If there ever was a “Christian nation,” Puritan Massachusetts might be it. So how did it happen that a presumed nation of faithful Christians began executing innocent believers? How did some of them turn against others in their midst?
This question is paramount in 2024, as calls for America to become a “Christian nation” once again sound across the political landscape. Satan and witchcraft are back. The QAnon movement claims that President Trump is a divine instrument working to unearth and destroy a satanic pedophile ring involving U.S. officials and movie stars—a satanic conspiracy just like the one in Salem. A Trump surrogate recruiting Christians to be poll watchers claims Harris used witchcraft to win her debate with Trump. In this moment, what can we learn from Salem?
It is easy to blame Christianity for Salem. Yet Puritan Christians had ruled in Salem for a long time before the witch trials. Indeed, there had been only one execution for witchcraft in Massachusetts in the thirty years prior to 1692. I know: One execution for witchcraft is one too many. But the question remains: How did one execution morph into a witch panic virtually overnight?
What happened in 1692 resulted from a shift in the laws of evidence. The government created a new court in 1692 that accepted as proof “spectral evidence”—that is, testimony from victims of witchcraft who claimed to see the “shape” or spectre of a witch who tormented them. The mere claim of seeing the spectre of a witch suddenly served as hanging evidence for the accused. It was “spectral evidence” that produced the famous claims of purported victims that “spectres” of witches harmed them. Based on this evidence, nineteen people were executed.
Several of the purported victims later confessed that they had simply lied. Local clergy and other magistrates at the time questioned the procedures. If “specter testimony pass for evidence,” wrote Rev. William Milborne, then “the Innocent will be condemned.” In other words, it was not Christianity itself that brought about the Salem Witch Trials. Rather, it was a choice by some in power to install new rules about what was and was not true. They chose to accept rumor and lies as the price of cleansing their Christian community—and Christians died.