Is Witchcraft a Religion or a Practice?

Is witchcraft a religion or a practice?

It seems like a simple enough question. It's certainly treated as though it's an easy question. Rolling into magical spaces populated by beginners, or flipping through the introductory chapter of practically any book published in the last handful of years, you're likely to find curt but vehement statements in one direction or another, delivered with the assurance of absolute authority (and the twinge of an unstated well, duh):

"Witchcraft is a practice, not a religion!"

"Wicca is a religion, but witchcraft is a practice!"

"Witchcraft is a religion—and we fought hard to be treated like one!"

The reality is that it's not a simple question, no matter how frustrated we might become on either side of the dichotomy. One needn't go very far or read very deeply before quickly seeing conflict and being confronted with contradictory perspectives. If it were simple, after all, we wouldn't have to keep talking about it.

Sometimes the distinction feels generational. Practitioners who lived through the Satanic Panics of the latter years of the twentieth century remember all too well the consequences of being "not a religion" in the eyes of the state. Practitioners from generations before then might recall the secrecy and need for legal discretion in the wake of the Fraudulent Mediums Act, or similar prohibitions either directly or indirectly curtailing publicly identifying as a witch. Beyond being a calculated political move, the impulse to cast witchcraft as a religion was also deeply personal: why shouldn't witches be entitled to enjoy their traditions out in the open, accepted and bolstered by the same sorts of social services, just like anyone else? Legibility as a "religion" is one way (though certainly not a surefire one) to do that, and to these preceding generations it sometimes looks flippant and dismissive for younger witches to so-casually eschew witchcraft as a religious category.

Of course, it's not casual at all. For many witches (of all generations) coming from high-control traditions like particular forms of Protestant evangelicalism, the distinction from "religion" is emotionally significant. For them, "religion" fundamentally is about control. Characterized by rules and regulations, protocol surrounding behavior and belief, as well as expectations around relationships, family structures, and matters of personal identity, religion becomes yet another form of confinement that needs to be escaped. A great deal has been written in scholarly spaces about the "spiritual but not religious," and many witches fall into this group. If "religion" is about oppression and group-think, "spirituality" is about freedom and individuality.

The assertion that witchcraft is "a practice"—inherently devoid of its own religiosity, but with the flexibility to accommodate religious people who choose to wield it—is perhaps the most rapidly growing and recently prevalent perspective. In some ways, it's a response to the increased public presence of many kinds of witchcraft, all over the world, beyond the contemporary European flavors that have enjoyed (suffered?) the limelight since the mid twentieth-century. Witchcraft is a big, nebulous category, and it looks different amongst different people at different times and places throughout history. It's perfectly reasonable that "religion" wouldn't encompass many of these expressions. This increasing visibility of the diversity that has always been there is a good thing, as is the challenge to categorical assumptions that served us in previous decades. But it's also true that the assertion that witchcraft is purely a practice and not a religion represents continuing shifts in our understanding of what it means to be "secular." Thanks to a lengthy history of both white colonialism and Christian hegemony, we tend to think of religion as a matter of belief, and not a thing that you do ("If there are gods and rules, it's religion!"). Our models for what constitutes "religion" are based historically (and legally) on how closely something resembles particular forms of monotheism (and most especially Protestant Christianity), and the result is that our models for "secularism" are themselves subject to the same biases. If something doesn't look like Christianity or the other models of religiosity within our own immediate experience, then it tacitly becomes not-religion. This is its own kind of violence.

It's all messy, and mostly it doesn't help us talk to each other one way or the other. It helps even less when we argue with such vehemence, and when we casually recite whatever pat line as though it's always true, and true equally for everyone.

I'd like to propose that we ditch that binary. At best, we're wrong at least half the time. At worst, we're forcing something huge and profoundly diverse into two boxes that are comparatively recent constructions, and that don't make sense outside of a very particular and very narrow cultural framework.

Is witchcraft a religion or a practice? It's both. And it's a lot more. It's also a cultural identity, a political tool, a personal strategy for working toward liberation, an art form, a mode for belonging in community, a framework for thinking about place and time, a sacred game. What witchcraft is depends on who is doing it and the cultural and personal frameworks that are meaningful to them, which can also change over time. If it's helpful in any given moment to describe it as "religion" (especially when the state comes knocking), then so be it. But if it feels useful and meaningful to call it "spirituality" or "identity" or "practice" or something else entirely, then we should feel free to do so and it will be equally true.

We do our communities and our art a disservice when we treat the matter as a binary—especially a binary created by an overculture that largely uses it to regulate us.

When a newcomer asks if witchcraft is a religion or a practice, try telling them that it's up to them. Try telling them that it's art, just to see what they do with it (because what does that even mean?). When you're not sure yourself, try not deciding at all and just let it be what it wants to without so much of your input. Look up other definitions of religion, not crafted by white scholars from prior centuries, struggling to explain their own disenchantment, swimming in the invisible water of their own biases. Don't be fooled into thinking "secular" equates to neutrality, or that "practice" is a thing separate from "belief." Remember that it's a big world and the way we describe it is always in flux. We can choose different words tomorrow. Our categories are only ever approximations, and they're useful until they aren't.