Jack Harvey. He goes on to claim that eighty percent of his congregation is "military, and appalled by [the Wiccans]" (Gwynne par 4). While the Army is supporting the Wiccans, it is lackluster at best. Major General William Dendinger, who is on the Armed Forces Chaplains Board says, "This belief is protected under the First Amendment" (par 3) and Lt. Col. Benjamin Santos, a Fort Hood spokesman, states that, "As far as we are concerned, they are a religious organization providing for the spiritual needs of our soldiers" (Holley par 5). People fear and hate what they don’t understand and only display their ignorance with shouts of ‘Devil-worship.’ As it so happens, the Devil "is a purely Christian invention; there being no mention of him … before the New Testament" (Buckland 4). Until the advent of Christianity, the Old Gods were both good and bad in themselves as dictated by their own actions, but only when Christianity came along with "an all-good, all-loving deity [was there a need for an] antagonist. In simple language, you can only have the color white if there is an opposite color, black, to which you can compare it" (4). So with the need for a ‘black,’ Christians created the Devil, complete with horns and a pointy tail, and compared him to the ‘Horned God’ of the pagans, which meant that "the pagans were Devil worshippers" (Buckland 4). Even with hundreds of years of oppression, Wicca is beginning to flourish again. People like Dr. Gerald Gardner and Raymond Buckland teach, give lectures about, and practice their own style of Wicca. People are coming out of the ‘broom closet’ all the time, and others are coming to the Old Ways in search of alternative ways to express their spirituality. Regardless of what critics like Rep Robert Barr and Sen. Strom Thurmond say, Wicca is here to stay....
