The outgoing Biden-Harris administration awarded a federal grant to a podcast that promoted the Church of Satan, paganism, a Cuban cult that practices animal sacrifice, astrology, an LGBT-friendly school of witchcraft, and other “magico-religious” beliefs. The series equates being filled with the Holy Spirit with demonic possession, compares Christian prayer with New Age meditation, warns that opposition to the occult can harm “innocent Satanists,” and insists it is possible to be a Christian and “to work magically with non-biblical spirits.”

The Democratic administration justified the grant on the grounds of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), claiming that “American magical beliefs and practices” represent a vital component of America’s “rich religious diversity.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded a $388,863 grant to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to produce the “Magic in the United States” podcast. The series would produce six episodes per season for three seasons between October 17, 2023, and last December 17, each highlighting different occult practices (often pointing out the LGBTQ status of its practitioners).

Yet the series crosses the line into full-blown celebration and advocacy of the pagan spirituality it chronicles. The very first episode begins with a Wiccan practitioner identified using the pseudonym “Thorn Mooney” describing the witchcraft he practiced at age 13 as a “wonderful bit of delirium that I remember as one of the happiest times in my life.” At the time of the episode, Mooney was studying for a Religious Studies Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, researching “Evangelical Protestant communities and mega churches.”

The hostess, Heather Freeman, repeatedly claims that someone can say his “religious identity is Christian” but adopt a “bigger, richer, and more complex” set of pagan and magical beliefs. “Ceremonial magicians have many different religious identities, including Christian. And some, like [self-identified Baptist pastor “Reverend”] Aaron [Davis] are willing to work magically with non-biblical spirits as well. One example is the Greek goddess of crossroads, magic, and witchcraft, Hekate.” She chronicles how Davis “could really feel the spirits of the ancestors” when he sang hymns in an African Methodist Episcopal parish, leading him to immerse himself in Afrocentric spirituality that culminated in worshiping the forces of nature. In time, he “set up an ancestor table, ancestor altar, and really start[ed] working on connecting with [his] ancestors” via a religion known as Santeria or Lucumí, “an Afro-Cuban religion that combines Yoruban spirituality and Catholicism,” as well as Spiritualism.

Freeman helpfully suggests ways for listeners to identify with these religions too. For instance, “a stay-at-home mom in rural North Carolina” might want to form her own syncretistic religious “bricolage” by mashing together “her Pentecostal grandmother’s speaking in tongues and the Southern Baptist church around the corner. And she might mix these with the Rootwork [witchcraft] practices she observes from a neighbor.”

Satanic Advocacy ‘Brought Light to Darkness’

The show reaches its darkest point in the final episode of season 2, about the Church of Satan. (The episode notes that it “includes frank conversations about sex and sex-positivity.”) Freeman praises Lil Nas X, a hip-hop performer who identifies as homosexual, for producing a music video for the song “MONTERO (call me by your name),” in which the rapper “slides down a stripper pole into Hell, gives Satan a lap dance, and then kills the Prince of Hell to become its new reigning sovereign.” He also produced a short-lived line of “Satan Shoes”: a pair of black Nike Air Max 97s, with a pentagram, the Bible verse Luke 10:18, and a drop of human blood. (He reportedly produced 666 pairs.) Lil Nas X apparently grounds his Satanism in his sexual identity: “People already demonize who I am and, okay, he’s evil, he’s doing this, he’s doing that. So it’s like, you know what? I’ll be that and I’m going to make the best of it.” 

“In just one viral music video, he challenged his audiences to question their comfort zones, to think about the things that might make them nervous — and brought light to the darkness,” says Freeman.

She goes on to tell listeners that “popular fears about devil worship and infernal rituals have led to moral panics targeting innocent individuals — including innocent Satanists.”

Cimminnee Holt of Corcordia University in Montreal claims the early church reinterpreted the Bible to include a fallen angel named Satan, Lucifer, or the devil. “Christian theologians retroactively pick out every character in these texts that somehow opposed God and say, ‘These were all Satan.’” Meanwhile, “Satanism has blossomed into a broad and diverse category today,” says Freeman.

