The Curious Case of the Christian Witch
Checking Socials, by Simone Ferriero (SimzArt) Pastor’s Epistle—November 2026 I wonder—in this holiday interstice betwixt Halloween and Thanksgiving—what our New England Puritan forebears would make of our culture’s full-throated embrace of the heroic witch. Surely Puritans viewed themselves as the heroes of their story: intrepid, bookish, brave, uncompromising, industrious, entrepreneurial. They, the champions of light and order, set out to bring commerce, religion, and civilization to (as they saw it) the untamed wilderness of the New World. But they feared the forests, the frontier; feared the peoples and the beasts and the darker, restless spirits who lived beyond the pale. The problem with presenting oneself as overtly godly is that any opposition inevitably comes to be considered the work of the devil. Hardly a surprise, then, that Puritan America soon started jumping at shadows, finding witches within their communities. I’ve spoken about the witch-craze on a previou...
