From Charisma News:
Ex-Witch Reveals the Ritual Satanic Abuse That Happens on Halloween
Since her salvation in recent years and subsequent inner healings and deliverance, Beth came to realize she was abused in a satanic ritual on Halloween when she was just 3.
“We went to the (Mormon) church and what happened next made my blood curdle. I was given candy, but that was just a prelude to the sexual abuse that would happen in a satanic ritual,” Beth reveals in her blog.
“On Halloween, Satanists use young children, such as myself, as sexual idols to worship. Other children receive a far worse fate. Death…”
This is just one of several articles published by Charisma about Beth Eckert, a woman in her thirties residing in California. Eckert apparently attended a Mormon church in early childhood and later embraced Wicca and occultism, before eventually becoming a Christian.
Charisma News caters to evangelical Christians, particularly neo-Pentecostals; the site’s publisher, Steven Strang, is a significant presence in evangelical Christian media, and according to a statement put out by the Ted Cruz campaign when Cruz gained Strang’s endorsement in January the site “is read by more than 200,000 monthly, with four million unique online visitors per month” (Strang is now an enthusiast for Trump).
Charisma News is most useful for monitoring trends and developments within neo-Pentecostalism, although in recent months it has branched out into purely secular anti-Clinton articles. It also gives a platform to one particular author who promotes David Icke-type conspiracies about elite “Illuminati” Satanic rituals and their potential to create dramatic supernatural irruptions. Eckert’s claims about Satanic abuse are similarly being promoted by the site at face value, despite the cautionary example of the 1980s Satanic Ritual Abuse panic.
The key phrase in the Charisma article is “since her salvation… Beth came to realize”. An early version of Eckert’s story appeared on a site called Your Spiritual Quest a year ago. According to her account then, she left Mormonism because the religion presented God as “cruel and judging”, but her subsequent years in an occult and New Age milieu were not conducive to her psychological wellbeing or maintaining healthy relations. Although she believes her interests at this time were spiritually harmful, there is nothing about Satanism or child rape.
On her blog, The Other Side of Darkness, we can see how her story developed. In March, she wrote that:
I decided to explore options for counseling. Once I began to dive into the emotional and spiritual depths of my soul, I found the answers I had been seeking. I was horribly abused as a child, by the people who loved me and were supposed to be taking care of me. This was a shocking blow to me, because the abuse was so severe that I actually completely blocked it out. I mean I had no memories whatsoever of any of it. Yet the information I began to receive as revelations from the Holy Spirit, finally started to put my life together like a puzzle that had lost the corner pieces.
In April, she went into specifics:
I am now in a class for women who were sexually abused as children. This class, (called Wounded Heart, after the workbook), has been a big help for me… I was molested, sodomized and raped as a child, in the Mormon Church. The abuse was so terrifying that I completely blocked it from my conscious mind.
The Wounded Heart, by Dan Allender, was first published in 1989. The author heavily promotes the idea of “recovered memories”, and he warns readers that
The denial is an affront to God. It assumes that a false reality is better than truth. It assumes that God is neither good nor strong enough to help during the recall process.
In other words, to doubt the memories you have been told by a counsellor or “deliverance minister” that you’re supposed to have is to commit a sin. This is highly manipulative, and I would go so far as to describe it as a form of psychological abuse.
From suddenly remembering being abused, to being abused in a church setting, to being abused as part of Satanic ritual on Halloween – the arc is depressingly inevitable. In Britain, this kind of “recovered memory” led to the tragic suicides of Caroline Marchant and Carol Felstead, and it is likely that a dubious therapist inspired the lurid allegations made by “Nick” that led to the recent disturbing farce of Operation Midland.
As far as I can tell, Eckert has not contacted the police with her story – even though she’s young enough that her supposed abusers may well still be alive and continuing with their predations. That in itself seems to me to be a tacit admission – either by Eckert herself or those who are helping her to “discover” these memories – that this is not a story that could bear much scrutiny on specific details.
Given Eckert’s obviously vulnerable state and her relative obscurity, this was not a case I really wanted to explore in any detail – but with a high-profile religious media empire irresponsibly using her to promote unsubstantiated allegations that may well lead to innocent people suffering harm, there was little choice.
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