I'm Not a Witch I'm Your....Pastor?!?

    As Halloween looms large on our collective horizons with kiddies dressed like monsters and superheroes begging for candy I thought it would be a good time to visit a spooky topic: witches. I'm not talking about the kind that wear pointy hats and have warty noses in story books.  No, I mean the real kind.
    In 1951 a weird thing happened.  England revoked it's anti-witchcraft laws.  Yep, up until 1951 you were not free to practice witchcraft in England.  Now, on one hand this seems to make perfect sense, after all, you don't want witches flying around the countryside on brooms casing spells and turning people into newts. One the other hand it makes almost no sense as the fairy tale witches who ride brooms through the air and turn people into newts never really existed.  Even King James' famous Witchcatcher General, Matthew Hopkins who operated at the peak of England's witch hunting mania, probably never once encountered anyone who practiced fairy tale style witchcraft.  At best he may have persecuted some folk-remedy based healers with ties to occult practices, at worst he probably executed a few mentally deranged delusionals.  It is debatable as to whether real "witches" ever even existed outside of Grimm's fairy tales... and some witch catching manuals published by the Roman Catholic church.  Admittedly there were some small pockets of rural occultists who occasionally ran afoul of the law, but all in all, the anti-witchcraft law was most often employed erroneously.
    All of that is true, until 1951.  Meet Gerald Gardener.  Among his many jobs he was a plantation
worker, hospital volunteer, archaeologist, and eventually the inventor of modern western witchcraft often known as Wicca. Over his life Gardner collected a dizzying patchwork of occult influences

from Rosicurianism, to spiritualism, to Druidism, and finally witchcraft from the New Forest Coven of witches.  He took all of these influences and merged them into one synthesis in a series of books on the practice of witchcraft which he was allowed to publish after the 1951 legalization of witchcraft.  This formed the foundation of the the Wiccan religion and their worship of the pagan "Goddess".  The goddess in question is something of an amalgam of pagan Celtic nature and fertility gods.  For our purposes probably the best modern day analogy of the Wiccan goddess would simply be "mother nature".  All in all, the form of witchcraft that Gardener forged was a modernist mashup of diverse, and often conflicting mythologies. From that point forward practitioners, both of the earnest and misguided variety and of the opportunistic and conniving variety, have taken up the practice of semi-organized religious witchcraft building on his foundation.

      It was into one of these earnest but misguided coven's of witches that Nadia Bolz-Weber fell as a young adult after being invited to a Wiccan wedding.  Nadia practiced the worship of the goddess and was a witch prior to becoming a Lutheran Pastor.  You may say, what a drastic turn of heart she must have had to turn from witchcraft to Christianity, but you would be wrong.  Let's let her put it in her own words.

“The goddess we spoke of never felt to me like a substitute for God but simply another aspect of the divine, like God’s aunt or something. When I tell other Christians of my time with the goddess I think they expect me to characterize it as a period in my life when I was misguided and that now thankfully I have come back to both Jesus and my senses. But it’s not like that. I can’t imagine that the God of the universe is limited to our ideas of God. I can’t image that God doesn’t reveal Godself in countless ways outside of the simple system of Christianity. And in a way I need a god who is bigger and more nimble and more mysterious than what I could understand or contrive.”

      Just in case you missed it: she never left Wicca...Just saw Christianity as another expression of God.  So, yes.  We have a Lutheran pastor who is also a witch. One might rightly assume that Ms. Bolz-Weber is at the far lunatic fringe of the ELCA, and while that would be sensible, it would also be wrong.  If anything Ms. Bolz-Weber is the current darling of the national church.  Her lecture circuit and books are touted by the leadership of our ELCA as groundbreaking and inspirational. For this reason she was invited to be one of the keynote speakers at things like the ELCA National Youth Assembly and  the Ninth Annual Lutheran Studies Conference at Pacific Lutheran University. 

    So, how is this happening?  Well, as long as Universalism continues to find its way into the ELCA there can hardly be any call for singling out, or disciplining heretics.  After all, if salvation is only a

matter of universal acceptance and all roads lead to God then really anything, including witchcraft is on the table. Oh, and did I mention that she is close with out national Presiding Bishop who has not seen fit to either censure or remove an actual witch from the roster of the ELCA?  Instead she keeps getting invited to national events and allowed to promote her personal re-interpretation of God and Christ as she sees fit.
    I know that a lot of you will read this and wonder if there can possibly be any truth to any of this or if this is just more internet fake news.  If you think that, good for you.  It should seem too insane to be true.  Go out, do the research. read the articles, and explore.  You may want to make sure that kids aren't in the room when you do it.  Her stance on "ethically sourced porn" alone is not safe research material around kids (ironic considering that our national ELCA invited her to the national Youth Assembly).  While searching be sure to look into the golden vagina idol she had made for Gloria Steinem out of virginity promise rings that she had girls mail her in protest to abstinence, as well as her perspective on the current Christian ethic about sex in general.  (Spoiler:  in her words she wants to "burn it the f*** down"...I added the asterisks... what can I say, I'm a prude apparently). 

   One final thing, and this is important.  What makes her so dangerous, outside of the overwhelming support of the ELCA, is that most of what she says about God, faith, grace, life, and love is actually spot on. Her theology on most days, and in most ways, is actually pretty excellent...  Until she takes a sharp left turn down a horrendously dangerous heretical alley.  Those who follow along with her, basking in the otherwise commendable Lutheran theological flow may fail to notice when the neighborhood of the dialog changes from the noble halls of how God's grace is transformative and freely given to those who have faith, to the seedy underworld of "ethically sourced porn".  Be on your guard folks.  Some of the wolves "baa" right up until they eat you.