Christian Witches

I don't believe it's possible to be a Christian Wiccan. How can you be two religions with some very differing moral codes and beliefs? It's like being a Jewish Muslim.

Also Wicca and witchcraft are not the same thing. Sure you can be a Christian and practice witchcraft (if you don't follow certain beliefs in Christianity). Wicca is a religion, witchraft is an art or tool.

"How can you be two religions with some very differing moral codes and beliefs?"

It's called synergy, though a Jewish Muslim is not a very good example as Islam is more of an update on Judaism than a wholly separate religion.

But I challenge your assertion that two rather different religions like Christianity and Wicca cannot be combined purely because of the differing beliefs and moral codes held by these religions as separate entities. I don't challenge your assertion on purpose, but rather my own existence does so.

Hi, I'm a Muslim pagan, how may I help you?

Greetings,
I know some one who have have been a Christian Witch for thirty two years and a psychic councilor for twenty seven. Christian witchcraft takes the fear and intolerance out of the Bible and out of Christianity and this is why I have opened an on line church called: The Church Of The Christian Witch.

http://christianwitch.ning.com

It is time the true teachings of Jesus Christ were heard. Christian Witchcraft has always been a polytheistic religion. (More Pagan then Christian.) As you know, the concept of Christianity came after the death of Christ and in fact the name Christ itself was given to many a human being in those times. Christ is not the true last name of Jesus.

Christ was used as a sir name, the name Christ is used in same way Goody was used in the fifteenth century. The name Goody was given to all women who where upstanding citizens. A.K.A. Salem Mass Witch trials: Goody Proctor and Goody Rhodes.

Although it is true that most Christian Witches do not believe in the traditional Christian beliefs they do acknowledge Christs humanitarian teachings.

This is what separates a Christian Witch from a Catholic, Baptist, Mormon or protestant. Most Christians are brought up on the self serving interpretations of the original Bible. (I say self serving because each leaders interpretations serve to benefit their own beliefs as well as the individual beliefs of their church. Christianity has too many denominations to claim Christs teachings as their own. The teachings of Christ are open to interpretation by all.

Christian witchcraft is the only faith that takes the fear and intolerance out of the Bible and out of Christianity. A Christian Witch is an open minded, free thinking individual who is encouraged to think for themselves using the principals of humanity as their guide.

To personally serve Christ's teachings, I use my psychic gifts to help bring closure to people's lives involving, missing people cases and murders all over the country as well as helping people with personal problems while instructing them on how to live a more non-violent humanitarian lifestyle through opening their own psychic channels and redirecting their negativity into creativity. I also write gospel and environmental music and I am a musical therapist and art instructor for the elderly, disabled and infirmed.

As a Child I was Wiccan for a couple of years, ages ten to twelve but my Catholic Celtic roots always seemed to steer me back to Christianity. In fact many of the women and men in my own Christian coven consider themselves to be Wiccan/Christian Witches. We even have a Buddhist monk.
To say the least, we have a very free and interesting group where all are welcome.

It is a shame that in this modern society many Witches, Wiccans and Pagans that I meet and whom I have known do not understand the principals of a Christian Witch. In fact, many young people today use witchcraft as a fanciful escape rather than a source for inspiration, spirituality and Earth worship.

Being a witch means much more then make up and clothes. It is not the outside image of a human being that people will gravitate towards, it is the depth of the human soul that people will remember. The compassion and kindness that a human being reflects outward to the world is the greatest gift a human being owns. This is what makes a true witch become a supreme supernatural being.

From the dust of the Earth all life came and back into the dust we all must go. Our natural order is to live our lives as Earth Guardians and protectors of all life.

My beliefs are this: Although the Bible and many Christians shun witchcraft, it is no secret that the original Bibles God and Christ himself used their own powers of witchcraft and psychic awareness to rule the nations.

