If you’ve found your way to this article, you probably know the feeling: the nagging sense that the witches in the books and the Jesus in your heart shouldn’t fit together, and the simultaneous, stubborn sense that they do. The herbs in your kitchen are not in opposition to the cross above your door. The moon you greet at night is not in opposition to the One who said consider the lilies.
You’ve been told to choose. You’ve quietly refused. Now you’re searching whether you’re allowed.
The short answer: it depends entirely on what you mean by witch. The longer answer — the one that’s actually useful — is what this piece is for.
What “Witch” Actually Means
The word witch has carried so many meanings across centuries that asking “is it OK to be a witch” without specifying is a little like asking “is it OK to be a chef” — depends what you’re cooking and what tools you’re using.
Historically, “witch” has meant:
- Cunning folk: Village healers who used herbs, prayers, and folk wisdom to treat illness, deliver babies, and ease grief. Often Christian, often persecuted anyway.
- Practitioners of folk magic: People who tied knots, lit candles, recited charms, and worked with the seasons in ways that overlap heavily with what most Christians still call “prayer” or “ritual.”
- Wiccans: Adherents of a specific religious tradition developed in mid-20th-century England by Gerald Gardner, with its own theology, ethics, and structure.
- Modern eclectic pagans: People who draw from many traditions, often without belonging to any one of them.
- The caricatured figures of horror movies and panic literature: Almost entirely fictional.
When the Bible prohibits witchcraft (most famously in Exodus 22:18 and Deuteronomy 18:10–12), it is condemning specific practices in a specific cultural context — primarily divination used to manipulate political power, child sacrifice connected to particular foreign cults, and ritual harm. It is not condemning village herbalists, candle-lighters, or moon-watchers.
This matters, because most contemporary “witches” who are wondering if they can also follow Christ fall into the herbalist/candle-lighter/moon-watcher camp, not the political-divination camp.
What Christ Actually Said
Christ said almost nothing about witches. He said a great deal about:
- Loving one’s neighbor and enemy
- Caring for the poor and sick
- The kingdom of God being among us, not elsewhere
- Hypocrisy in religious leaders
- The lilies, the sparrows, the seeds, the soil
If your “witchcraft” is herbal healing, attending to the moon, keeping a seasonal altar, or marking sacred time with candles — none of these are prohibited by anything Christ said. Many of them are continuous with what Christ did.
Where the Tension Comes From
The historical anti-witch impulse in Christianity comes mostly from three sources:
1. The witch trials. From the 15th through 18th centuries, hundreds of thousands of people — mostly women — were tortured and executed across Europe and colonial America for “witchcraft.” This was not biblical fidelity. It was a moral catastrophe. Most modern Christian denominations now openly acknowledge this.
2. Theological anti-nature impulses. Some streams of Christian thought, especially those shaped by certain readings of Paul and Augustine, came to view the body and the natural world with suspicion. This was always one thread among many; it is not the dominant biblical witness.
3. 20th-century evangelical purity culture. The “spiritual warfare” framing of the 1980s and 1990s, with its lists of “demonic” objects (yoga, Halloween, crystals, tarot), is a recent and culturally specific phenomenon. It does not represent two thousand years of Christian theology; it represents a particular American Protestant moment.
If you’re wrestling with the “is it OK” question, you’re often actually wrestling with #3 — the inherited fear from a particular evangelical childhood. Naming this can help.
The Pagan Church of Christ’s View
We don’t use the word witch much in our community, mostly because it carries so much cultural weight that conversations get derailed by definition battles. But we hold:
- The earth is sacred. Tending to it with herbs and prayer is honoring the sacred.
- The moon is a holy timekeeper. Marking its cycle is participating in the rhythm of creation.
- Lighting candles, sitting in silence, marking thresholds, blessing meals — these are universal religious practices, not pagan import.
- Divination for the purpose of manipulating others is not okay. This is a moral concern, not a craft concern.
- Calling on powers in opposition to the love at the heart of Christ’s teaching is not okay. Most “witches” we know don’t do this.
In other words: if your practice is rooted in love, attention, and care for the living world, you are doing what every spiritual ancestor has done. The label doesn’t matter much.
Practical Questions People Ask Us
Yes. An altar is a focal point of attention. Christians have had them for two thousand years.
This is a more contested practice. Many in our community see tarot as a contemplative tool (using the cards as prompts for reflection) rather than as fortune-telling. The line, for us, is whether you’re using it to listen or to predict. Listening is fine. Predicting is shakier ground.
Yes, enthusiastically. Herbalism is one of the oldest spiritual-practical disciplines we have.
Depends on what you mean. If by "spell" you mean a focused intention with ritual elements, yes — Christians have always done this, we just call it prayer. If by "spell" you mean trying to manipulate other people’s wills against their consent, no. That’s not okay regardless of theological framework.
Yes. Many in our community do both. They are not in conflict.
What Other Christians Will Say
You should know going in: many Christians will not be ready for this conversation. Some will tell you you’re playing with the devil. Some will quote verses out of context. Some will be loving and concerned and simply unfamiliar with the history.
You don’t have to convince them. You don’t have to argue. You can hold your own practice gently and let your life speak for it. Most people, given time, come to understand that “Christian witch” doesn’t mean what the cartoon image suggested.
You can also find communities, like ours, where the conversation isn’t a fight.
If This Is You
If you have been carrying this question quietly, sometimes guiltily, often alone — you should know that there are a lot of you. The Christian witch communities online have grown rapidly over the last decade. The interest in earth-honoring spirituality among former evangelicals has exploded. You are part of something much larger than your own kitchen altar.
And you are not doing anything wrong.
If you want to talk with people who hold both Christ and earth-honoring practice without anxiety, we’d be glad to meet you. Our About page lays out who we are. Our New to Us guide walks through what to expect at a first gathering.
The herbs, the moon, the candles, the love of Christ — they all belong to the same sacred world. You don’t have to choose.
Sources & Further Reading
- Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present (Yale University Press, 2017)
- Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (Routledge, 1996)
- Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (W. W. Norton, 1987)
- Owen Davies, Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History (Hambledon Continuum, 2003)
- Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692 (Little, Brown, 2015)