Anton Szandor LaVey, who was born Howard Stanton Levy, founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco on April 30, 1966, and published “The Satanic Bible” in 1969. Historian Ethan Doyle White says LaVey “had no real childhood religion, but he certainly developed an antipathy towards organized Christianity. … He views this conservative, ambient, Protestant Christianity in America as a very oppressive thing, especially when it comes to sexuality.” By the 1950s, LaVey held occult-themed discussions as part of what he called The Magic Circle, where he “liked to seat maybe an army general next to a drag queen or something like that,” according to Holt. The podcast notes Satanism’s embrace of LGBTQ ideology in general and transgenderism specifically. Holt says that LaVey supported sexual libertinism: “He is fully accepting of the LGBTQ spectrum, including trans identity. In fact, he spoke fondly of the idea … shifting your gender as a magical act. … [A]nything between, alive, consenting adults is fine.”

Spirit-Filled Christians Are Experiencing ‘Possession’? Animal Sacrifice Is like Communion?

The series misses few opportunities to mislead or demean the traditional Christian faith. “[T]he church was often an institution of indoctrination and oppression,” says Freeman in an episode on conjuring and Hoodoo (in which she notes, “While Hoodoo is certainly practiced by both men and gender-non-conforming individuals, the knowledge is primarily passed by women”). In another episode, a Korean shaman named Chaweon Koo — who combines “witchcraft, angel magic, demonology, human design,” and digital technology — mocked her Christian grandmother’s practice of sprinkling the house with holy water as a “crazy” and “superstitious” practice that proved “this whole Bible thing, Christian thing, is not for me.”

Likewise, an episode on the Book of Mormon features the conversion, then deconversion, of a man who identifies as a transgender lesbian. “I was raised very non-denominational Christian, and through the years, I started seeing the flaws of a lot of the fundamentalist evangelical Christianity that I grew up around, being in the Bible Belt. And so I became a very militant atheist,” explains the character, who is given the name “Eva” in the podcast. “[O]nce I realized I was trans, that specific church is very not accepting of the LGBTQ+ community, and so eventually I went ahead and left.” He now practices magic, accepts some Mormon beliefs, and calls himself an independent Catholic priest. “I’m kind of this weird Mormon Catholic occultist,” he says. 

The series normalizes encounters with demons, or “spirits.” The final episode of season 1 tells the story of Jennifer Kim, a 39-year-old New Yorker who grew up as a Christian but is now becoming a mudang, a Korean Shaman. “I started to have physical interactions with spirits. … These incidents were gradual, but once they started happening, it started snowballing and spiraling into bigger things,” said Kim. In a season 3 episode on the Mexican pagan magic of Curanderismo, a woman named Grace says she received the calling to become a “healer” at age seven during a dream that featured a beautiful woman whose gown seemed “very dark … as if she was wearing the night sky.”

The series also downplays the ritualistic practice of animal sacrifice as part of the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, a Santeria-based cult that hides Afro-Cuban paganism and spiritualism beneath the outward trappings of Roman Catholicism. Silver Daniels, a Lucumí (or Santeria) practitioner, admits, “Yeah, the animal is sacrificed, but it’s always done in the most humane way.” Freeman compares sacrificing animals to a Caribbean ancestor to “a fast-food cheeseburger, a venison stew after a successful hunt, or the euthanasia of a beloved pet.” The city of Hileah, Florida, attempted unsuccessfully to ban the practice. One of the outraged figures in the podcast quotes a council member saying, “Jesus Christ died for our sins. He made the ultimate sacrifice. We don’t need to sacrifice anything else.”

Yet again, the series takes pains to reconcile or equate Christian practices with pagan ones, legitimizing the latter. Freeman informs listeners that a shaman being possessed is akin to a Pentecostal Christian receiving the Holy Spirit. Possession “happens along a spectrum and might look like a Wiccan priestess relaying an inspired message from the Goddess of the Moon to her coven; or an evangelical Christian being consumed by Holy Spirit and delivering a ministry; or an initiate of Vodun being bodily possessed by a Lwa, and sharing a dance with their community. Spirit possession is a big topic,” claims Freeman. 

Similarly, the podcast presents animal sacrifice as an alternate form of the Eucharist. Daniels likens eating a goat he had sacrificed to Christian Communion: “There’s Communion in Catholicism, right? In a way to share in the life force of Christ through the sacraments. I wasn’t unfamiliar with the concept of Communion, but this was the first time in my life where I really felt like I was communing, like, we were all sharing the same meal.”

