I have presented a set of Green Rituals and suggested activities in the previous chapters, but these are only meant to be starting points. Each household creates its own family traditions, and this is how it should be for the Craft. The question of how open one should be about the Craft is a matter that each individual must decide based on that person’s situation. I have heard people say that being in the “broom closet” is not healthy for the acceptance of the Craft, and there are indeed many examples of people who are open about being Witches having only positive experiences. But I have also read of numerous cases where people have suffered discrimination and threats because of their Paganism. Religious freedom is a Constitutional right, but enforcing that right may require the individual to go through expensive lawsuits.
Selena Fox of Circle Sanctuary in Wisconsin was targeted by Jeff Fenholt and his associates. The Ashbury Park Press (“Many Witches Still in [Broom] Closet,” Janine De Fao, April 7, 1994) covered a number of problems encountered by various other people involved in the Craft. Because they are known to be Witches, there are people who have lost custody of their children, been harassed at work, called names on the street, forced to relocate businesses, and shot at (which happened to a coven in Florida) and were driven out of their neighborhoods. In Georgia, a senator came out against Witches and vowed to force them to leave. In Arkansas, a couple was driven from their shop by fanatical ministers who organized the landlords of the town to not lease store space to them. Surely this is restraint of trade and religious discrimination (and a few other federal crimes) but those people have yet to be charged with any crime at all. Instead the matter has been addressed as a simple civil case.
Christian ministers repeatedly gain national attention by claiming a relation between crime and satanism, and then saying that Witches are Satanists: “What they are doing is promoting witchcraft, which is evil. Read your Bible” (from the above article). Well, the Bible (as of the sixteenth century King James translation) says, “Suffer not a Witch to live.” This kind of rhetoric puts the murder of a Witch on par with that of an abortion doctor in the minds of some fanatics; it’s okay because “God” said to do it. This is not a leap in logic since the Fundamentalists have already linked Wicca with abortion issues in Pat Robinson’s 1992 flyers denouncing the Equal Rights Amendment, saying it would lead women to kill their children, divorce their husbands, and become Witches. There is no middle ground with such people, and that is why Christianity and other Judaic-based faiths have been at the root of most of humanity’s wars and misery for the past two thousand years. A minister quoted in the Ashbury Park Press article said, “They’re worshipping Wicca god (sic) and Wicca goddess (sic). There’s only one God, and that’s the God in heaven. Witchcraft, Satanism, New Age—they’re all under the same umbrella.” Even Billy Graham said that the best ministers were “not well-educated” and the previous quote certainly proves that. Yet the man is leading people in a congregation and community, and is quoted in the newspaper.
Another minister objected to the Pagan concept of people being able to control their destiny, saying, “The central issue of the Christian experience is that we are not in control, God is in control.” What is unspoken here is that it takes ministers and priests to intercede for people and guide them in communicating with God with the hope that the Judeo-Christian God will be benevolent in his control. The Catholic Church condemns the Craft as “superstition,” and offers the terror of no salvation for Witches. This is not a threat that can affect Witches, but is meant as a means for keeping people from exploring an alternative to Christianity and Catholicism.
Even in science, the origin of the universe is presented in terms of the Creation of God. It is not until analysis of this notion is made that even a religious leader (an Anglican priest was interviewed on a Learning Channel program about a beginning for the universe—implying a creation of the universe) will admit that the god of science is not the Judeo-Christian god of religion, but Shiva, the Lord of the Dance. In this particular Learning Channel program, an hour was spent on the god/science theme, but the “revelation” that the god of science was Shiva (hence, a Pagan divinity as Creator) was left for literally the last minute of the show, with only a quick view of a statue of dancing Shiva before the credits were rolled (this should have been the beginning of the program, in my view, but my preference for the Dravidic God has already been stated).
Fear over the rising popularity of neopaganism and the Craft is so strong that ministers are compiling studies to say there are only a handful (some 50,000) Pagans in America, with only 90% of them being Witches (Rev. Melton, The Institute for the Study of American Religion), but a slightly more accurate accounting puts the number at anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 (EarthSpirit). Even this last number is too small for the reality simply because many Witches are solitaries who are not members of groups or subscribers to newsletters, and many Witches do not fill out surveys such as those from which EarthSpirit gathers its data. The membership in Circle Network News has quadrupled over the past twenty years, so the indications are that the Christian ministers have good reason to be worried about their job security as more and more Americans turn away from the dominance of the Church and embrace the natural balance of the Lady and the Lord.
The fact that the Craft is attracting increasingly larger numbers of practitioners indicates that a major change in the role of religion is coming, and this sort of societal change always results in fear and extremist behavior by fanatics. In time this will pass, and the influence of the resurgence of the Old Religion is already being established today. Wicca is legally recognized as a genuine religion by the Chaplain’s Guide for the Uniformed Military Services, the Internal Revenue Service, and numerous state licensing bureaus. All this is good news for neopaganism, and offers encouragement for people to be open in their practice of the Craft.
I present both sides to this issue not to equivocate, but to make the newcomer aware of how society may react. The young college woman who had her shrine dismantled by school officials was certainly wronged, but she may have thought there would never be any objection to what she did—this is America, after all. I like to think that change is in the wind since there are many Witches now with families whose children are not being raised in the Christian system. The growth of the Craft seems to be moving more openly into the next generation, not under the guise of the folklore of mainstream religions as happened with my mother and grandmother (and myself to some degree until I decided to drop the Christian references), but as a self-aware practice.
Other writers, including Scott Cunningham and Silver Ravenwolf, have also discussed the pros and cons of this matter, so there are other written views available to the seeker. By being open about the Craft, some people feel that a statement will be made showing that the Old Religion is not evil or something to be feared. Others recommend caution. I feel that to be closeted or open is a decision that only an individual can make based upon the situation and circumstances affecting that person, and criticism by anyone else is irrelevant. Ignoring the realities of daily life will not create changes or prepare an individual for dealing with situations that arise, but each person contributes in their own way for the betterment of their own life and in turn, for the betterment of society.