A word to the wise: we should always regard Christian testimonies as unreliable.
They function as sales pitches and attention-grabbers–and as such, contain exaggerations and outright fabrications meant to aid in those functions. Their creators spend a lot of time crafting them to be like that. And they know very well that a really dramatic testimony can catapult them into stardom.
But when Christians add the bombastic elements of the Satanic Panic to their already-inflated sales pitches, they can elevate those stories to the stratosphere. MAGIC! WITCHCRAFT! SEX! BLOOD! DEMONS! And then, just when the allure of this conspiracy theory seems to be too great to bear, we add in the fact that literally nobody will ever demand proof that anything in the testimony really happened.
(That sound you might have just heard was Christian conjobs messily exploding in their pants.)
Christian audiences have always loved and thrilled to Satanic Panic testimonies. These stories represent triumphs over their enemies. They fulfill all of Christians’ wishes and hopes for conversions. They even (massively incorrectly) consider these stories PROOF YES PROOF of their religion’s veracity.
Consequently, a garden-variety Christian grifter can easily become a rock star with a good Satanic Panic testimony.
Back when I was Christian, I personally watched my own tribemates ignore more humdrum, pedestrian testimonies like mine. Instead, they clambered over each other to get closer to a Satanic Panicker like my ex Biff.
— Captain Cassidy, Roll to Disbelieve, Can Christians Restart the Satanic Panic?, October 27, 2018
I was very recently watching some ‘testimonies’ on YouTube, whereby former ‘atheists’ explained how some sort of revelation caused them to become Christians (funnily enough, none had experiences of Allah, or Buddha, or Brahmen). Each had a sort of glazed look about them, and a stupid smile when they referred to their atheist times. Was I convinced? I thought it was absolute bullshit. The especially malleable minds that these people have can never have had the reasoning ability needed to be the type of atheist I encounter; at best, perhaps, they had never really given the matter much thought, possibly having been raised in a non-Christian family.
I was left with the impression that the testimonies may have been genuine though, of course, untrue. These were people who, by giving their testimonies, were able to join a club, become accepted members, and even achieved a level of attention they may never otherwise have attained.