Report: Witchcraft rising in US as Christianity declines
by Calvin Freiburger, LifeSite:
Recent decades have seen a dramatic rise in paganism and the number of Americans identifying as witches while Christian denominations have been losing members, according to a new report.
Last week, Quartz published a piece reviewing religion survey data from Connecticut’s Trinity College covering 1990 to 2008, and from Pew Research Center covering 2014 to the present. They report that the United States’ Wiccan population skyrocketed from 8,000 in 1990 to 340,000 in 2008, a year that also found roughly 340,000 self-described Pagans.
“The best source of data on the number of witches in the US comes from assessments of the Wicca population,” Quartz’s Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz and Dan Kopf explain. “Not all people who practice witchcraft consider themselves Wicca, but the religion makes up a significant subset.”
Pew currently puts the percentage of self-identified Wiccans or Pagans at 0.3 percent, and those who self-identify as atheist, agnostic, or otherwise unaffiliated at 22.8 percent.
Singh-Kurz and Kopf suggest witchcraft’s popularity is due to a combination of factors, from the longtime allure of witches in media and literature to contemporary rebranding of witchcraft as having more to do with nature and individuality than demons and the occult.
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