Witches and Witch Hunts: The History of Christian Misogyny
Whether or not history seems interesting is entirely dependent upon the teacher, video, and/or book we’ve got. Whether or not history is important isn’t debatable—in part because attitudes of the past are woven into our current culture and we use terms, espouse ideas, and embrace norms that, unbeknownst to us, were born centuries ago. Learning to see this is an invaluable part of our quest for justice.
More directly, if we ignore the past, we can never create true justice because we remain ignorant of the pervasive pull of normative narratives (the stories we’re taught to tell ourselves to justify “the way things are”) holding us in their sway.
And this brings us to WITCHES!
Just hearing (or, you know, reading) the word “witch” calls to mind all kinds of imagery. You may think of the campy fun of Hocus Pocus or the primal fear of The Blair Witch Project.
Maybe you have warm memories of Witch Hazel and Bugs Bunny on Looney Tunes or Ana Taylor Joy’s euphoric dance with the darkness in The VVitch. Of course, there are Elphaba and Glinda in Wicked…who are very different from Frank L. Baum’s original The Wizard of Oz.
The point is, when we hear “witch” we experience a big, ol’ mix of characters and emotions. That makes sense as the witch is everywhere…and there’s good reason for that.
Why The Witch?
Natalie Wilson, a scholar of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, gives us an important frame for the witch and her place in our current cultural scene in her text Willful Monstrosity: Gender and Race in 21st Century Horror:
“Accusations of witchcraft have plagued the globe on and off since the 14th century—even earlier if we include the ways women are cast as evil in religious texts, mythologies, and lore. What was Lilith if not a witch that refused to bed down, missionary style, with Adam? Though witches arguably haunted the cultural imagination most prominently between the years 1400 and 1800 (the height of the witch hunts), they currently inhabit the literary and media landscape in great number and variety. Just as many scholars have questioned why zombies have taken culture by storm, so too might we ask “Why witches? Why now?” Part of the answer certainly lies in the fact we are experiencing two contradictory impulses in relation to gender: on the one hand, a profound anti-woman, anti-feminist backlash, and, on the other, a heightened popularity and embrace of feminism and other social justice movements.
Given the witch has been employed to denigrate women as well as to celebrate female empowerment and agency, it is no surprise the figure is looming large in our current era of gender trouble. Nor is it surprising—given the historical besmirching of feminism—that we are witnessing a heightened association between the feminist and the witch.[1]”
Throughout history, the witch is both an embodiment of oppression and an incarnation of liberation. Understanding this lets us be mindful in our approach to the witch, as well as conscious of how patriarchal forces of oppression may be hiding in our ideas and attitudes just below our conscious awareness.
In her brilliant text, The Gospel According to Women: Christianity’s Creation of the Sex War in the West, history of religion scholar, Karen Armstong, underscores how important understanding Christian history and theology is to everyone in America.
Europe became (largely) Christian. Through European colonization, those Christian values became woven into the foundation of new societies around the world. As a result, Christianity is embedded in the national identity of every American.
“We cannot simply cast off two thousand years of cultural formation in a mere fifty years of a more secular approach, even if we are deeply opposed—and therefore, we think, unaffected—by Christianity. Christianity still affects our thinking in matters of ethics and justice. It is inevitable, therefore, that our Christian culture has also formed our Western attitudes to sex and to women, and that those attitudes are present, even if in a submerged form, today.”[2]
No matter how we identify religiously, to live in the west is to be shaped by Christianity and we can’t talk about the witch without talking about Christianity. To understand one, we must understand the other.
Christianity’s Role
Why are witches so scary? Well, Christian propaganda and patriarchal conditioning. Or, to use Wilson’s more eloquent words, “The witch is reviled, as numerous texts suggest, because she flouts societal norms, because she threatens male control of the family and industry, because she claims her body as her own.”[3]
Think about it. The “old crone”? Here is a woman who is no longer conventionally attractive, who is past her value in childbearing, and who has power men can’t match. OF COURSE she would be seen as scary in a patriarchal society!
But there’s more to it than that.
For centuries, the Catholic Church dismissed witches as pagan superstitions, unworthy of time or consideration.[4] However, the witch would ultimately become the perfect villain/vessel to embody two of the church’s most vehement (at the time) and problematic (then and now) teachings.
