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 previous Halloween; at the moment I’m more struck by popular culture’s remaking of the witch from servant of Satan, through innocent victim, to independent empowered female.

These days, a horror film or novel set in Colonial New England will inevitably portray the Puritans not as plucky Pilgrims but as oppressive, joyless, patriarchal tyrants. And one can see why; admittedly, I wouldn’t want to live beneath a Calvinist theocracy. But the contemporary witch, far from an ingénue, wields real spiritual, magical power in the name of liberation. If the satanic witch of old embodied fundamentalist fears, her postmodern granddaughter stands up for women’s rights. And I, for one, would consider this a step in the right direction.

Once upon a time, it was the other way around. Early Christianity spread in large part due to its scandalous uplifting of women, who—should we take Romans 16 seriously—served as deacons, elders, and apostles, not to mention the first proclaimers of Christ’s Resurrection. Today’s Church is in a sad state of affairs when neopaganism must lift the historically Christian banner of treating women like actual human beings. And so, while I sometimes feel that the “heroic witch of literature” trope wears a bit thin, I nonetheless see it slantwise as a positive development.

Oft have I heard neopaganism named a Christian heresy—by which we mean that the neopagan movement proves far more Christian than either side would care to admit. It functions, in effect, to remind us of Christian practices and principles that have fallen largely by the wayside; and which, when we cease to recognize them as Christian, we then dismiss as “pagan.” Plus they make nice candles.

But the fact that so much literary ink has been spilled over the archetype of the spiritually powerful, liberated, independent, dangerous woman is undoubtedly a good thing. It demonstrates our culture’s continued longing for direct and personal religious experience; for the visceral reality of the sacred; for a New Covenant where there is no longer male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, for all are one in Christ. Witness also the niche phenomenon of the “Christopagan” or “Christian witch.”

Once, Christianity was the radical upstart faith promising liberation from the patriarchal pagan Empire. Alas, some 2000 years later, far too many Christians have taken up the mores of the establishment, such that even the staunchest of Puritans unconsciously aped the gender hierarchies of ancient Rome. So when Christians act like pagans, should we then be surprised that people must needs look to pagans in order to act like Christ? Little wonder that modern witches often revere figures like St Brigid, the Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene.

To be clear, I am a cleric, and thus cannot be pro-witchcraft. I’m certainly not advocating for satanism, nor even the more milquetoast iterations of New Age neopaganism. Please put away your pitchforks. Yet I must admit that the present-day fictional figure of the witch tends to remind us of who and what we ought to be. And so a witch may be heroic, in a world of topsy-turvy Christians.

In Jesus. Amen.