread in North America in the 1980s. Shortly afterwards, there were similar reports in Britain of sexual abuse, torture and murder, associated with worship of the Devil. Professor Jean La Fontaine, a senior British anthropologist, conducted a two year research project into these allegations, which found that they were without foundation. Her detailed analysis of a number of specific cases, and an extensive review of the literature, revealed no evidence of devil-worship. She concludes that the child witnesses come to believe that they are describing what actually happened to them, but that adults are manipulating the accusations. She draws parallels with classic instances of witchcraft accusations and witch-hunts in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe, and shows that beneath the hysteria there is a social movement, which is fostered by a climate of social and economic insecurity. Persuasively argued, this is an authoritative and scholarly account of an emotive issue."

As others have pointed out this is all in stark contrast to the child abuse scandal which is still plaguing the church, featuring connivance and a conspiracy of silence which in some cases reached to the top.