Christian prayer, too, resembles New Age meditation or interaction with spirit forces. “For a Christian … their prayers are mediated by God. For someone who describes themselves as ‘spiritual, but not religious,’ their vibrations, energy, or capital-W ‘Will’ interacts with the capital-U ’Universe,’” asserts Freeman.

These practices are presented as compatible with Christianity. “It’s really interesting to note how many Hmong Americans might go to church on Sunday and also see the Shaman on Saturday,” says Melissa Borgia, a professor at the University of Michigan.

One whole episode transforms the Christian saint Cyprian of Antioch into a champion of conjuring demons.

Highlighting LGBT Witchcraft

The series highlights an LGBTQ-friendly form of witchcraft with the help of “Thumper Forge,” who was raised an Episcopalian but who became part of the “Minoan brotherhood, which is another form of modern pagan witchcraft — specifically for gay and bisexual men.” The founder of one school of witchcraft, Gerald Gardner, required members to become “a priest or priestess of the Wicca based on their assigned-at-birth sex,” complains Freeman. In 1977, Eddie Buczynski, a lapsed Catholic, formed the Minoan brotherhood. “Within the gay community itself, there has always been very much a drive towards chosen family, we have friends who have become our families. And the Minoan Brotherhood gives us an opportunity to reconnect and recognize the gay men who have come before us, and to realize that we are carrying on their legacy as well. And so Eddie is very much perceived as our ancestor,” says “Thumper.” He claims “a term that has started growing in popularity is PriestX, the idea of a gender-neutral priesthood role.” Freeman then editorializes against “laws impacting the LGBTQ+ communities that seem to go one step forwards and then two steps back.”

The NEH awarded the series the $300,000 grant to run from May 1, 2023, to November 30, 2024, as part of “The Public Humanities Projects program,” which “supports projects that bring the ideas of the humanities to life for general audiences,” including via “radio programs, podcasts, documentary films, and documentary film,” says the grant description. “Public Impact Projects helps small and mid-sized cultural organizations expand their public programs.”

Politicians are often accused of cutting a deal with the devil, but rarely as clearly as this.

The podcast claims it will “expand the audience’s understanding of magical beliefs and practices prevalent throughout recorded American history. The evolution of American magical beliefs and practices intersects with this nation’s rich religious diversity.” Instead, each episode advocates and promotes the occultic practices in question — some of which the hostess, Heather Freeman, practices. The podcast’s website notes Freeman “has been fascinated by magic, witchcraft, religion, and spirituality since a kid.” The show’s producer, Amber C. Walker, double majored in Gender-Sexuality-Feminist Studies and Africana Studies at Oberlin College.

Each episode promotes some form of paganism, occultism, or spiritual practice Christianity would regard as demonic:

