Christianity and the Witch Craze

by Brian D. Wilson

There is perhaps no historical event more distorted and lied about than that period known as the European witch trials. That the trials happened, there is no doubt. However, I think you will find that after the most common myths about this era are corrected you will find that that Christianity's role in the dark affair was quite different than you imagined.

The biggest myth about the witch-hunts concerns the number of victims. Feminist Andrea Dworkin in her work Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality claimed that 9 million women were burned as witches. Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism was content with saying millions of women died. Such large numbers are often cited out of a desire to morally equate the witch-hunts with other infamous instances of ethnic cleansing in history, the charge of gyn-o-cide being very common among femenist writers.

The figure of 9 million can be traced back to Matilda Joslyn Gage, in Women, Church and State, an early feminist work from 1893. “Gage appears simply to have intuited this figure, offering no basis for it what so ever. It has since lived on, often without citation” says social historian Rodney Stark (For the Glory of God, 193).

Dworkin calls her citation, “the most responsible estimate,” an odd statement given the total population of Europe at the time. If we put Europe’s population at 40 million (Charles Van Doren, A History of Knowledge) and assume half that number were women, it would mean that almost 50% of Europe’s women were executed, an absurd proposition.

It isn't that responsible scholarship on the era doesn't exist. It is that works written on a popular level continue to come out yearly at a rate far exceeding any serious work on the matter. Luckily though after 1970 scholars have been much more responsible in their research most citing less than 100,000 casualties during the entire 450 years of the witchcraze, a number conisderably lower than the number killed for petty and other crimes.

Robin Briggs in his work, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Content of European Witchcraft suggests that fewer than 60,000 people died during the whole period, which works out to fewer than 2 victims per 10,000 people. In some countries the witch hunts were hardly felt. Brian Levack (The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe) reports fewer than 1,000 deaths in England during the entire era.

Another myth is that women were almost exclusively the victims. Historian Richard Kieckhefer (European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture) has done perhaps more than anyone in making witch trial data from European archives available. He exhaustively surveyed 410 trials from Europe’s most intensive periods of persecution between 1300 and 1499. He found that 63% of the accused were female, 25% male, and 12% were tried together in mixed groups. Against the whole era (1300-1750) nearly one third of the accused were men (Briggs, 171).

Kieckhefer breaks the data down even more. For death sentences 41% were male and 33% female, acquittals 10% for each gender, severe sentences were 6% males and 1% females, mild sentences 8% males and 24% females.

Given these statistics sexism, another common myth for why the witch-hunts went on, becomes an inadequate explanation. First it must be admitted that the charge is not wholly inaccurate. The infamous Witches Hammer for example suggests that, “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.”

Yet such attitudes do not explain the male victims, that the majority of those capitally punished were men, or that most charges of witchcraft brought against women were made by women. Some have argued these women accusers were outsiders seeking acceptance or mere patriarchal puppets serving male wishes.

Historian Deborah Wills (Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power) points out that most, “village level quarrels that led to witchcraft accusations grew out of struggles to control household boundaries, feeding, child care, and other matters typically assigned to women’s sphere.” The accusers were often the ones urging conformity to a patriarchal standard, while the fights were rarely about proper feminine conduct but curses and insults concerning the woman’s reputation for neighborly nurture. Finally witch hunters accused very few women of anything, ignoring the sex-role violations of millions.

What then about Christianity’s role? Surprisingly the Spanish Inquisition shines light upon the matter. First it is noteworthy that very few people died during the entire Spanish Inquisition thanks to the rational restraint of church officials. For example, in a century (1540-1640) in Aragon only 535 people were executed, During the whole inquisition in Spain only 800 people were executed and over 20,000 were acquitted by Church officials (Keickefer, 202).

Unbiased reexamination of this era actually shows that the Inquisition was initiated to bring about judicial restraint in place of mob action. Levack points out that during, “the largest witch-hunt in Spanish history more than 1900 persons were accused but most were never charged and only 11 individuals were condemned.”

What the witch-hunt archeival dats reveals is that witch hunting and execution were most frequent in places where local mobs ruled and ecclesiastical authority did not reach. Far from oblivious to these mob actions, church authorities made great efforts to stop witch trials. For example in the culturally unassimilated areas of Alsace, Lorraine, and French Comte, all French witchcraft cases became subject to review in Paris, most being over turned (Stark, 251). In Spain the Inquisition became so opposed to witchcraft trials they not only intervened to save the accused from local mobs, but they punished the local prosecutors (Stark, 249).

Christians also helped to end witch-hunts by their aggressive campaign to end superstition. In 1607 for example the Council of Malines ruled, “It is superstitious to expect any effect from anything when such an effect cannot be produced by natural causes, by divine institution, or by the ordination and approval of the Church.” Neither is this example unique, but it goes back 1200 years to Augustine wherein the Church pushed to end attacks brought on by superstition.

Witch executions, while brutal by modern standards, too must be examined in light of the times. Dismissal rates in church courts were far higher than in secular courts, and capital punishment was given out far more for common crimes like robbery than for witchcraft (Weisser, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe). In Rouen, between 1550 and 1590 during the height of the witch-hunts 3 women and 6 men were burned as witches while sixty-six women were burned for infanticide (Stark, 204).

Certainly the brutality with which the Church tried, and on occasion capitally punished witches, is appalling. The point however is that this treatment was a product of the age itself, and not of some unique brand of sadism that necessarily followed from the doctrines of the Church. If the Church is guilty of anything it is of being influenced by the world in which it lived, which no Christian ever denied. Yet it must no be forgotten that it was the old Germanic and Celtic beliefs concerning crime and punishment that formed the foundation for medieval witch jurisprudence, and it was the Church's constant challenge to this tradition that eventually brought this to an end.

In the final analysis we Christians should admit that the witch-hunts occurred under the banner of Christendom. Next we ought to politely correct those in opposition about their immensity. Lastly we ought to remind our detractors of the Church’s central role in ending the witch-hunts.