The witch trials never ended.

The Burning Never Stopped: How We Weaponize the Sacred

They came for Dorothy Good when she was four years old.

In 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, they shackled a child's wrists and called it godliness. They imprisoned her for months, and when she finally emerged, her mind had shattered in ways that would never heal. Her crime? She was different. Her mother was different. And difference, they said, was demonic.

Dorothy was not burned—in Salem, they preferred the rope. But across the ocean, in the villages of Europe, the fires had burned bright for centuries. Tens of thousands of bodies—mostly women, but also men and children who didn't conform—turned to ash in the name of Christ. The same Christ who said, "Let the little children come to me." The same Christ who stopped a crowd from stoning a woman and asked, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

The pyres have gone out. The gallows have come down. 

But the burning never stopped.

The Alchemy of Holy Violence

There is a particular kind of evil that wraps itself in sacred cloth. It speaks in the language of protection while wielding the instruments of control. It invokes God's name while doing the devil's work. And it has walked through American history with a Bible in one hand and a whip in the other.

The women hanged as witches were healers and midwives, property owners and loud mouths, the mentally ill and the simply inconvenient. They were the ones who didn't bow quite low enough, who owned land a neighbor wanted, who practiced herbalism when male doctors wanted monopoly, who said "no" when the powerful expected "yes."

We look back now and call it madness. Hysteria. A dark chapter we've moved beyond.

But have we?

The New Witch Trials

In the 1970s, something shifted in the soul of American Christianity—or rather, something ancient was repackaged and sold as new. Wealthy men in boardrooms realized they could harness the spiritual hunger of millions and point it like a weapon. Not toward the money-changers in the temple, but toward women's bodies. Not toward welcoming the stranger, but toward building walls. Not toward healing the sick, but toward denying them healthcare.

They called it the Moral Majority. They wrapped it in flags and crosses. And they taught a generation that Christianity meant control—control over women's wombs, control over who could love whom, control over who belonged in "our" country, control over children's bodies and identities.

The language changed, but the impulse remained identical: You are different, therefore you are dangerous, therefore we must control you, and we do it in God's name.

The girl seeking an abortion today is Dorothy Good in new clothes. The doctors who help her are the midwives and healers. The trans teenager denied medical care is the child accused of witchcraft for not conforming to prescribed roles. The immigrant family separated at the border are the strangers we were commanded to welcome but chose to cage instead.

Different era. Same burning.

The Christ They Forgot

Here's what causes my soul and spirit to morn: The man they claim to follow would not recognize none of this.

Jesus of Nazareth spent his ministry defending precisely the people today's religious politicians condemn. He touched the untouchable. He elevated women in a patriarchal society. He healed on the Sabbath and infuriated religious authorities who cared more about law than love. He told stories about Samaritans—the immigrants, the others, the ones "real" believers were supposed to hate—and made them the heroes.

When they brought him a woman caught in adultery—caught in the act of body autonomy that scandalized the righteous—he didn't condemn her. He condemned the men with stones in their hands.

He spoke constantly, obsessively, relentlessly about helping the poor. He said you cannot serve both God and money. He said it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. He overturned tables when he saw people using religion to exploit others.

And yet, somehow, his name now gets invoked to bless oligarchs and persecute the vulnerable.

This is not a new Christianity. This is the oldest betrayal, endlessly repeated: taking the words of a radical who challenged every power structure and using them to reinforce every power structure.

 The Soul Remembers

But here's the thing about the human spirit: it knows.

Somewhere beneath the propaganda and the fear-mongering, beneath the talking points and the culture wars, our souls remember what the sacred actually feels like. It doesn't feel like control. It doesn't taste like fear. It doesn't sound like condemnation.

The sacred feels like a four-year-old being set free instead of shackled.

It tastes like the forgiveness offered to a woman caught in the act of being human.

It sounds like "welcome the stranger" and "feed the hungry" and "whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do to me."

Every spiritual tradition—before it gets twisted by power—knows this. The mystics knew it. The contemplatives knew it. 

Indigenous wisdom keepers knew it. 

Early Christians, before Constantine made Christianity an empire, knew it.

The sacred liberates. It never imprisons.

The sacred heals. It never wounds.

The sacred includes. It never excludes.

When someone uses religion to control your body, your family, your identity, or your dignity—they are not speaking for the sacred. They are speaking for the same impulse that shackled Dorothy Good. They are heirs to the men who lit the pyres and tied the nooses and called it holy.

The Choice Before Us

We stand at a crossroads that isn't new—it's the same crossroads that's always existed. On one side is the religion of control, of power, of using God's name to justify cruelty. On the other is the spirituality of liberation, of love, of recognizing the divine in every human being, especially those the powerful have deemed disposable.

One path leads to more Dorothy Goods, more bodies regulated and controlled and punished for the crime of being fully human.

The other path leads toward what every authentic spiritual teacher has always pointed to: beloved community, radical compassion, justice that rolls down like waters.

The pyres are gone, but the choice remains.

Which fire will we tend? The fire that burns people for being different? Or the fire that burns away everything in us that would harm another human being in God's name?

The witch trials never ended. They just got better branding and bigger budgets and tax-exempt status.

But the resistance never ended either. In every era, there have been people who refused to light the fires, who hid the accused, who said "not in my name" to holy violence.

Dorothy Good was four years old when they came for her.

How old will the next one be?

And will we be the ones with chains in our hands, or the ones breaking them open?

The sacred is waiting for our answer. It always has been.