The Economic Motivations of Modern-Day Witch Trials

I recently read this paper that got me THINKING about what we’re seeing in America with queer and women’s rights.

The paper was about witch trials, so we’re about to turn this whole systemic-violence-against-women series Halloween-y.

Brace yourselves.

Because it’s super scary.

European Witch Trials

The paper, aptly enough, was titled ‘Witch Trials.’ It appeared in The Economic Journal in 2017.

What? The Economic Journal?

I know. But there is an economic tie-in with the witch trials, believe it or not.

Let’s get into it.

Gender & The Catholic Church

For a long time in Europe — particularly Western Europe — Catholicism was IT. We could trace the history back to the consolidation of the religion with the Roman Empire in the first century, but we really don’t need to go quite that far back for the purposes of our discussion here today.

Suffice it to say that for over a millennium and a half depending on how you’re measuring, the Catholic church was synonymous with state power. Even kings were subject to the pope’s edicts. It wasn’t just a religious body — it was a political one that held a lot of wealth and economic sway.

Generally speaking, in Catholicism there are rules around gender. They largely reflect patriarchy, and don’t leave a lot of room for people who break them. This isn’t necessarily unique to Catholicism as a religion. But it is a part of it.

In early ‘modern’ Europe, there was a lot of pressure to not break those norms, whether you were an independent or powerful woman, or you were breaking gender norms in any other way. (Read: being queer.)

When you broke these norms, people in your community might call you a witch. Claim you were involved in magic and casting evil spells and causing harm to your community — even if you were not doing any of those things. When you got that title from the community, it wasn’t uncommon for the people to want a witch trial.

But the Catholic church wasn’t having it.

By and large, it sought to eradicate pagan beliefs in things like magic. So lending these beliefs credence through something like a witch trial wasn’t really its thing.

It preferred to exercise power through crusades and inquisitions — which the paper labels ‘coercive exclusion.’

The Printing Press

In the 1400s, you’ve got the advent of the printing press. The printing press is one of the most powerful technological innovations of the last millennia. Because words are powerful. More powerful than coercive exclusion, as it turns out.

In the 1300s, there had been a pope who tinkered with the law to change witchcraft from a thought crime to an actual action that could be prosecuted. But the change wasn’t really acted upon en masse. It did open up the door for people like Dominicans Heinricus Institoris and Jacobus Sprenge — who were ardent witchcraft believers and witch trial advocates — to spread their ideas over a century later.

And that they did. With the printing press, they had the ability to widely distribute their book, Malleus Maleficarum. It captured the imagination of the general public, further solidifying the call for witch trials.

But by and large, the Church still wasn’t having it.

That is they weren’t having it until 1517, when Martin Luther used the same technology to publish his Ninety-Five Theses. This led to Protestantism becoming a thing, and it spelled trouble for the Catholic church.

Market competition led to witch trials

Until Martin Luther, the Catholic Church hadn’t really had too much competition from competing Christian religions within its own stronghold. When it did, the coercive exclusion strategy was pretty effective at shutting them down.

But when people started adopting Lutheranism and other forms of Protestantism in large part thanks to the printing press, all that changed. Kings started changing their allegiances. The people started listening to other religious leaders.

And all that led to a decrease in power and money for the Church.

With conversion in such large numbers, coercive exclusion wasn’t going to get it done anymore. At least not on its own.

This is when the Church started indulging the public in its long-sought-after witch trials. It used these trials as a form of advertising. By prosecuting those who deviated from the cultural norms of the gender binary, they were able to convert people through popularity rather than war.

Protestant religions, for their part, did clap back with their own witch trials. The interesting thing is that these trials didn’t really happen as often in places where there wasn’t a lot of market competition. Ireland and Italy, for example, had very few witch trials.

But in places like Germany and France where there was a lot of market competition, they were happening at alarming rates.

This went on until about the 1650s, which just so happens to be when the Peace of Westphalia was signed. This treaty cemented the religion of individual monarchs/countries, meaning that competition over a king’s loyalties was no longer something you could do.

While there were witch trials after this, the numbers seriously declined. This form of advertisement was no longer needed. It wasn’t going to affect the religion (and economic tributes) of any particular monarch and therefore their people.

What about the Salem witch trials?

Same deal. You can apply the market competition theory to competing pastors in the region using the prosecution and subsequent murder of women and anyone else who violated the gender binary as a form of advertising.

