Witches are real, and witches are evil. To be sure, while warts, brooms and cauldrons are also real the caricature that brings them all together is rather far from the truth. God, in His infinite wisdom, told His people Israel not to suffer a witch to live (Exodus 22:18). Our fathers the Puritans followed the same perspective. They rightly saw witchcraft as a great evil. They, in accordance with their times, saw it also as a capital offense. Neither of these, however, is the source of the great horror of the Salem Witch Trials.
We are all so comfortable scolding our fathers for their folly before us. Of course they are guilty of folly, not because they came before us, but because they are our fathers. They act foolishly because they are what we are, fools. We are, if outside the kingdom, outraged over the witch trials, and if inside the kingdom, deeply embarrassed by them. What though are we embarrassed for?
Not, in my judgment, for finding witchcraft evil. Though I believe it is not the function of the state to punish witches, I don’t think the greatest evil either was that our fathers thought otherwise. No, the great evil was the manner in which the trials were held. The injustice was less in the sentencing, more in the means by which the victims were found guilty. The failure was a failure to follow biblical and humane rules of evidence. Unverifiable, unanswerable, subjective evidence was used to destroy the innocent.
We, of course, have grown past that. Especially in the church we have learned from this black eye, this skeleton in our closet. Now we insist in judging the accused decently and in order. We’d never fall for, “I know she’s a witch because she gave my sow the stink-eye and a week later all her piglets were dead.” We now know that a people wicked enough to practice witchcraft are a people wicked enough to falsely accuse others of witchcraft, and so no longer presume the guilt of the accused based simply on the testimony of one person. We’ve grown past the habit of hearing testimony from those who are beyond the injunctions of Deuteronomy 19 wherein God’s Word says that the man who perjures himself will receive the punishment the accused would have received had he been guilty. Isn’t it great to be in a world so much more careful and biblical than the world of our Puritan forebears?
Except, of course, that we’re not in a better world, because we are not better people. Every kind of bogus evidence received in Salem is daily received in our modern courts of public opinion. We receive evidence from cowards who in their anonymity will not come into the light. We fall into the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, believing that because B happened after A that A is the cause of B. We reach conclusions without hearing a defense. We leap from the obvious truth that X is a wicked and horrible crime and a sin against God to the unjustified conclusion that Pastor So-and-so must be guilty because he’s been accused of X. And we insist that his accusers, false or not, must be protected at all costs.
We all, including our Puritan fathers, have our blind spots. But we are never more blind than when we see the blind spots of others and insist we’ve grown past our own. Lynch mobs are still with us. Kangaroo trials still happen. And we’re all all too ready to be judge, jury and executioner. Until, of course, we find ourselves the accused.