Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [59]
Witch beliefs were hardly limited to Indian country. The twentieth century was dotted with cases that indicate the endurance of beliefs in witchcraft and magic. In 1928, Nelson D. Rehmeyer, who lived in York County, Pennsylvania, was murdered by three men who believed he was capable of putting hexes on others. The murderers claimed that they had sought only to make Rehmeyer lift a hex, but in the course of a struggle, Rehmeyer was killed. As was true in the cases involving Native Americans, this killing, too, ended up in court, although without the sovereignty issues that surrounded Native American case law. Instead, the case raised issues of superstition, science, and mental illness: the lawyer of one defendant argued that his client was mentally incompetent—the main evidence being his belief in witchcraft and diagnoses by psychiatrists. The accused man was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison.239
If murders of alleged witches have thankfully tended to decline in number since the early twentieth century, Americans continue to believe in the Devil and in demonic possession. Any search engine will reveal horrifying cases of parents who killed their children because they believe they were possessed by demons; other concerned parents arrange for exorcisms to be performed by church members, and sometimes children have died in these rituals.240 Belief in witches should not seem especially exotic to modern Americans, 70 percent of whom reported a belief in the Devil in 2007. The Devil has, in fact, enjoyed something of a surge in the past twenty years of Gallup polling; 55 percent of adults professed a belief in the Devil in 1990.241 Witches continue to accompany the Devil. Indeed, a 2005 Harris poll found that 28 percent of adults believed in witches. As a point of comparison, 34 percent of adults believed in UFOs, and 25 percent believed in astrology. Credulity may be slightly on the rise: two years later, a Harris poll found that 31 percent of Americans believed in witches, 29 percent believed in astrology, and 35 percent believed in UFOs.242 The Catholic Church continues to endorse the ritual of exorcism, which rids people of the demons that possess them, and so do many Protestant churches.
For many modern Americans, witchcraft is an entertaining and quirky remnant of an earlier time, a self-gratifying reminder that people in the past were a superstitious lot. In this conviction of their difference from past credulous inhabitants of the continent, Americans, who live in the most religious of all Western nations, deceive themselves. Americans are especially attached to this belief system, with its polarities of God and Satan, heaven and hell, demons and angels, miracles and curses. Only 37 percent of Canadians and 29 percent of Britons professed belief in the Devil in 2004.243 Major public figures in the United States espouse these doctrines. The Christian evangelical leader Pat Robertson announced, in the wake of the calamitous earthquake that devastated Haiti in January 2010, that the earthquake was a result of a pact the people of Haiti had made with the Devil over 200 years earlier. These American beliefs about the presence of Devil’s pacts and witches even went mainstream in a recent national election. The Republican Party’s nominee for vice president in the 2008 United States presidential election, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, had been prayed over by a contemporary Kenyan witch-hunter, Thomas Muthee, during his visit to her Christian church. Muthee claimed to have driven a witch out of her Kenyan home in 1988–1989. Once he identified this woman as a witch, he organized an around-the-clock prayer session in a grocery store basement called the “prayer cave.” The woman apparently left town in the wake of this persistent harassment.244
For those who are skeptical