In the American dictionary Witchcraft is defined as being the practice of sorcery or magic. The definition is in the dictionary and cannot be disputed. So, with that knowledge wouldn't you agree that parting the red sea, turning water into wine, sending plagues and curses to destroy entire lands, healing telepathically with the touch of a hand and making burning bushes speak are all feats of paranormal activity and supernatural magic? In essence they are feats of witchcraft.

It is my belief that no religion should practice or preach intolerance or sacrifice of any kind. All religions should teach humanity. Any religion that is against gay rights, animal rights, Women's rights, human rights, witchcraft and other religious beliefs are also against humanity. I do not condone negative religious practices. I believe in standing up for what is right even if you are standing alone. Human beings are both God and Goddess. If we do not do Gods work, Gods work will not get done. Everyone is responsible for their own actions and reactions.

(You Can Start A War With One Disagreement. You can prevent A War When All Parties Involved Agree To Act Humanly.)

Both God and Goddess are an individual's choice of faith. No deity is greater than another for no human being is greater than another. Human beings are not the most important life forms on this earth, however, there are some individual human beings who believe that they are the most important, because of their supposed capacity for higher intellect. I believe, that all life forms on this planet were created equal regardless of their race, color, creed, religion, species or personal and sexual preference.
One act of humanity is bliss one act of ignorance is devastating.

No species on this planet can claim a higher intellect unless they use that intellect to benefit all life forms on this Earth without excluding anyone or anything that breaths life. As long as you act humanly pray to whomever you choose and allow others to pray to whom they choose.

My God is the God of humanity. My Goddess is the mother of my God. The Bible is a great book to read but one must remember it is a fictional story filled with paranormal activity. When interpreted with an open mind. The Bible teaches us not to follow the barbaric teachings of a God but to use our own free will and humanity while we follow our own clear conscience. To explain my affiliation with Christianity I must say that those who read the Bible with an open mind know that Jesus Christ was a liberal who loved everyone. The only thing Christ was against was the inhumanities he saw in his short life time. Jesus Christ was one of the first noted humanitarians in human history but others have also done great things to benefit our Earth and society human beings like, Gandhi, Buddha (Who was before Christ) Chief Seattle, The Dali Lama, Martin Luther King Jr, Abraham Lincoln, John Denver, Michael Landon, Princess Diana, Mother Theresa, John and Robert Kennedy and so many more. I hope this was insightful.

I believe that the Earth needs more defenders not more people who stand in defense. No human being can claim the right to a holy title or a holy existence when All human beings are flawed. The only measure of one's holiness is in the humane acts that they commit while they are serving the Earth and all of her life forms.

(Gandhi once said: The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.) If you can harm any life form without remorse, then you have no respect for life and therefore you have no respect for humanity.

The Seven Rules To Christian Witchcraft Are:

1. Harm not one living thing for all life is created equal regardless of color, race, species, size, religion, personal or sexual preference.
2. Always be kind, compassionate, respectful and tolerant of all life and never cast stones.
3. Protect, defend, heal, educate and lend a hand to all life and replenish that which you take from the earth for your survival.
4. Banish all hate, cruelty, violence and negativity while you think humanely before you act and speak on all matters.
5. Advocate for those who cannot advocate for themselves and stand up for what is right, regardless if you are standing alone.
6. Channel your negativity into acts of creativity and always let positive thoughts and actions rule your life.
7. Alter your attitude and you can alter your entire existence as well as altering the existence of all the lives you touch.

To Bardou

A witch is anyone who casts spells. Even Satanists and Christians could be considered witches if they cast spells and do magic, but they aren't Wiccan because they follow a different religion than Wiccans. A Wiccan is someone who follows the religion of Wicca, which is an officially recognized religion just like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. If you get nothing else from this, remember that "Wicca" is the name of the religion and "Wiccans" are the followers of Wicca. Here we talk about christian witches, and as i said a wiccan is not the same as a witch, so a christian witch is not a christian wiccan.
Love, Peace and Blessings,
FaithLake

Oh, Bardou, sorry, i did not see your second post, ignore what i have told you.

