A Wiccan among the Wicked

And among convicts, too

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

01/18/02

Stephanie Simon of the Los Angeles Times reports that a prison in Wisconson has hired a Wiccan as prison chaplain, and the local wowsers are, not surprisingly, blowing their stacks over it.

The Wiccan’s name is Witch. The Reverend Jamyi Witch. As you might have guessed, the name is a professional honorific, and not the name she was born with, but it’s just the sort of thing to take the religiously unstable and send them into whirling, hissing paroxysms of fury and fear.

I’m no big expert on Wicca, but I know a fair number of Wiccans, and they tend to be friendly and unassuming types, the sort of people you would want for neighbors. They don’t worship Satan, or cast spells to make your lawn die, or anything like that. The practitioners refer to themselves as witches, which is what causes biblical fundamentalists to pop their skulls, because of that Old Testament injunction about how "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Of course, the bible they are all reading dates from at least 17^th century England, where the term "witch" denoted midwife, and the translators used it in place of whatever the bible originally meant to describe the local midwives, most of whom also functioned as apothecaries and diviners. The original meaning strongly suggests anyone calling down the power of gods for personal benefit. From that, it could be argued that any Christian who prays for personal divine intervention of any sort is practicing witchcraft. Since most British midwives were Wiccan, and since the original biblical meaning of the term seems to have been adjusted along the line, I’ll assume that Wiccans have more right to be witches than the bible has to demand that they be killed.

Wiccans have a rule called "the law of threes" which basically says that anything you wish for in a spell will come back on you in threes. While the basic premise seems flawed to me – I’m sure if there was something to it, there would be a whole lot of billionaire Wiccans celebrating their 300^th birthdays and lording it over their neighbors, who at age 100, are only worth $333 million – it does tend to dissuade practitioners from wishing ill fortune on others. That would explain why folks like Falwell and Robertson and Gary Bauer haven’t turned into toads or something like that. What’s three times worse than being turned into a toad? Simon notes that the Reverend Witch wryly acknowledges that interest in her craft tends to drop off among prisoners once they learn that Wicca will not teach them how to melt prison bars.

A state rep, who Simon notes comes from a place called West Salem, is leading the drive to prevent a Wiccan from ministering to the spiritual needs of the cons. His name is Mike Huebsch and he is not, at this time, a toad. His argument is that only a tiny minority of prisoners are Wiccan, and so the state should be paying someone from a more mainstream religion to take care of the prisoners.

I guess that means Catholic. Catholics make up about 27% of all Americans. The next biggest group are Seculars. We make up about 13%. After that, the next biggest group is the Southern Baptists, who make up 6%. Everyone else is less than 2%. Usually a lot less than 2%. I guess Huebsch defines mainstream as being any church that represents more than one one hundreth of one percent of the population. And is Christian, or at the very worst, Jewish. He’s really annoyed that the state is paying a Wiccan $35,000 a year to be a prison chaplain, and he’s rounded up a bunch of the local peasants with pitchforks to demand an end to this blasphemy.

The only trouble is, government jobs don’t have any rules regarding blasphemy. They can’t. It’s against the law.

I would question why any government in America pays for chaplains in the first place. It strikes me as a clear violation of the First Amendment injunction about "an establishment of religion." I understand that because of the somewhat restrictive nature of jails, the prisoners can’t just go moseying out on a Sunday morn in search of salvation, and the ministering would have to come to them, but it seems to me that churches and private charity groups should be paying for the chaplains, and not the public sector.

Of course, most local churches get to feeling a whole lot less holy about salvation of rapists, murders and drug dealers when they have to pony up for someone to go in and spread the good word. As with other types of charities, churches can’t meet the overall demands, and need the government to help. Most churches strongly fought against welfare reform for this very reason. They know they can’t pick up the socially superfluous in a capitalist system that demands winners and losers. So they much prefer that the government pay someone to see to the spiritual needs of the incarcerated.

Now if the prison officials are brave and stand their ground, and if this Huebsch is fool enough to try suing, he’s going to learn about a passage in the Constitution that doesn’t get talked about much among the Christian right.

The Constitution explicitly stipulates that "...no religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or position of public Trust under the United States." In other words, the Constitution forbids the government from using religion as any kind of hiring test for any government job. No ifs, ands, or buts.

And it isn’t just the federal government. Courts have ruled that under the "privileges and immunities" language in the Constitution, any provision in the Constitution that upholds a right or forbids a government action applies to the state and local governments, as well.

This makes sense. The Constitution’s guarantee of free speech wouldn’t mean much if the states could go ahead and ban any speech that popped into the empty little heads of state legislators. The Constitution would be toilet paper if the states could override any or all provisions. There have been a few disputes about that over the years, including one medium-sized civil war.

So. No religious test. That means that if the state has a job opening for the position of chaplain, they aren’t allowed to ask what the religious views of the job applicants are.

That probably isn’t the result Huebsch has in mind, but under the Constitution, it’s the only result possible. Even if you make "willingness to minister to the spiritual needs of the prisoners" a part of the required qualifications of the job, you could still end up with an atheist chaplain, since there are plenty of Buddhists and Taoists and other spiritualists who don’t believe in a god or gods.

If the religious whacks who are in a tizzy over Ms. Witch really want to avoid believers in small and unpopular religions – and there are thousands of such in America, which has religious freedom – then rather than have the government draw up a list of religions that are "acceptable" as opposed to religions that are not, they should push for the role of chaplain, whether in prison, the military, or in church, to be made a completely private sector function, run and paid for entirely by private sector funds. The Catholics will be able to afford a lot more chaplains than small, suspect religions, like Mennonites, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jews, Moslems, and Baptists, and everyone will be happy. Right?

And it even does Ms. Witch a favor. If, at some point, Huebsch should sadly pass away, and they do an autopsy and discover that he was, in fact, a toad, Ms. Witch will be off the hook, and they’ll have to burn the Catholic chaplain instead.