I will say ahead of time that Wicca can be a somewhat complicated system to explain because of the numerous nuances in it and the many different directions one could take or apply Wiccan beliefs in. This erodes the credibility of Wicca entirely in some areas and severely in others. But it is rare to find a worldview that does not have at least one ray of truth protruding out from it. The nature of reality is such that even false religions often have at least shards of truth embedded in them. So it is with Wicca, for it does hold to at least several things which Christianity also affirms. My life goal is to discover truth, and I have no desire to condemn the whole of something which is only false or unverifiable in part. I have chosen to primarily address Wiccan theology and views on sexuality in this post, and I made sure to note which parts of Wiccan belief in each category are true, in accordance with how they concur with what reason proves and what Christianity teaches.
Wiccan Theology
Wicca is a form of paganism, with paganism roughly equating to various pre-Christian or non-Christian religions that often feature nature worship and some form of polytheism (though the Trinity certainly has polytheistic elements, despite what many Christians claim when pressed). Its practice may involve some similar rituals or themes, yet it remains rather decentralized and has no board which presides over it, as the Vatican does Catholicism. As such, Wicca is not so much an organized theology as it is a general spiritual belief system which individual followers apply in a subjective, loose way. I've actually read that agnostics and atheists can identify as Wiccans, so theism can be more of a symbolic formality than a serious metaphysical belief for Wiccans (like Satan in LeVay's Satanism).
Wicca does include, at least in some versions, an uncaused cause, a deistic being that created the universe and a male and female deity who can have large roles in the belief system. While Wicca is often described as a duotheistic worldview featuring the Horned God and the Moon Goddess, the two deities created by the uncaused cause, it views other deities ascribed to other religions as manifestations of the power and personalities of these two deities. Yet it can get very pluralistic. Pluralism is a mixture of various religious and spiritual beliefs or the belief that most or all religions are simultaneously true. Since Wicca allows for very individualized, arbitrary, and pluralistic practice, it has the same flaws of any other pluralistic system.
Of course, pluralism is objectively false because conflicting claims cannot be simultaneously true. Truth is objective and discovered, not created by human merging of random ideas; for this very lack of specificity and uniformity at least some versions of Wicca suffer a hopeless defeat at the hands of logic. The logical law of non-contradiction states that something cannot be and not be in the same way at the same time; something is either true or false, and mixing incompatible or arbitrary beliefs is not a rational way of recognizing truth. Conflicting truth claims are innately exclusive by nature. For one to be correct, all other competing ideas must be false. And thus the versions of Wicca held to by different individuals cannot all be true.
Also incorporated into some Wiccan teachings is the use of magic. I do not think that the condemnation (and demand for capital punishment of) sorceresses and sorcerers in Mosaic Law (Exodus 22:18, Leviticus 20:27) would in itself paint all Wiccans as male and female witches, as, although magic can be featured in Wicca, the malleability and subjective application of Wiccan principles, along with the fact that even atheists can be included as Wiccans, mean that not all Wiccans will even believe in magic, much less attempt to engage in it. Honestly, it seems dubious to me if all Wiccans even believe in sorcery and its practice considering the somewhat loose ideological boundaries of the system.
Such a malleable set of specific theological beliefs could also make Wicca difficult to define. I have done my best to summarize what I have learned about Wicca here, and I welcome any clarification or correction from both Wiccans and non-Wiccans alike!
Wiccan Sexuality
A poem called The Charge of the Goddess details some Wiccan beliefs which I will assess here:
"And ye shall be free from slavery; and as a sign that ye be truly free, you shall be naked in your rites;
and ye shall dance, sing, feast, make music and love, all in my praise. For mine is the ecstasy of the spirit,
and mine also is joy on earth; for my law is love unto all beings." [1]
Wicca can involve rituals where men and women shed all clothing and expose their nude bodies, though no one is pressured against their will into nonconsensual display of his or her body and nudity is not utterly mandatory for participation in some rites. The system views nudity as a natural thing, and yes, nudity is objectively neither sexual (in itself) nor unnatural; in truth, the Bible does not condemn nudity and largely approves of it, but evangelical Christians will rarely hear this from other Christians [2]. Although nudity is not inherently sexual (as logic and experience can prove), it remains relevant to a discussion of Wicca and sexuality because of the ways American culture misunderstands nudity. I have read that nudity in Wiccan practice can represent a type of existential and philosophical honesty where one symbolically sheds illusion in favor of truth as the quoted excerpt from The Charge of the Goddess explains in part, yet, as many Wiccan beliefs are ludicrously arbitrary, pluralistic, and unverifiable, Wicca as summarized by me above is not a religion of reason and reality. It seems to me that nudity in Wiccan rituals is intended to declare personal freedom from slavery to false ideals. Though nudity can indeed be very liberating, the beliefs of Wicca, where pluralistic and vague, cannot free anyone from the objective problems philosophy and theology grapple with.
