Should the federal government recognize a dubious religion called “Wicca” (often identified with witchcraft and earth-worshipping paganism) when it comes to honoring a dead soldier?
That’s the question raised by the family of Sergeant Patrick Stewart who gave his life for his country while fighting in Afghanistan. He was buried more than a year ago in the Northern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Fernley, Nevada and his widow requested a memorial plaque with a Wiccan pentacle- a five pointed start enclosed in a circle, and sometimes associated with Satanism and witchcraft.
Ultimately, the Nevada Office of Veterans Services granted the right to install the plaque and five family and friends turned up to dedicate the memorial last week.
While I have little personal respect for Wicca—it’s a trendy, phony potpourri of druidical, primitive and New Age elements that’s more a pagan cult than an organized faith – there’s no question that a dead soldier and his family should get the right to choose their own memorial.
In this spectacularly diverse country, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has approved the symbols of 38 different faiths in military cemeteries – including more than a dozen distinctive versions of the Christian cross. Soldiers may also choose the Jewish Star of David, the Muslim Crescent, the Buddhist wheel, the Mormon angel, the nine-pointed star of Bahai, and an “atomic whirl” (like the old school book drawing of a nucleus surrounded by electrons) to honor self-proclaimed atheists.
No matter how much we might dislike Wicca/witchcraft, the Constitution leaves no room for the government to discriminate against its adherents. According to Department of Defense figures from 2005, some 1,800 active duty personnel list their religious preference as “Wiccan.” The First Amendment gives them an absolute right to do so.
Like the recent controversy over Congressman Keith Ellison, the newly-elected Muslim who plans to take his oath of office on the Koran, the issue of the Wiccan plaque in a military cemetery forces us to come to terms with the true meaning of pluralism.
In America, we enjoy a vastly more robust and vibrant religious life than Europe because of the dazzling diversity of religious expression. Free-wheeling competition insures more energetic religious faith for everyone: we’re all strengthened and energized by the wide-open, free market in religious ideas-- with government neither privileging nor persecuting any faith.
The right approach to people silly enough to proclaim allegiance to Wicca is to talk them out of it—show them the error of their ways and the superiority of the faith we happen to practice. But denying hundreds of active duty military personnel their freedom of choice in religious orientation because we disapprove of their preferences is, in the final analysis, not just unconstitutional but un-American.