Christo-Pagan? Christian Witch? Can one be both?

I've been noticing lately that my essay on Christianity and Wicca has been receiving a huge number of hits (I'd never had a counter there until recently). I found it very surprising, even more so that these were coming off of searches for "Christian Wicca". Which got me to thinking, can one be Christian and Wiccan at the same time?

My answer would be no, they cannot. The two faiths, while they share some similarities in feasts and rituals, have core, fundamental differences that cannot be ignored. That's not to say that you cannot appreciate the other religion and glean some things from it. But, you simply cannot be both. For those of you searching for a "Yes" answer to that question, please read through this essay before leaving. You will run into varying opinions out there on this subject. I've read several. In fact, The Witches Voice did an essay series on this question alone. I read all the essays submitted and found the ones that said "yes" were written from a "personal experience" aspect while the ones who said "No" were written from a factual look at the two religions. I'm going to briefly reiterate what was there (quoting and linking where appropriate) and add in my own opinions and observations.

Let me clarify a little bit. When I say you cannot be both Wiccan and Christian, I mean that you cannot hold everything that both faiths teach to be true. Picking and chosing is also very dangerous if you make uneducated choices. You can consider yourself to be wiccan with christian influences, in other words, but you cannot be christian with wiccan influences.

When you strip away everything, all the dogma and the redes, and get to the basics of each religion, one can see they mix about as well as oil and water. A closer look reveals this on several levels.

First, Wicca is pantheistic. Pantheism means that God is present in all things; God is immediate; God is inseperable from creation; God IS creation. Second, because of the pantheistic nature of Wicca, it can also be polytheistic. Polytheism sees "the forms of god in many shapes, with many faces and many names". While some Wiccans are not polytheistic (seeing these "forms" as merely facets of One), the religion itself allows for the possibility.

Christianity, by contrast, is monotheistic. Monotheism obviously means a belief in one God, alone. One cannot be monotheistic and polytheistic at the same time. Monotheism also means that God is both transcendent, independent of and distinct from the created universe, and also immanent, presently active in the created universe. Thus, one can find the *presence* of God in nature, but you cannot find *God* in nature. This is an important distinction. It directly contrasts the concept of pantheism.

Based off of these fundamental differences, each religion has a based a system of belief and ritual worship off of it. While they have some things in common, there are many doctrinal and dogmatic teachings of Christianity that are not compatible with Wicca.

This is not to say that you cannot learn from the other religion and glean things from it. In fact, the best thing you can do to further your faith is to study other religions. There are aspects of "truth" that transcend all faiths and these can be incorporated into your own life. However, you cannot adopt key tenets of one faith that oppose those of the faith you currently hold. It is a dichotomy that will, in the end, leave you more frustrated with your faith life than ever before. In the quest for Truth, however, you cannot bend what each faith holds as "fact" to fit your fancy.

For further reading, I recommend the Essay Series on The Witches Voice and, specifically, Essay #4 by Amber Simmons. Also, I would recommend following the link she provides at the bottom, Conversations with a Catholic Clergyman.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me. No flames, please.

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