Heretics and Witches

Early in his important new book, Head and Heart: American Christianities, Garry Wills observes that Catholics, via the Inquisition, tended to condemn to death heretics, while Protestants were more likely to put to death witches. Well, here and now we don’t burn people at the stake and we have finally stopped hanging them, though we are still far from finding all of human life to be sacred. But what about the crimes themselves, heresy and trafficking with the devil?
To have heresy, there has to be an orthodoxy, usually, but not necessarily, religious. Orthodoxy means right belief, in contrast to which the heretic holds his or her own (erroneous) belief instead. To be a heretic, you have to be a member of the group that propounds the orthodoxy. You can’t just be an infidel, an unbeliever. So the Spanish Inquisition caused the secular authorities to burn Christians who held unorthodox views, while they expelled unbelieving Jews from the country unless they converted to Christianity.
Witchcraft or sorcery refers to all kinds of allegedly supernatural activities and its practices and beliefs are to be found in all ages and most cultures. However, the kind of witches that Protestants persecuted were those who were thought to be possessed by or to be otherwise in league with Satan, a matter of action not just belief: having sexual relations with the devil or doing harm to others with his aid.
But is this all just history, in the past of Torquemada of the 15th century and Salem, Massachusetts of the late 17th. Or does that useful French saying apply, le plus ça change, le plus c’est la même chose, the more things change, the more they stay the same?
We (in the West) may not be as dominated by orthodoxies today than when there was little distinction between church and state, but we are neither without them nor free of the persecution of heretics, even if not to the point of capital punishment. Within more than one religious establishment, among the Episcopalians most prominently, battles are now raging between an orthodox wing and those who dissent from the position that the openly gay may not be ordained as the most conspicuous issue. No burning at stakes today, but institutional excommunication nonetheless.
More than one Catholic bishop, more poignantly, has threatened to withhold communion from politicians who do not support laws prohibiting abortion, even though they are personally opposed to the practice. “Bishop: Denying Communion to Obstinate Pro-Abortion Catholic Politicians ‘in many cases becomes the right decision and the only choice’” is the title of an article on LifeSiteNews.com. That is most severe punishment for a believing Catholic!
But we also have our secular orthodoxies, making heretics out of those who dissent from them. Take one example. We are all members of the population that is governed by the Constitution, including its second amendment. One group of citizens insists on an interpretation that the Constitution-given right to bear arms pertains to individuals (rather than only to the states’ militias), while others do not regard gun control as unconstitutional, but a legal and constructive social practice. What sets this debate apart from the very many disagreements that characterize our political discussions is that the matter of gun control is often “elevated” to single issue status in election contests. Opposition to gun control comes to resemble those religious orthodoxies in that dissenters are declared heretics, no matter how many other beliefs they share with the orthodox.
Of course, politicians who support gun control are not strung up on gallows in the village square, however much the proponents of this orthodoxy might desire that. But the fierce and well organized defenders of this orthodoxy achieve a significant dual result. In many parts of the country, proponents of gun control cannot get elected and the fear of retribution prevents its advocates from supporting implementing legislation. As a result, the United States is world headquarters of death by shooting—and ever more by juveniles—so that an entire nation is punished by a minority of fanatical defenders of, in my belief, a misguided orthodoxy.
It is fair to ask what, on the liberal side, constitutes a similar orthodoxy. The best I can come up with is First Amendment devotees, of which I am certainly one. However, most of us ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) supporters stop short of the single-mindedness that makes adherence to that amendment a do or die issue. Perhaps there is something to the accusation that we liberals are wishy washy wusses!
You might think that we are done with witchcraft. Well, yes and no. We have mostly banished the devil from our daily lives, but we do pursue people suspected of trafficking with that turbaned man with a long dyed beard, somewhere in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Of course a belief in the existence of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda is no superstition. Nor is trafficking with them a myth. And it is emphatically not harmless. And yet, there are uncanny resemblances between our treatment of accused supporters of Al-Qaeda and of those accused of being witches.
Like witches, suspected Al-Queda traffickers are identified and incarcerated on the basis of gossip, now called unverified second-hand reports. That’s not so for those suspected of being robbers or even murderers. Supposed witches were notoriously subjected to torture until they confessed. Daily, the matter of “harsh techniques of interrogation” fill the pages of our newspapers—again, not in connection with “ordinary” crimes, but with suspected crimes that are modern analogs of possession by the devil.
Finally, the trials. Gossip also counted as evidence in trials of witches, as were secret communications and, of course, extorted confessions. Evidence against the accused was often withheld from the person on trial. Frequently, the “lawyers” supposedly defending the accused were in effect on the side of the prosecution. Thus many of the trials of people charged with being witches were radically unfair—by any standard, even those prevailing long ago and in societies much less squeamish about procedures than we are. More often than not, to be tried was to be convicted. For many of these practices, similarities can be found in Guantanamo, with, to be sure, indefinite incarceration taking the place of conviction and execution.
Our country is of two minds concerning the treatment of these latter-day witches. There is Cheney-ish hysteria that aims at squelching all signs of sedition at any cost. No lesson was here learned from the fact that now, half a century later, we are apologizing for FDR’s succumbing to the hysteria that led to forcibly “relocating” West Coast Japanese--Americans. Then there are those, of which I am one, who hold that the “war on terror” is not a current emergency, but a very long haul indeed. That assessment entails that if we cannot learn to treat this brand of criminality in ways that remain within the framework of our free society’s traditions, we will change those traditions for the worse. Like them or not, we must allow heretics to have their say and we must deal with those possessed by the devil without ourselves becoming possessed by Satan.