The religion of Wicca

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How many Wiccans are there in the U.S.?

Overview:

Nobody knows how many Wiccans that there are. We have a hunch that few personal estimates are accurate within 50%.

When we started to research this question, we assumed that we could find a few reasonably accurate estimates, compute their average, and present the result as a ballpark number of the number of Wiccans in the U.S. But it was not to be. We found estimates by individuals as low as 2,000 Wiccans in 1982 and 3,600 in 1996. At the other extreme, Phyllis Curott, author of Book of Shadows, estimated 5 to 10 million in 1999. ₁ There have been a few surveys conducted by polling companies which numbers based on hard evidence. But these polls have problems that we feel significantly underestimate the number of Wiccans in the U.S.

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Topics covered in this section:

• Introduction: Religious groups' self-reporting; census data.....
  
  
• Estimates by various polling groups, for the years. Some are personal guesses; others are the result of telephone surveys:
  • 1972 to 1998
    
    
  • 1999 and 2000
    
    
  • 2001 to 2006
    
    
  • 2007 and 2011
    
    
  • 2014 and 2015
    
    
• This group's attempts to estimate the number of Wiccans in the U.S. for the years:
  • 2001 and 2008
    
    
  • 2015
    
    

References:

1. Phyllis Curott, "Book of Shadows: A modern woman's journey into the wisdom of Witchcraft and the magic of the Goddess," Broadway Books, (1999) Read reviews or order this book safely from Amazon.com online book store Amazon.com's sales rank for this book was 2,356 on 1999-OCT-26. Not bad, considering that Amazon lists over 1 million books.

Copyright © 1999 to 2016 by Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
Latest update: 2016-OCT-16
Author: B.A. Robinson