Bryan Fischer is warning America about the rise of Wicca, what he calls “ancient, recycled superstition.” For Fischer, Wicca is “the worship of Satan” and somehow “spiritual warfare” against Christians. You know, because apparently people don’t have the right to believe what they want to believe despite the First Amendment.
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Worse, he sees the increase in Wiccan numbers as “evangelism in witchcraft and demonism.” It is, of course, Christianity that turned the gods of Paganism into demons. Even the word “demon” does not mean what the Pagan word “daimon” meant two thousand years ago. Christianity developed all these false believes about Paganism and then proceeded to blame the Pagans for them. Fischer still does.
This is not unusual. Pagans definitely do not enjoy a privileged position in our culture. If you go online you can regularly find Christian merchandise under the category of religion, while everything Pagan goes under the category of “mythology.” Never mind that the Exodus is no less mythological than the Dorian migrations ancient Greeks believed so strongly in. There is no evidence for either.
Fischer starts off his rant by claiming that “Russell Moore of the Southern Baptists falsely says we are not a Christian nation.” We were and are a nation of mostly Christians but that is a far cry from the claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.
According to Fischer, in 1892 the Supreme Court ruled that the United States is a Christian nation. This is not true. In fact, what was written by Justice Brewer in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892), is that “These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.”
On the other hand, Fischer is more than happy to ignore the Treat of Tripoli (1797) which, as ratified by Congress, stated that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
And in fact, in 1905, Justice Brewer explained in words Fischer strongly disagrees with that,
Neither is it Christian in the sense that all of its citizens are either in fact or name Christian. On the contrary, all religions have free scope within our borders. Numbers of our people profess other religions, and many reject all. Nor is it Christian in the sense that a profession of Christianity is a condition of holding office or otherwise engaging in public service, or essential to recognition either politically or socially.
So when Fischer says “Tough nuts…this is the law of the land,” he is not only wrong, and Moore right, but he is lying through his teeth.
This led to Fischer’s tirade about Wicca, because a group of Wiccans are meeting “right out there in front of God and everybody” in a coffee shop, where they dared to talk about members of their group visiting a local cemetery to commune with the spirits. Fischer is outraged, saying “they’re not hiding this” as though it is somehow a shameful thing to go to a cemetery and talk to the dead.
Fischer describes Wicca as a “modern version of ancient Pagan religion.” He’s both right and wrong about that. Though often called the “Old Religion” Wicca is not old, but new.
Wicca is not, as is sometimes described, a survival of ancient religion. Rather it is an amalgam of beliefs, some very old, some dating to the 19th century, at best a modern interpretation, or better, a reincarnation, of ancient religion for a new era. It embraces the beliefs of many ancient cultures, as indeed does Fischer’s Christianity.
Fischer is bothered by the fact, he says, that these Wiccans think they’re “hip, sophisticated, and edgy,” because, even assuming it is true, it is somehow a sin to be “hip, sophisticated, and edgy.” Never mind all the evangelicals out there who think they’re “hip, sophisticated, and edgy.”
The fact is, and these are actual facts rather than Fischer’s invented facts, there is no evidence for a great deal of what is found in the Bible. Secular humanists are quick to point out Christianity’s own reliance on superstition and myth, as were the Founding Fathers, an example of which is Jefferson’s removal of all miracles from his version of the Bible.
Jefferson also referred to Christianity as “our particular superstition” in a letter to William Short in 1820.
Yeah. So pot calling kettle black here. In fact, it could be argued that if there is one religion group today that has absolutely no right to throw stones at anybody over superstition and myth, if is the Religious Right.
For the Pagan Romans, the word religio, or religion, for the Romans, was defined as “a proper reasonable awe of the gods†and its opposite, superstition, as “an excessive fear or awe of the gods.†This, for the Romans, made both Judaism and Christianity superstitions, rather than religions. We see this excessive fear of God today as a primary symptom of the Religious Right’s war on everything.
There is no proper reasonable awe in Fischer’s lexicon. For his crowd, it’s chicken little every time something doesn’t’ go their way or they see something they don’t like. With the number of times we’ve been threatened with divine wrath in just the past fifteen years, it’s surprising we’re still here to talk about it.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