The Great Rite is a ceremony where one of two things occurs: either a Wiccan priest and priestess have ritual sex to symbolically represent Wiccan ideas, or they carry out a symbolic procedure by placing a special knife into a chalice (cup). Since Wicca is a fertility religion as The Charge of the Goddess alludes to, the Great Rite's themes can be quite central to it. Really, it is not the public nature of this sex that contradicts Christianity, as public sex is never condemned as sinful by the Bible (I hope to elaborate on this and its ramifications more at a future time), as any rationalistic Christian theonomist knows. The true abomination is its idolatrous nature and function in rituals of Wicca's paganism and pluralism. Wicca's pagan and fertility religion aspects focus on the generative, life-giving nature of sex as something that glorifies the Goddess.
Wicca does honor the emotional and relational intimacy sex can bring. It allows but does not mandate practically any consensual sexual act, marital or extramarital. It does prohibit nonconsensual and irresponsible sex (sex addiction, emotionally-damaging sexual encounters, etc.), but beyond these principles it leaves the morality of sexual acts to individual preference. Part of the Wiccan stance towards sexuality totally agrees with the Bible--sexuality is a thing with definite spiritual and moral significance, but both sexuality in the name of a false deity and participation in acts of Biblically defined sexual immorality cannot be reconciled to Christianity.
Wicca's Weakness
Not only is Wicca loose and somewhat pluralistic, with pluralism being inherently false by its very nature, but its beliefs suffer from an inability to be subjected to rational verification. Logic can incontrovertibly prove the existence of an uncaused cause, an undertaking which natural theology and abstract philosophy strongly reinforce. One does not need any faith to believe in an uncaused cause as long as he or she understands the purely logical necessity of the existence of a cause which has always existed uncaused [3]. So at the very least, some form of deism or theism is true (even if only a more solipsistic kind of theism). Wicca acknowledges this, or at least some adherents of Wicca do. The Horned God and Moon Goddess are sometimes described as created by this uncaused cause, who is a fairly deistic being that does not actively interfere with the material universe or the lives of the humans which inhabit it. Yet Wicca (at least when its duotheism is not just ideologically symbolic but reflects actual theological beliefs) goes beyond this to posit a type of paganistic duotheism.
Christianity has an objective advantage over Wicca once one moves beyond the logically necessary existence of an uncaused cause. Christianity centers on alleged historical events like the resurrection of Jesus which either happened or did not happen. While I openly concede that no one can prove anything about the past except that it has existed for at least a moment and that any material world must have a beginning (and therefore an external cause), there is definite historical evidence for some of the most important claims of Christianity. First century historians Josephus and Tacitus, among others, documented the existence and crucifixion of Jesus. Historical references to the rise of Christianity despite major persecution can be researched, and, if history did unfold as believed by most historians and reported by alleged historical documents, then it follows that events occurred in the first century AD which only the veracity of Christianity seems to explain [4].
Wicca's weakness, thus, is its near total lack of supporting evidence, much less proof.
Conclusion
Wicca is indeed full of shit at times, but I did want to explicitly acknowledge where Wicca overlaps with Christianity. Out of the information I presented here, the areas where that overlap would exist would be in Wicca's inclusion of belief in the existence of the uncaused cause and its acceptance of nudity as a natural thing. As I said before, not every component of a false religion is necessarily untrue. Islam, Wicca, and other non-Christian theologies do not disagree with reason and the Bible in full.
I have tried to not misrepresent Wicca to the best of my ability and current knowledge of it. If I have misspoken or misrepresented a doctrine of Wicca, as I already said, "I welcome any clarification or correction from both Wiccans and non-Wiccans alike!" I hope that this explanation of Wicca is informative, although its contents might be confusing at first. I will hopefully write more about Wicca as I learn and become familiar with it.
[1]. http://blessedbe.sugarbane.com/goddess.htm
[2]. See here:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/08/bible-on-nudity-part-1.html
B. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-naturalness-of-nudity.html
[3]. See here:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-uncaused-cause.html
B. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-god-of-big-bang.html
[4]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-importance-of-resurrection.html
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