To be a christain wiccan, one would have to figure it out themself! I, in fact, am a christain wiccan, and it's totally possible. I believe in God and Jesus like any other christain, but I also believe in magick and witchcraft as long as it harms no one. I believe all the "Gods" like Athena, Zeus, etc. are actually people that specialized in a certain type of magick.

I have thought of this many times. This was interesting.

There are a lot of strong opinions on here, my my. Now before anyone rips my head off, I am a Trinitarian Wiccan, proud to be one even though I technically "don't exist".

Here is how I make my peace with it. I believe in the Goddess, mother of us all, and I believe that She is half of the Supreme Deity (whom I see as God). I also believe in Jesus, that he came from the Divine to teach us and then he died and was resurrected, as he was a divine incarnation.

If you believe in Jesus, in the message he preached during his life, regardless of who you think his father is, as well as the fact that Jesus is the incarnate of the divine, congratulations you can call yourself a Christian whatever you identify with. I believe Jesus is the son of God (God being, in my eyes, the collective supreme being comprised of every form of divinity seen by man) and God is made up of the God and the Goddess.

I hope this clears the air. This is just my view, yours may be completely different and you are welcome to do so. This is simply my point of view. Peace! :D

Yes you can be a christian and practice white magic. Jesus preformed miracles and some of the saints.

An excellent discussion as to why the term Christian Wicca is an oxymoron and why the two religions are mutually exclusive by C. Beyer at "Wicca For the Rest of Us" at http://wicca.cnbeyer.com/christian-wicca/

To my knowledge, there is a single book and website written by a Christian Wiccan. That website has changed multiple times, rendering my original footnotes useless. As of May 25, 2014, the websites domain is expired, leaving nothing at all to be referenced. This is why most quotes here have no source notations.

There is also an article about it atReligiousTolerance.org, which lists my original article on the matter among others as Essays, covering a wide range of viewpoints a few are quite negative.

My opinion on this topic is absolutely negative, but it is informed opinion, built upon the words of author-founderNancy Chandler Pittman and experience with others who follow it. Ive yet to meet one who can offer a sophisticated explanation of their beliefs (instead getting things like I believe in Jesus and nature) or solid understanding of how diverse concepts are being coherently united. Rather than pursuing a truth, Christian Wiccans seem primarily interested in straddling two religions without making profound choices on how they understand the world, and that is what I criticize.

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Defining Christianity and Wicca

The first issue is the name Christian Wicca. E very believer Ive encountered believes Christian Wiccans are both Christian and Wiccan. In fact, most forms are true to neither Christianity nor Wicca, and it certainly cannot be true to both.

To avoid debate of exactly how one defines these religions, I turn to theMerriam-Webster Dictionaryfor the most general of definitions of the two faiths:

• Christianity: The religion derived from Jesus Christ, based on the Bible as sacred scripture, and professed by Eastern, Roman Catholic, and Protestant bodies. Its Concise Encyclopedia continues with the explanation: Its principal tenets are that Jesus is the Son of God (the second person of the Holy Trinity), that Gods love for the world is the essential component of his being, and that Jesus died to redeem humankind.
• Wicca: A religion influenced by pre-Christian beliefs and practices of western Europe that affirms the existence of supernatural power (as magic) and of both male and female deities who inhere in nature, and that emphasizes ritual observance of seasonal and life cycles.

The Bible is rooted in the belief of a single deity, commonly referred to as God. There are no other acceptable deities. Wicca, on the other hand, involves the reverence of two deities minimally, a god and a goddess. If you worship God alongside a goddess, then you are breaking the Christian commandment to worship only God, and you are denying his existence as the only God. If you attempt to be a monotheistic Wiccan, you lose the polarity and unity of separate halves that is fundamental to Wicca.

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The All

ReligiousTolerance.org attempts to reconcile the difference this way:

Many Wiccans (perhaps most) also believe that there is a single ultimate deity which/who is unknowable. A common Wiccan saying is that All Gods are the ONE GOD. This deity is sometimes referred to as The All or The One and is often visualized as having two aspects: a male facet who is called the God and a female component, the Goddess. (source)

Not quite.