Modern-day witch trials in America

Arthur Miller (also known as Marilyn Monroe‘s third husband) cast the McCarthy era as a modern-day witch hunt in his play, The Crucible. It was a common descriptor at the time, and not an inaccurate one if we take the political market competition aspect into account. It’s a particularly easy analogy because there were actual trials involved.

But I think the unraveling of women’s rights and queer rights that we’re watching unfold before our very eyes might be an even better one. It hits all the marks:

• Reduction in religious (and economic) power
• Harming those who violate the gender binary as a form of advertising
• Focus on riling people up in a time of extreme polarization, specifically in places where there’s viable market competition

The first generation raised by mothers with bodily autonomy leaves religion behind

In America, a universal legal acceptance of bodily autonomy was only established in 1973. It wasn’t codified. It was established through judicial precedent in Roe v Wade. Regardless of how it was achieved, women did have a right to a safe abortion with limited interference from the state because of this ruling.

In the 1990s, the first generation raised by parents who had full rights to bodily autonomy started leaving Christianity in droves. With them went their tithes, and Christian leaders’ influence over their political views.

As this generation was growing up, there were plenty of people who would tell you they wouldn’t get an abortion themselves.

But even in conservative or religious circles, the right for other people to choose what they did with their own bodies was generally accepted and even endorsed by most.

There were always fringe groups advocating to take away women’s rights. But the general consensus was that could never happen. We wouldn’t slip backwards like that.

Because regardless of your religious ideals and how you’d like to inappropriately impose them upon others, when you take away the legal protections of bodily autonomy, you don’t get rid of abortion. You just get rid of safe abortions.

Plus, abortion isn’t only used as a choice of whether or not to have children. It’s also used to save mothers’ lives, because human pregnancy is one heck of a dangerous endeavor. Even women and child-bearing people who want to carry a pregnancy to term sometimes need a D&C or other medical procedure to terminate a pregnancy that would threaten their lives.

All of this was generally recognized, despite having some passionately fierce opposition among certain members of certain (usually religious) groups. Most politicians weren’t keen to take women’s rights away, regardless of which side of the aisle they occupied.

This first generation to leave religion behind also abandoned all kinds of binarized thinking, changing popular opinion about gender and sexuality so drastically that it influenced the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to effectively legalize same-sex marriage.

Backlash

In the decades since anyone who wasn’t a cishet man began gaining rights, extreme partisan Christian religions have become politically strategic with the aim of amassing power to constrict these freedoms and gain economic advantages. While not everyone in this cohort is Evangelical, a lot of the organization has happened among Evangelical and Evangelical-adjacent congregations.

Personally, I grew up in a religion that embraced evangelical efforts as a matter of dogma, even though it was not a big-E Evangelical religion. I struggled with my faith for many years, but the final straw was when the church created a position within each congregation to phone residents of California, advocating for Proposition 8, with the aim of removing the rights of gay people to get legally married in the state.

It wasn’t just an ideological contradiction I was struggling with anymore. It was political activism that hurt people.

I bring this up because it’s important to recognize that these changes didn’t just happen with the inauguration of our 45th president. We cannot point to a single man and pin all the blame on his ascendance. This was an organized effort that happened over the course of decades, and was a direct response to the loss of political and economic power by religious groups.

In fact, the ascendancy of the 45th president was supported by this effort rather than inspiring it.

Systemic violence since 2015

We don’t necessarily have to hold formal, public trials to see the witch hunts happening in front of us. While America isn’t burning people at the stake, it is exercising systemic violence against anyone who challenges the norms of a gender binary that defers all power to cisgender, heterosexual men.

This systemic violence is killing Americans.

Our 45th president’s bombastic presentation of misogynistic beliefs led to a measurable increase in violence towards the queer community, evidenced by a 93% increase in murders of transgender and gender-non-conforming individuals in the United States between the years of 2017 and 2021.

The nomination of the Supreme Court justices that would overturn Roe v Wade was no mistake, either. Women and child-bearing individuals have died since 2022 when the judicial precedent was overturned. While I don’t know that we have comprehensive, measurable statistics just yet, we do have a litany of anecdotal examples.

Amber Thurman is one.

Candi Miller is another.

