Voluntary Suffering and Witchcraft Accusations

Many people picture human and animal sacrifice when they think about religious sacrifice.  Though they may align with the colloquial definition of sacrifice, not all instances of human and animal sacrifice can be considered religious voluntary suffering of which sacrifice is only a subset.  Voluntary suffering, an individual’s acceptance of encouraged suffering for purposes that are supernatural and thus unidentifiable (Steadman and Palmer 2007), encompasses pain, sacrifice, and taboo.  Backyard examples of voluntary suffering like giving 10% of one’s income to the LDS church as tithing would be considered sacrifice, suffering through the pain of hunger through religious fasting, pain and sacrifice, and the prohibition of eating pork in Judaism and Islam, taboo.  Unverifiable blessings come from tithing, fasting results in the attainment of supernatural power, and one avoids supernatural punishment when adhering to the pork taboo.  Thus, making all of these examples the acceptance of encouraged suffering for purposes that are unidentifiable.

It might be easy to assume that witchcraft accusations are a thing of the past or only occur in other parts of the world outside “Westernized” countries.  Unfortunately, witchcraft accusations are still occurring, even in the United States.  In 2022 a Tennessee preacher went viral when he accused six unnamed female members of his congregation of being witches, or supernaturally evil.  Sadly, in the United States members of the LGBTQ community are also accused of being supernaturally evil quite often.  Because of this unfortunate modern reality in the “Western” world, understanding the motivations of people that accuse others of witchcraft is all the more important.