This chapter has a complex relationship to the underlying logic of this study. It concerns accusations of religiously inspired abuse that were either false or, in the few cases where abuse took place, the perpetrators were quite unlike the people supposedly responsible for it. In much of what is called ‘Satanic ritual abuse’, there are no victims: the incidents, as well as the attribution of guilt, are invented. The very few examples of claimed ‘Satanic ritual abuse’ that did involve abuse were almost always very different from the general case that they were deployed to substantiate: either there was nothing Satanic about the exploitation or, when the occult did figure, it was simply used by ‘secular’ abusers to scare victims into acquiescence and silence. This chapter considers the social conditions that make ideas such as ‘Satanic ritual abuse’ more or less plausible. One such is the size of the core audience: over the thirty years since the first stories of Satanic abuse, church-going in the UK has halved and even US Christianity has shown a considerable decline. Another is the need for novelty: the mass media and its audiences get bored. A third is the impact of clergy sexual abuse scandals on the credibility of the Christian churches. The latter two considerations add up to the simple point that the exposure of real religious predators made for a more arresting story than doubtful claims about Satanists.