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this seems to me one of those issues that lets you see how the peculiar world of the evangelical right interacts with wider matters--in other words, what can happen if the far right evangelical community actually gets power politically. think about it: recent evangelical discourse has been very much about a state of spiritual warfare that pits the good (themselves, of course) against Evil/satan (everyone who is not them)--this is not in itself a new worldview, but its social situation is new.
if this is your basic view of the world--spiritual warfare--and the animator is understood to be "satan" then it follows that, for these folk, the fact of wicca, the fact of paganism functions as a bizarre confirmation of the worldview as a whole--regardless of what the content of these formations might be--for the evangelical right--and this is based on my own experience within that world--what wiccans or pagans might say about themselves is discounted up front--they are "instruments of satan" pure and simple. it follows from this that these folk would not feel the need to know anything about wicca, anything about paganism in their current forms to be quite persuaded that both are bad bad things.
it makes some sense that, motivated by the above (more or less) you would find lawyers fronting for rthe religious right trying to exclude these groups from the category "religion"---and also that this argument would rest on the flimsiest possible logical grounds, in that it provides no answer for ustwo's question about the definition of a religion on the one hand (this agreement with ustwo indicates the possibility of radically opposed positions running across the same question for very very different reasons)--but it also introduces its opposite, which is a freedom of religion question. on these latter grounds, the decision cited earlier seems to me self-defeating for the right--they have set up the grounds for their defeat across what they might take as a victory.
two funny things within it: the usage of the term "mainstream" is idiotic outside the context of conservative ideology in general, within which the right's claim that it and it alone represents the "real america" and "the mainstream" are common currency--totally empty claims, but no matter.
second, is that i am not surprised to find folk who actually know something about contemporary wicca or paganism bewildered by the ruling--it only really makes sense if you assume the above concerning the ways in which these signifers operate in rightwingworld.
it seems that the right would prefer to see wicca through the lens of the inquisition than to take at all seriously what the beliefs systems are actually like, what they do and how they work from the viewpoint of practioners.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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