Submitted by James L. Nammack, Nov 7, 2007 14:50

I'm not a Pagan, but I am a diviner who has been a vendor at many festivals, fairs, and some Pagan events as well. I have done a lot of reading about Wicca and Paganism, and I have had a lot of friends who identify themselves as such. Even though I am not a Pagan, I am not a Christian either, and that has caused me untold problems with my relatives, neighbors, and others. The Holy Inquisition might be dead, but the yearning for it among Christians is still very much alive and well.

I was a diviner at a Wiccan Halloween festival in Asheville, North Carolina about five years ago, and there was a gathering of about thirty Christians outside the building we were using, and they were screaming at us and cursing us with all the venom they could muster. This continued unabated for quite some time. That was the spookiest Halloween I had ever experienced. I grew up in Kentucky, and I was fairly close to many of my cousins and aunts, and I was very close to some of them. Regardless, each and everyone of them hatefully disowned me after it became known that I was no longer a Christian. With the relatives that I had grown up with and felt quite close to, the hurt was deep and long-lasting. And this has nothing to do with Kentucky being Bible Belt country. This kind of thing goes on all across America all the time.

Wiccans and Pagans are castigated by their Christian coworkers, neighbors, "friends," relatives, and everyone else. Of course, this persecution is not uniform, but is wide-spread enough so that a person who identifies him or herself as being a Wiccan or Pagan thinks not only twice, but several times, before making it known to others that one is no longer a Christian. This is a very, very real problem, and you should not be making light of it.

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