A recent sojourn in Salem, Massachusetts, found me thinking about Donald Trump’s incessant crowing that the investigations into Russian interference on his behalf in the last election, and the current impeachment investigation into his shakedown of the president of Ukraine to provide dirt on an opponent in the next election in exchange for U.S. military aid, are “witch hunts.”
Some of Mr. Trump’s supporters echo this dismissive drone. Lindsey Graham has even specifically referenced the particular sordid historical episode conjured by this allegation, saying that, “Salem witch trials have more due process than this!”
Terming these law enforcement efforts “witch hunts” is a way to suggest that the charges leveled against the president are wild and baseless. This turns history upside down.
Witch hunts were a feature of cultural oppression in Europe and North American from around 1450 to 1750 resulting in estimates of up to a million executions. The perpetrators of these atrocities claimed biblical authority for their predations. Exodus 22:18 admonishes, “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Other verses echo such condemnation of sorcery, divination, soothsaying, casting of spells and seeking oracles with unseen spirits or the departed.
The ancient Hebrews began this ignorant brutality. Rabbi Simeon ben Shetach in the 1st century BC is reported to have sentenced 80 women to death who had been charged with witchcraft on a single day.
In medieval times the resurgence of witch hunts took place with support or at least tolerance on the part of the established church and persisted after the Reformation and into the Enlightenment, accompanied by a number of developments in Christian doctrine such as the recognition of the existence of witchcraft as a form of satanic influence and its classification as a heresy. Crucial to this history was that the majority of those accused were from the lower economic classes in European society.
Witch hunts are akin to pogroms and other purges of the powerless. They are a search for a defenseless scapegoat in troubled times. The powerful leaders or groups, stumbling in repressive darkness, perpetrate murderous vengeance upon those who are seen as “other” and perhaps any who aspire to freedom from domination of their thinking and behavior raising questions regarding the rectitude of the forces of authority by simply being who and as they are.
Ironically, those claiming inerrant biblical authority now are white evangelical Christians who comprise the core of supporters of a president who clearly has a persecution complex.
In a bonafide witch hunt, the powerful persecute the defenseless to exonerate themselves. It is perpetrated by those who designate themselves the keepers of central religious and state authority against those who exercise alternative expressions of spirituality outside of the confines of official dogma. This is the opposite of what is happening to Mr. Trump.
The real contemporary witch hunts are against various groups who do not share equally in the white male Christian heterosexual power structure, including Muslims, migrants, other people of color and LGBTQ people in order to reinforce and perpetuate the current hierarchical structure of privilege and power.
They are levied against women’s and LGBTQ rights by religious reactionaries, the same group that perpetrated the Salem trials, and for similar reasons, namely the perpetuation of their own power and privilege.
Racism was a principal driver even in the murderous Salem purge. Tituba, a woman of color, was a nurse and nanny in the settlement. She was most likely an indigenous Central American who was a slave in the house of Rev. Samuel Parris, Salem’s Puritan minister.
At the time, black slavery in the colonies was on the rise, and the West Indies was rapidly becoming Europe’s most important center for the slave trade. Parris bought Tituba in Barbados, where she had been enslaved since her capture during childhood. He brought her to Massachusetts in 1680, when she was a teenager. She was the first to be accused and was regarded as the influencer and instigator of the others.
There have been metaphorical so-called witch hunts in American history levied against groups and individuals who challenge the dominant power dynamics. Perhaps most notorious among these was the Truman and McCarthy era persecution of leftists.
Although Joseph McCarthy, the opportunist power monger driving the “witch hunts,” was finally disgraced, Roy Cohn, his right-hand legal aid, survived unscathed. In spite of his consummate venality, Cohn still retained friends in high places.
It’s almost funny that Donald Trump, a client and protégé of Cohn, can now invoke “witch hunt” to describe the perfectly legal investigations that have probed his official behavior. Here we have a man in the White House who is animated by the most vile impulses, incapable of shame, unabashedly exhibiting all of the seven deadly sins of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth, yet supposes himself to be good, projecting all.
And it is the real witch hunt.
Jonathan Klate lives in Amherst and writes about spirituality, ideology, and the relationship between these two.