“Christians had been told that women were abominable beings who were sexually depraved. The witch was the ultimate depravity, and her diabolic sexuality was truly monstrous.”[5]
“The essential ingredient for the transformation of these pagan witches into the Christian heresy was the unique Christian invention of Satan. In no other religion is there anything comparable in power and fearful monstrosity to the Christian Devil. There are certainly devils in other religions, but these are usually rather playful creatures, who possess none of the near omnipotence of Satan. Satan, in his full horror, was a fairly late development in Christianity, and did not begin to terrorize the imaginations of Christians until the Middle Ages…The Devil gradually emerges as God’s shadow, the evil we know exists but for which God refuses responsibility. This means that we cannot accept the evil in ourselves…Sexuality was one of the “evils” that Christian men could not accept, and so they repressed it and projected it onto women, who became unnaturally sexual in the Christian imagination. Sexuality also became diabolic in the Middle Ages, and Satan is represented as a vast animal with priapic sexual appetite and huge sex organs. It could only be a matter of time before the two monstrous sexual projections of medieval Christianity came together.[6]”
This horror and these prejudices still linger in our western world today—whether we know it or not and whether we identify as Christian or not. “Witch words like ‘magical,’ ‘enchanting,’ ‘ravishing,’ ‘bewitching’ preserve the hostility felt for the witch underneath the apparent admiration.”[7]
“The fact that we prefer to call a woman a castrating bitch instead of a castrating witch is instructive; so is the way we have completely buried the witchy meaning of words like glamour and charm, while at the same time we have both—men and women—decided to use these words instead of discarding them for something more neutral…we don’t want to think what we are really saying when we praise a woman for being “enchanting” or “bewitching.” They have scarred the relationship between men and women in the West, but perhaps the most horrifying thing is that they were deeply typical of the relations between the sexes, and still continue to be so subliminally today.[8]”
Hostility toward women is woven into our everyday language and we rarely see it. This equation “sexuality is bad + it is of the Devil + women embody it = the WITCH” has been passed down for centuries. Our modern language bears witness to this just as this mindset fueled the fire for centuries of witch hunts.
The Witch Women Hunts
As Karen Armstrong explores at length, some women even came to believe the charges against them—turning themselves in for sexual thoughts or dreams. The accusations were made with such conviction—and reflected such deep internalization of centuries of preaching—that women were, as Thomas Aquinas once described them, viewed as “misbegotten males.”
Looking at the lives of women who did confess to witchcraft and didn’t later recant, “shows that women [also] turned to witchcraft for simple human comfort: they had no hope in God, no hope in their husbands, and no hope in the church.”[9]
How far the Christian message had fallen. Looking to Armstrong once more we see:
“By the late 15th century, the Church had clearly impressed Europe with a terror of sexuality and a hatred of women that exploded in the first sporadic Witch Hunts. The panic grew during the 16th century, reaching its zenith in the late 16th century and continuing until about 1680, when the fury had spent itself…The Witch Hunts were a religious phenomenon and were engineered by the Church and supported both by the beliefs of devout people and the fears of the “witches” themselves….The witch was a Christian creation; she was seen as a heretic of the most dangerous sort, because she was giving to the Devil the honor that was due to God. It was therefore the duty of all good Christians to hunt out these enemies of society and God.[10]”
Now, as you may be thinking, this doesn’t sound very “Christian.” Armstrong would agree with you.As she explains, this horror-inducing irony was the result of centuries of Christian preaching.
“It was not a logical belief; indeed, it contradicted many tenets of Christianity, including Jesus’ command to love enemies. It was an emotional conviction proceeding from the repression that Christianity had imposed on Europe. For centuries, sex had been seen as evil and women as the enemies of man. Now sex became diabolical and women the arch-enemies of society.”[11]
Understanding Christian Misogyny
This is the other side of the importance of knowing our history. With a strong knowledge of history, we see Christian misogyny, men’s guilt over their sexual appetites, and patriarchal oppression at the root of The Witch Trials that burned across Europe and into the new world. But a strong sense of history also shows there is nothing authentically “Christian” about that.
In fact, an ardent and egalitarian feminism was at the very heart of Jesus’ ministry. In a time when women were often seen as baby-making property, Jesus of Nazareth recognized their full personhood. This is why women flocked to—and funded!—his ministry and he sent women out to preach, teach, and heal in his name, just as he did men.[12]
Yet once the founding prophet was gone, with Christianity as with so many religions, normative forces in culture began to push back against this radically egalitarian, justice-filled, love-fueled message.
As Wilson noted, “the witch has been employed to denigrate women as well as to celebrate female empowerment and agency.”[13]
Over its 2,000+ year history, Christianity has done the same, acting as a powerful force of the liberation or persecution of women, all depending on how true to Jesus’ message the powers that be are.
Understanding our history—both of the world around us and the forces that have shaped us personally—is an essential tool for liberation and revolution.
For those who find history a little too quiet, THE WITCH offers a louder beginning—one steeped in horror, rebellion, and the unraveling of patriarchy itself.
📚Want to dive deeper? Here are the studies and books that informed this article📚
[1] Natalie Wilson, Willful Monstrosity: Gender and Race in 21st Century Horror, (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2020), 130-131.
[2] Karen Armstrong, The Gospel According to Women: Christianity’s Creation of the Sex War in the West, (New York: Anchor Book, 1987),, 8.
[3] Wilson, 134.
[4] Armstrong, 101.
[5] Armstrong, 100.
[6] Armstrong, 102-03.
[7] Armstrong, 117.
[8] Armstrong, 119.
[9] Armstrong, 126-27.
[10] Armstrong, 98-99.
[11] Armstrong, 99.
[12] Okay, so I normally have specific citations down here but I’ve taught religious studies for over twenty years and the Historical Jesus is my personal favorite area of study/expertise. So, I didn’t look up specific quotes to underscore what I said in this paragraph. However, if you’d like to know more about the charismatic prophet Jesus of Nazareth, who built his nonviolent revolution around the Kingdom of God and was executed by Rome as a terrorist for doing so, I’d suggest you start with Marcus Borg’s Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus & the Heart of Contemporary Faith and/or John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography and/or Elizabeth Johnson’s Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology.
[13] Wilson, 131.
