I have a religion professor who specializes in cults and cult perception who has written a book about religious intolerance in America. In each section she and a co-writer address a different cult and discuss how and why American society is intolerant towards that cult, and of course how we should change. In the chapter that I most recently read she discusses the intolerance of people in the U.S. against Wicca. She asserts that the main issue is that Christian America sees Wicca (and Satanism) as the embodiment of evil, and thus intolerance is bound to persevere. After quoting a rather long list of Bible verses that directly condemn witchcraft and similar practices, she makes the following statement:
Sorry, God does not like, respect or want wiccans. There is no such thing as a Christian wiccan as some have claimed. And as long as you follow paganism, you will never see the truth and your mind will be forever closed (no matter how loudly you proclaim that it isn’t). That is the shame of it all. 1
Her conclusion is that Christians are intolerant because they refuse to accept witchcraft as an acceptable form of religion. Are you serious professor?! There are at least three very large assumptions that this quote makes, all of which are unfounded, nonobjective, and ignorant, and I want to discuss them so that we can see how important it is to address these things
God’s just like me.
From the very beginning of her statement she starts out on the wrong foot. Her implication in that first sentence is that God is bad because he doesn’t want to give everyone the same respect that she does. Her assumption then is that God fits into the mold that she has constructed of a “good” person. Her western, democratic, everyone’s-idea-is-equally-important mindset is projected onto God, and completely fails to see the bias in that. Not every nation in the world believes like we do. In fact, most nations in the world (other than America) have no problem with the idea of God being a loving judge. They assume that God is the judge of an objective good and evil. To presume that God must fit into her mold is a ridiculous assumption. But believing that everyone’s ideas are equally important and equally right is not just a fallacious western assumption, it stands in direct contradiction to scripture.
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. (1 John 4: 1-3a)
God hates Wiccans.
This also comes from the first sentence of the quote, but is based on a very different assumption that is just as equally false. The assumption is that people’s identity comes from their actions. In other words, because someone practices witchcraft, then their identity is Wiccan. This is a false assumption that we all struggle with. Our identities do not come from our actions but from our nature. We are not sinners because we commit sin, but we commit sin because we are sinners, it is our very nature. I am not a liar because I tell lies (bet you’ve heard that one before), rather I tell lies because I am a liar by nature. Another great example is homosexuality. A person is not gay by identity, rather their sinful nature (whether biological or not) causes them to struggle with gay practices. So to say that God hates Wiccans is to say that God hates the person, when in reality he hates the sin.
The Christian claim to exclusive truth is narrow-minded and nonobjective.
That’s basically a summary of the rest of the quote. She says that because Christians claim that they are correct and that everyone else is pagan and ignorant, then Christians are close-minded. The parenthetical statement that follows implies that they are also nonobjective because they discredit the beliefs of others.
Well this is a very interesting claim because it is somewhat self-indicting. The idea that Christians are narrow-minded because they claim exclusive truth is ridiculous. That statement fundamentally fails to understand what Christians believe. We do not believe that Christ was a prophet who helps us understand the way to God. If that were the case, then perhaps we would be narrow for saying our prophet is right and every other prophet is wrong. Jesus didn’t say that he was a prophet; he said that he was God. Now that leaves us with two options, either he was who he said he was (God), in which case we do have exclusive claims to truth, or he was just a deranged man, in which case Christianity should be abolished. It’s impossible to say that everyone is equally right. Either Christianity is infinitely more important because Jesus was God, or it is inferior because it follows a crazy man. That’s not narrow, it’s just a fact.
Furthermore, it is impossible not to claim exclusive truth. A lot could be said about this but not now. In short, everyone claims exclusive truth. My professor may claims that there is no objective basis for truth, but that in itself is a claiming to be true. It’s an inherent contradiction. We all claim exclusive truths and to condemn someone for doing so is to condemn yourself.
The second thing that she implies is that Christians are nonobjective because they discredit the beliefs of others. Well, she has just tried to discredit the beliefs of Christians by making that statement, and I’m sure we would never conclude that she is nonobjective…
1. Corrigan and Neal. Religious Intolerance in the United States.
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