There Are More Witches in America Than Presbyterians
Episode nineteen of a 21-day October series on what Scripture actually says about the spiritual realm. Week 3 (Victory in Christ). Two episodes left before the Halloween capstone. This one is a wake-up call: the occult is not a shrinking medieval relic. It is a growing, mainstream, documented movement — and Scripture named its practices thousands of years ago.
The numbers (documented, not hyperbole).
— 1990: Trinity College's ARIS survey counted roughly 8,000 self-identified Wiccans in the United States.
— 2001: about 134,000.
— 2008: around 340,000.
— 2014: Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study put Pagans and Wiccans at roughly 0.4% of US adults — about 1.5 million people — which was slightly MORE than the roughly 1.4 million members of the Presbyterian Church (USA) at the time.
— Today: estimates run between 1 and 1.5 million, though current figures are academic extrapolations rather than a fresh national census.
A caveat for honesty: the Pew comparison is 2014 data, and the witch-vs-Presbyterian margin was close. We are NOT claiming witchcraft is "the fastest-growing religion in America" — that specific superlative isn't supported by solid data. But the growth trajectory is real: from about 8,000 to over a million in a single generation.
The real story isn't the raw count. It's the mainstreaming.
The occult has moved from fringe to the center of wellness culture:
— Astrology apps (Co–Star, The Pattern, and others) have tens of millions of downloads.
— "WitchTok" — witchcraft content on TikTok — has accumulated billions of views.
— Tarot is sold in mainstream bookstores and offered at parties and bars.
— "Manifestation" (a repackaged blend of New Thought and word-of-faith practice) sits on bestseller lists.
— Crystals, sage, "shadow work," "spirit guides," and "energy healing" are marketed as self-care and empowerment.
The vocabulary is therapeutic. The practices are Deuteronomy 18.
The culture calls it wellness. Scripture already named it.
Everything in that list maps onto categories this series has already covered:
— Astrology → "observer of times" (Deut 18:10; episode 9).
— Tarot, divination apps → "divination" (Deut 18:10).
— "Manifestation," spell-work → pharmakeia / witchcraft (Gal 5:20; episode 10).
— Mediums, "spirit guides," contacting the dead → "consulter with familiar spirits" (Deut 18:11; episode 14).
The same practices. New branding.
Here is the part that should sting — and it points at the church.
The occult didn't surge in a vacuum. It grew while large parts of the church went quiet about the supernatural.
Where churches stopped preaching a living, supernatural God — stopped taking angels, demons, providence, prayer, and the unseen realm seriously, and offered instead a moralistic, therapeutic, naturalistic religion with good advice and nice music — people with real spiritual hunger went looking elsewhere. The occult is feeding a genuine appetite for the transcendent that a disenchanted church stopped feeding.
That is not primarily a critique of the culture. It is a challenge to the church. People are starving for the transcendent, and someone else is feeding them.
Scripture never banned these things because they are empty.
This is the thesis of the entire series, stated at its sharpest: God did not forbid divination, sorcery, and mediumship because they are harmless parlor tricks. He forbade them because they are real points of contact with real spiritual powers. They are real doors.
The ban is not superstition about nothing. It is protection from something.
The answer is not panic. It is the real power of the real God.
The Reformed response to a culture drunk on the occult is not moral panic, not boycotts, not conspiracy-hunting, not fear. It is the confident proclamation of the gospel and the demonstration of the real, superior power of the living God.
This is exactly what happened in Ephesus (Acts 19, episode 13). The gospel advanced, the counterfeit was exposed, and pagans voluntarily burned their own magic books — 50,000 pieces of silver worth — because they had encountered something more real and more powerful than anything their craft offered.
1 Corinthians 2:4-5: "my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God."
2 Corinthians 10:4: "the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds."
The church answers counterfeit power with true power, counterfeit transcendence with the living God, preached without apology.
The Reformed anchor:
The answer to a culture drunk on the occult is not panic. It is the real power of the real God, preached without apology.
This is episode 19 of the 21-day October series. Two left. Tomorrow: one of the strangest passages in Scripture — the Nephilim of Genesis 6. And on Halloween night, the capstone: Colossians 2:15, where Christ disarmed every dark power at the cross.
📖 Passages: Exodus 7:11-12, Deuteronomy 18:9-14, 1 Samuel 28:3-25, 2 Kings 17:16-17, 21:6, Isaiah 8:19-20, 47:12-15, Daniel 2:27-28, Acts 8:9-24, 13:6-12, 16:16-18, 19:11-20, 1 Corinthians 2:1-5, 10:19-21, 2 Corinthians 4:3-4, 10:3-5, Galatians 5:19-21, Ephesians 5:8-14, 6:10-18, Colossians 2:15, 1 Timothy 4:1, 2 Timothy 3:1-5, 1 John 4:1-4, Revelation 9:20-21, 18:23, 21:8, 22:15
(Sources on the statistics: Pew Research Center 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study; Trinity College ARIS 1990/2001/2008. Current totals are estimates.)