• Season 1, Episode 2, “Ancient Technopagans,” discusses the Pagan and Occult Distribution System network (PODSnet), a 1980s Bulletin Board System (BBS) for paganism, as well as 93 Net — a BBS that promoted Aleister Crowley’s religion of Thelema, which teaches, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
• Season 1, Episode 3 discusses the Pennsylvania Dutch healing magic known as Powwow.
• Season 1, Episode 4 focuses on Harry Houdini’s desire to “root out frauds, and how Spiritualist mediums continue to relay messages from the beyond to this very day.”
• Season 2, Episode 2 blasts the city of Hialeah, Florida, for passing a law banning animal sacrifice while praising the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye of the Lucumí or Santeria cult. It also agonizes that “Ernesto Pichardo was a Cuban-American of Spanish and French ancestry, so some practitioners were concerned about the intentions of a white Church leader promoting this Afro-Cuban religion to a largely white American audience.”
• Season 2, Episode 3 discusses the law of attraction and manifestation, Christian Science, New Thought, and Madam Blavatsky’s Theosophy.
• Season 2, Episode 4 deals with Appalachian folk magic. It also features the story of Montague and Duck Moore, who carried out a scheme of “essentially magical racketeering” in the early 1900s in Franklin, Virginia.
• Season 2, Episode 5 highlights the “Ghost Dance,” or Nanigukwa, carried out in the 1800s by the Paiute tribe in the hopes it would wipe out all American white Christian settlers and turn North America back into Turtle Island. It condemns Christopher Columbus and other settlers for living in a “larger framework that” allegedly “assumes inherent superiority of both European people and of Christianity.” It also includes a land acknowledgment: “I’m recording this podcast from Charlotte, North Carolina, an American city which was established upon the colonized lands of the Catawba, Cheraw, Sugaree, Wateree, and Waxhaw peoples — they have stewarded this land for generations and continue to do so.”
• Season 3, Episode 1 equates the Book of Mormon with asking a moon goddess to project a sign into an inanimate object. “I asked a moon goddess for a message. And I got one — in a cup of water, as a vision. The word ‘divination’ literally means ‘inspired by a god,’” explains Freeman. “[T]he origin of Mormonism is wrapped up in 19th-century American folk magic, including scrying. … [F]olk magic and mysticism merged in the translation of the Book of Mormon.”
• Season 3, Episode 2 features Curanderismo and praises a woman named “Teresa Urrea. Santa Teresa. Otherwise known as Teresita.” Jennifer Koshatka Seman, a professor at Metropolitan State University in Denver, relates: “You know, she’s quoted as saying, first of all, you don’t have to go to priests to confess your sins. And you don’t have to listen to the government. You don’t have to give up your land because the government tells you to. And so she — apparently — she baptized babies, right? She, as a woman, did what priests, only priests are supposed to do. So she’s violating all the rules, all kinds of institutional rules, and people love her for that.” Teresa became seen as a revolutionary leader.
• Season 3, Episode 3 presents the Christian saint Cyprian of Antioch, who abandoned sorcery in favor of Christ, into a summoner of demons. Modern sorcerers use the “Prayer of St. Cyprian,” intended as an exorcism prayer, to summon demons.
• Season 3, Episode 4 calls the founder of Theosophy, Madam Helena Blavatsky, a “remarkable spiritual seeker.” This episode, too, features the work of a modern astrologer (Jake Zukowski) who identifies as gay and was raised Catholic before embracing astrology, saying its “tradition really connected me to the things I liked about Catholicism.”
• Season 3, Episode 5 deals with teen witches, real and imaginary. A witch named Adelaide Ebrahimy, the daughter of a Baptist mother and a Muslim father, who said she wanted to become a witch at the age of 10 after watching Elsa in the Disney movie “Frozen.” (“Addy” is now a 21-year-old anthropology major, and theater minor, at Western Washington University in Bellingham who identifies as LGBT.) The podcast mentions “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” “Carrie,” and other characters but credits the 1996 movie “The Craft” for creating “a big change where, not only is witchcraft now a symbolic element of the transition, but it’s something you can embrace as part of your journey into womanhood.” The episode notes that many witches “are non-binary, or trans, or want to be allies. So, you might see more teenage boys being interested in witchcraft. They can put in their own values without having these tensions, that they might have in other parts of their lives surrounding issues of gender and sexuality.” For instance, “Addy came out as queer around the same time she came out as a witch. And Addy’s values in witchcraft are reflected in the college club she started with some friends.”
• Season 3, Episode 6 discusses Alya Lux, who was raised in a Protestant household but “got her first Tarot deck at fourteen, and while she was interested in magic, she was focused on the idea of magical powers and supernatural phenomena.” She wanted to know about the intersection of witchcraft and technology. She now uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to cast spells. She asks an AI program called Stable Diffusion to create an image, then asks the image, “What’s your true name and how can I call you?” (“This is a classic question that magicians will often ask spirits,” says Freeman.) “Magical experimentation with AI is developing as quickly as the technology itself,” says Freeman.

Freeman concludes the series by invoking her own practice of the supernatural. “The crossroads goddess Hekate doesn’t tell us what to value, even as she rules over this intersection of magic, religion, and technology. And all of Hekate’s roads intersect at one point or another. So I, for one, will embrace what Hekate reveals with her twin torches. I, too, am walking into the future of magic in the United States,” says Freeman.

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) briefly noted the existence of this grant in his 2024 Festivus Report on wasteful government spending.

“Cutting government-funded magically inspired projects is a great place to start. After all, if you can’t find private funding for your magical project — poof! — it probably doesn’t need to exist,” declares the report.