With a year-over-year increase of 193%, the fastest-growing 2021 search term on the leading Bible search site, BibleGateway.com, was ‘sorcery.’ During the same period, Google reported a roughly 500% spike in search frequency for this word. Why?
Christian websites say believers may have been investigating a supposed scriptural link between sorcery and COVID-19 vaccines. Per The Christian Post, Christianity Today and others, sorcery, vaccines and the Greek word ‘pharmakeia’* have a scriptural connection. The word’s relation to the modern word ‘pharmacy’ was seen by some as evidence that vaccines are spiritually and physically unsafe.
The pharmakeia argument tends to come up in among certain Christians with a focus on end times prophecy, often alongside suggestions that the vaccine represents the mark of the beast from Revelation. (Christianity Today)
This special word, which is incidentally not found in any English translation of the Bible, may also have informed the belief that the sorcery in vaccines gains its dark power from contamination by cells from aborted fetuses. Whether vaccine refusal was due to conspiracy theories or other reasons, we have seen tens of thousands of preventable COVID deaths.
‘Pharmakeia’ is also said to refer to abortion and also birth control, and to therefore link them by association to the alleged evils of sorcery.
Plutarch mentions pharmakeia alongside other practices (furtive child substitution and adultery) by which a woman might thwart her husband's obtaining of a legitimate heir (Romulus, 22.3). Thus, there is good reason to think that pharmakeia in Galatians 5:20 refers to the evil use of potions and drugs, especially contraceptive and abortive agents. (Orthodox Presbyterian Church)
It is self-evidently and gravely harmful to mis-apply ancient texts in a way that brings concern with a superstitious idea like sorcery to bear on medical decisions of modern life.
For evidence of additional harm, look to the medically dangerous anti-abortion laws being passed with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. This move to deny women’s bodily autonomy serves much the same purpose now as the witch hunts did five hundred years ago. That purpose is the re-assertion of the right of male power structures to control women at a time when those systems feel under threat.
So how IS abortion the new witchcraft?
- Both anti-witchcraft and anti-abortion laws are a form of implicitly religious persecution directed primarily against women. The punishment may come from the legal system, or through the violence of forced birth.
- Witch hunts and abortion legislation use fear to control women’s public and private behavior. Any pregnant woman in the US who is suspected of behavior not 100% geared toward fetal well-being, or even in the position of being shot while pregnant, can now be jailed.
- Charges of both abortion and witchcraft may be difficult to disprove. Spectral evidence used to convict witches — as per Matthew Hale’s infamous precedent — could not be refuted because by definition it doesn’t exist. Miscarriage and stillbirth now expose women to the risk of criminal investigation. Proving one did NOT cause death of the fetus may not be possible, especially without access to a powerful attorney.
- Political preoccupation with both of these issues follows historically from the disruption of male power structures. Examples would be the witch trials during the Reformation, criminalization of abortion in the decades just before and after the end of slavery, and renewed focus on curbing women’s reproductive freedom in the wake of the 20th century’s civil rights and women’s rights movements.
- Crusades against abortion, as those against witchcraft, both perpetuate evil even as they claim to eradicate it. They readily devolve into state-sanctioned femicide. As an example, self-styled “abolitionists” in Texas call for the death penalty for women who have had an abortion.
A combination of factors, such as rising fascism, politicized religion, political polarization, and rapid social change may all accelerate this rolling back of rights under the guise of enforcing a moral ideal on those whom the law was never designed to protect. Stoking the fires of willful ignorance and hatred is only laying the groundwork for further harms.
*As a point of comparison, this google trends link also shows a spike in searches for pharmakeia around the time of the the spike in sorcery searches, although at a much smaller scale.