Ondrea was almost another after her water broke too early, but she couldn’t get access to appropriate medical care because of these laws. The complications that arose from that lack of care means she may not be able to have children in the future.

Ondrea is from Texas, where things are particularly bad. While we might not have nationwide stats just yet, we do know that in Texas, where some of the harshest abortion laws exist and were implemented even prior to the Dodd ruling, there was a 56% increase in maternal mortality between 2019 and 2022, compared to an 11% increase in the rest of the nation at large.

NOTE: Wondering where the domestic violence awareness month tie-in is this week? Well, this year we’re looking at systemic violence, but even still, queer people do face high rates of intimate partner violence, and those increased rates of murder of transgender people reflect an uptick. Plus, if you’re a pregnant or postpartum person in a relationship where IPV is present, you’re at increased risk of reproductive coercion, which can be lethal. Abortion access helps reduce this occurrence of violence from men.

Hormone therapy — which is another healthcare issue that has been extremely politicized over the past few years with restrictive laws emerging across the nation — is and has been known to reduce suicide rates among transgender youth and adults. With restricted access to this medical care, more people will die.

There are concerns that the 2015 Obergefell v Hodges ruling, which gave equal rights to marriage to same-sex couples, will be overturned. In some states, you’ll find referendums on same-sex marriage this election season. This is a preemptive move to maintain the right to marriage should the Supreme Court once again go against its own precedent when it comes to the federal rights of gender-marginalized populations.

Tool for advertisement

These changes were obviously instigated by people on one particular side of the aisle. As a tool for advertisement, they may have backfired — at least when it comes to Roe v Wade. It turns out revoking bodily autonomy gets people to show up at the polls for Democrats.

Which does raise the uncomfortable question of why some these rights haven’t been legislatively codified over the decades. Is the fact that gender rights are so tenuous — supported only by Supreme Court precedent — advantageous as an advertisement tool not just for one side of the aisle, but for both?

I don’t have a definitive answer for that question. But it does seem like one worth thinking about, regardless of which conclusion we arrive at.

Economic impacts of gender violence

While these systemic changes may be a form of advertising to gain political and therefore economic power, they also have a negative economic impact on the people being harmed for the sake of advertisement.

Obviously, if you can’t afford to travel to go to a state that will provide you with adequate care while you’re pregnant, you’re more likely to die if medical complications arise.

If you’re forced to have a baby for which you know you cannot provide, that’s going to have negative economic implications not just on the rest of your economic life, but likely on the rest of that child’s economic life.

Upward mobility is on a downward spiral in the U.S., so it’s getting harder to get out of poverty once you’re born into it.

If Obergefell were to be overturned, gay couples could lose access to any number of medical and financial rights with the lack of legal recognition of their marriage, from insurance to investments to Social Security to veterans benefits…the list goes on.

Physical safety in your community can affect your personal economy, too. We’ve known for a long time that LGBTQ+ businesses tend to base themselves in states with protective laws. Protective laws tend to be established in states with high costs of living, which means you might have to pay a premium for your safety or to access legal protections in the workplace.

The rhetoric supports the theory

Lest you think the witch hunt thing is a bit of a stretch — despite the presence of the classic themes like a threat to the economic power of a religious body, advertising through the persecution of gender-marginalized people which results in death, and ideological polarization — it can be helpful to look at the rhetoric we see around us.

NBC reporting told us the story of Kaitlyn Kash, a woman who had to travel for an abortion after learning her baby had a fatal medical disorder. She reported that throughout the process — even though she was able to access care due to her economic status — she felt she was being treated as a ‘criminal.’

Some people are even lodging the witch accusations out loud. Point blank.

Rose Tagnesi, the director of disability education at a school district in California, felt forced to step down from her position after harassment due to her sexual orientation as a gay woman. Among that harassment were accusations from a school board member that Tagnesi was a ‘witch’ and a member of an ‘LGBTQ coven’.

Happy Halloween, America.

I don’t know how we find our way out of these extreme times. I don’t where the Peace-of-Westphalia equivalent is for us. I could be wrong, but I suspect it lies somewhere with the legislative codification of gender rights. If such laws were written in a way to explicitly forbid any tests of historical inquiry, this type of systemic gender violence could no longer be used as a tool for advertisement.

In the meantime, it’s really unfortunate that we’re choosing to do the whole witch trial thing. And that’s an understatement.

Domestic Violence Awareness Month 2024