So... I was a Christian musician for many years, and was a critic of its music industry for most of those years. I am also a student of ancient lifestyles and folklore, and Celtic mythology and practices in particular.
Put another way, I know a lot about Christians and a lot about witches.
So you can’t really blame me for falling into a rabbit hole on social media when a Christian rock musician of my acquaintance posted the following, above a picture of a female Christian pop singer with her arms crossed shoulder-to-shoulder:
"If you think witchcraft ain’t on display in modern Christian music, you are mistaken….
"I’ve seen her do the triple six, the sign of the Baphomet and here the Osiris Risen in a pose….
"But she’s pretty and has a pretty voice and sings songs about Jesus…surely these are all coincidental…
"You will see this stuff and not believe it if they did it right in front of your eyes, because you’ve been conditioned with blue pills your entire life.
"These symbols all go back to Lucifer worship, the religion that hides within the 33rd degree of Freemasonry…
"Irritates the life out of me….give me the Old Rugged Cross…"
My friend proceeded to condemn this Christian artist as a witch, and to portray the entire Contemporary Christian Music industry as deeply infiltrated by members of the occult.
I was left breathless by this idiocy. I thought we were done with this 40 years ago (we should have been done with it 300 years ago). But there it was, right in front of me.
I was heartened that my friend’s other social media connections – Christians all – came to the defense of the artist he was disparaging:
"Stop. You can go too far when you start insinuating that every hand gesture someone makes can be attributed to the occult. I’m sure I have posed in every one of these gestures, and I can assure you with 100% certainty that I have exactly 0 interest in worshiping the devil."
And this:
"Respectfully, I don’t think it’s appropriate for anyone to make statements like this based on observation and assumption. We don’t know her. We don’t know her heart. God does. I know for sure that I worship with and appreciate many of her songs. Her most recent, “Thank God I Do,” really speaks to me, and I’ve sang it at church. Even if her intentions are bad, it doesn’t mean that people can’t grow and be led to a closer relationship with Christ from listening to her music."
And I entered the fray as well. I assured my friend that he was wildly overgeneralizing, based on a couple of photographs of a woman making gestures that all of us have made from time to time. But no, my friend pushed back with a fierce lecture on occult signs and symbols, and fleshed out the demonic conspiracy encroaching into CCM. The more we pushed back, the more intense he became.
This went on for the entire evening. My friend considered his argument beyond criticism, and declared us all ignorant, insisting that we go “study the occult.” Now, I’ve forgotten more about the occult than he will ever know, and at the core of my knowledge is a truth that is beyond my friend’s ken:
Wiccans don’t proselytize. They don’t infiltrate. They are not at all interested in social dominance, infiltration of other institutions, or insinuating themselves on others. That’s strictly Evangelical territory.
But, being an Evangelical, my friend is unable to conceive of any worldview that does not include social dominance, infiltration of other institutions, or self-insinuation.
There are many directions one might go with this. The most obvious is to acknowledge my friend’s behavior as typical in Evangelicalism, a domain where the condemnatory othering of those outside the tribe is not only commonplace but rampant, and this CCM pop star merely its latest random shooting. Another might be to call out my friend’s spontaneous mania as an all-too-common exemplar of the knee-jerk triggering that is embedded in the Evangelical psyche from early childhood on, and note with chagrin that 30 years of endless parading as the country’s most put-upon victims has only made it worse.
Certainly, the Evangelical Church is built on a foundation of social dominance and perceived persecution, by design; in this, it is typical of many of the more extreme patriarchal sects. It’s how you recruit and retain. And, just as certainly, those who go all-in on this mindset (like my friend) are nonetheless a noisy minority within the tribe; most people just need to belong, and the church doesn’t demand much, as long as they don’t speak up too often.
But the sadness this whole episode brings down on me derives from something deeper. It has reminded me that the Evangelical Church, into which I was born and in which I lived for decades, is a cauldron of forces much more dangerous than perceived Wiccans. Those forces are fear and self-righteousness – the ingredients, per psychologist Robert Altemeyer, for releasing authoritarian aggression. Make people afraid, and convince them that they are the chosen, the ones who are right, and you can unleash them as rabid footsoldiers out to vanquish the perceived enemy of your choice.
Thus it always was, as far back as my memory goes. Evangelical Christianity is a breeding ground for this sort of manipulation. I remember, in particular, the inflammatory tracts of Jack Chick, little pamphlets that planted the paranoid seeds of fear in young people of my generation, rallying them as God’s soldiers to lash out at the evildoers that are constantly in the shadows, eager to prey upon us. I remember that fear. I remember the self-righteousness.
The times, they ain’t a-changin'. Thus it always was, thus it shall always be. I’m just very grateful I don’t live there anymore: I know better than to be afraid of witches...
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