• The saying is All gods are one god. The inclusion of the, making it All gods are THE one god, is absolutely not a Wiccan belief.
• The statement is not a Wiccan saying (it was coined by Dion Fortune, who died before Wicca even existed), although some employ it to explain their personal views on divinity.
• Theres a second half to that statement, completely ignored here: all gods are one god and all goddesses one goddess.
• The Christian God is not unknowable.
• The All is a concept largely created and popularized by author Scott Cunningham.

At least some Traditional Wiccans recognize a concept known as the Dryghten, which is an impersonal power, an energy from which things came, but, again,that is not the Christian God.

Mary as Goddess

Most commonly, Christian Wiccans try to fit the Virgin Mary into the role of Goddess. The problem is Mary isnt a goddess in Christianity. In fact, to elevate Mary to godhood destroys a vitally important facet of her. Her son, Jesus, acts as an intermediary between God and man through his dual nature of being both mortal and divine, and that nature is defined by his parentage: one mortal (Mary) and one divine (God the Father).

Worshiping a mortal as a goddess doesnt work in Wicca either. God and Goddess are equal. God and Mary most certainly are not.

Sources of Sin

The concept of a savior is anathema to Wicca. Salvation is necessary because of inherent flaws in humanity, traditionally brought about by the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. Wicca does not accept that we can be tainted by mere existence. Any taint we might bear comes from our own choice of actions, not our nature. We do not bear responsibility for the actions of others, and only the individual can make right his or her personal transgressions.

Many other concepts are important although arguably not foundational, such as the existence of Satan. In Christianity, Satan is an embodiment of evil, and supernatural powers within a Wiccan context are intimately part of nature. A Wiccan acknowledgment of Satan would imply that some part of nature is inherently evil, which they deny.

You cant just take one theology, smack it down on top of another theology and say close enough.

Redefining Definitions

Are those definitions too rigid? There are always exceptions, but the above points are very central and agreed upon by most. Even so, most important here is the number of exceptions necessary to make this fusion work.

Trinitarian Wicca is the correct name of the tradition often generalized into a practice called Christian Wicca. Trinitarian Wicca is a path of American Wicca (or Non-British Traditional Wicca) that works exclusively with the Christian Pantheon. There are no church trappings or conflicts with the Bible, because we work directly with the Gods and Goddesses; church dogma does not have a place in our ritual structure. Concepts such as the original sin, salvation, baptism, heaven, hell, and Satan have no place in Trinitarian Wicca. (Nancy Chandler Pittman as quoted atReligiousTolerance.org)

Yes, some Christians debate the existence of Satan or Hell. But if you take out Satan and Hell and Original Sin and commandments for monotheism and the need for salvation, why are you calling whatever is left Christian? The result is something new. Theres nothing wrong with new, but it shouldnt be packaged as something it isnt.

Why People Attempt to be Both

There are four general scenarios where I find people attempt to be both Christian and Wiccan:

• They believe in God and Jesus but want to practice magic and think you need Wicca to do that.
• They want to be Wiccan (often because it sounds cool), but theyre afraid of going to hell if they change religion.
• They believe in God and Jesus but are also attracted to certain things embraced by Wiccans but are by no means fundamental to Wicca. You dont need to be Wiccan in order to respect nature and experience the glory of God through it, for example.
• Theybelieve in God and Jesus but object to certain things within their church, such as inequality between genders or condemnation of homosexuality. I counsel such individuals to simply find a different church or denomination.

There is nothing wrong in being Christian. If that is your path, embrace it.

The Origin of Christian Wicca

Christian Wicca is the brainchild of Nancy Chandler Pittman. According to one of her old websites, her book, Christian Wicca: The Trinitarian Tradition , stems from five years of:

research and comparative studies of the Pagan Wheel of the Year, the Kabbalah, and the Gnostic Gospels. The overwhelming parallels made me wonder why no one else had written such a book for magickal practitioners who uphold the Wiccan Rede, but choose to not give up Jesus as Lord.

