Wicca, a neo-pagan religion

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Web sites that spread errors about Wicca

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NOTE

This section was originally written in 1998 when a great deal of anti-Wiccan
hate literature appeared on the Internet and often updated. Since then,
conservative Protestant Christian groups have generally abandoned their
misinformation.

They still condemn Wicca on religious grounds, but are far more accurate in
their depiction of Wicca. We have left this essay online for historical purposes.
Their attacks caused a lot of pain at the time, and not a few physical attacks on
Wiccans, so they should not be forgotten.

However, in 2015, when Wicca had become widely accepted throughout North
America, an incident happened where a Florida sherrif announded that a triple
murder was suspected to be a "Wiccan ritual killing."

Quotation:

"Christian parents have a three-fold duty where witchcraft is concerned: understand the nature of the threat, protect their families from its influence, and most important, reach out to Wiccan teens to prevent the loss of a whole generation."  Excerpt from OnMission magazine 1

Overview:

Back in the early days of the Internet, almost all of the articles and essays that were written about Wicca by Cowans (non-Wiccans) contained gross inaccuracies. To our knowledge, all were written by conservative Protestant ministries, counter-cult groups, or individual conservative Protestants. A few  web sites disseminated misinformation which appear to have been intended to generate hatred against Wiccans. Much of their material seemed to have come from Christian propaganda in the Renaissance when the church was burning and hanging religious minorities.  Few, if any, of the authors appeared to have consulted any primary sources during the preparation of their essays. It seems obvious from the content of their articles that few if any of the authors had actually talked with a Wiccan. In 1996, when the first edition of this essay was written, we were only able to find two positive portrayals of Wicca by Cowans; both of them severely criticized their fellow Christian authors for spreading inaccuracies about Wicca.

In recent years, there has been a flood of relatively accurate descriptions of Wiccan and other Neopagan religions on the Internet's Christian web sites. We suspect that this has been caused by the increased availability of Wiccan and other Neopagan information to Cowans. This happened for a number of reasons, including:

	Wiccan and other Neopagan groups have created many thousands of web sites, thus making accurate information generally available from a wide variety of primary sources.
	The unusually high growth rate of Neopaganism from the 1990s until now, particularly among youth.
	The increasing percentage of Wiccans who are coming out of the [broom] closet and going public with their faith traditions.
	Increasing numbers of open Pagan rituals to which the public and media are invited.

However, this increasing accuracy does not seem to extend beyond written material to the content of videos. A former Neopagan who has converted to conservative Protestantism commented that they have never seen a conservative Christian video about Wicca, other Neopagan religions or occult activities that gives an accurate portrayal of these activities. In their opinion, all are filled with sensationalism and inaccuracy. All would hurt conservative Christians' efforts to evangelize Neopagans by supplying the former with erroneous information about the latter. Rather than help their evangelical activities it would hurt them.

Topics discussed in this section:

	Web sites that contain accurate information about Wicca
	Web sites that contained grossly inaccurate information about Wicca: Balaam's Ass Publishing Exposing Satanism and Witchcraft Y.E.S. For Christ Landover Baptist Church (A parody web site) Jesus is Lord web site A Florida Sherriff blames a multiple murder on a Wiccan ritual More inaccurate sites

Reference used:

1. William Wells, "Wicca: A caution to Christian parents...and a challenge," OnMission magazine, 2003-SEP-OCT, at: http://www.onmission.com/

Copyright © 1998 to 2015 by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
Latest update: 2015-AUG-09
Author: B.A. Robinson

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