Problems here include

• Nothing listed is actually Christian except accepting Jesus as Lord.
• Kabbalah is an esoteric path of study within Judaism
• The Gnostic Gospels are, well, Gnostic. They floated around very early Christian communities but were rejected as contrary to the faith. Considering Gnostic teachings revolve around the soul attempting to escape the bonds of materiality, its quite contrary to Wicca as well.
• Neither Wicca nor Christianity is a system of magical practice. For that, youd be looking for something like witchcraft or ceremonial magic.
• The Rede says we can do harmless things freely. Its not something you uphold, and you dont have to be Wiccan to agree with it, much less give up Jesus as Lord.

Biblical arguments are suspiciously missing here, perhaps because, in Pittmans own words:

[m] ost of the information of any Female Deity or feminine affiliation with the Godhead is absent from the Holy Bible.

Correct. Goddess figures are not a part of Christianity. If youre looking for a goddess, Christianity isnt where you should be looking. Thats not a flaw in the religion. Its simply a fact.

To throw out the authority of the Bible and, indeed, replace it with texts from outside Christianity yet continue to call oneself Christian employs a label without its substance. What Pittman is really offering is a new religion.

In short, Pittman exists in a Christianity largely of her own making.

The Old Religion

She explains the connection between Wicca and Christianity via the theory of theOld Religion, which has been debunked for many decades. Because Wicca is understood (by her) to be the modern form of the Old Religion, and the Catholic Church to merely be theOld Religion with a Christian veneer, Wicca and Christianity are therefore religious blood brothers, originating from a single source and therefore somehow compatible.

Even if they did come from the same source (and they dont), that doesnt make them compatible. Christianity comes from Judaism, and Islam comes from both, but there are still fundamental differences between the three.

It is interesting to note that even a person identifying herself as both Christian and Wiccan still has abias against Christianity. According to Pittman, the Old Religion naturally evolved into modern Wicca, but Christianity had to subvert the Old Religion by force and make fundamental concessions in exchange for [the pagans] accepting the Christian male Trinity.

Pittman herself defines a Christian simply as one who has a personal relationship with Jesus and the Holy Trinity while all but discounting Jesuss accepted teachings:

Who determines that Wicca is not an acceptable method of worshiping the Holy Trinity? Do I trust my life and my spiritual soul to British Scholars [at?] the Court of King James?

Her specific mention of the King James Bible makes me wonder why she doesnt just work from another translation of the Bible.

As for who determines if Wicca is an appropriate vehicle for honoring the Trinitybasic definition of words is all that is required. Wicca has no Holy Trinity, and what it teaches is contrary to Christianity. That clearly makes Wicca a poor vehicle.

In later versions of her website, Pittman explains that Trinitarian/Christian Wicca was never meant to be Christian. Instead, its a Wiccan tradition influenced by Christianity, which is pretty contrary to her older website. Regardless, the explanation really doesnt change much: the Christian ideas she attempts to inject into Wicca dont work well in Wicca.

Responsible Eclecticism

There is nothing wrong with combining certain Christian and Wiccan beliefs into something new. However, if youre creating something new, why insist on labeling yourself something you no longer are? Christianity came from Judaism, but Christians dont claim theyre Jews. If you believe the Trinity to be three separate figures, (Father, Son, Mother) thats your right. But that is not a Christian belief. By insisting on being both Christian and Wiccan, youve committed yourself to two incompatible theologies.

Also, theres certainly nothing wrong with bringing certain Christian concepts into your Wiccan practice or certain Wiccan concepts into Christian practice. But the choices should make sense just like any other belief system. Can a Wiccan follow Jesuss ethical teachings? Absolutely. Can a Christian worship outdoors, creating their own sacred space? Of course. But neither of these situations results in a Christian Wiccan.