The Pagan Explosion Revisited: A Statistical Postmortem on the Teen Witch Fad
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pome.v14i1.128Keywords:
Paganism, census, New Religious Movements, teen witchAbstract
Contemporary Paganism’s explosive growth was big news during the first decade of the new millennium. By the end of the decade, however, it was clear that this rapid expansion had fallen off, and the movement appeared to have returned to something approaching a normal pattern of growth. What actually happened was that shortly after the turn of the millennium, the Teen Witch fad temporarily inflated total numbers of self–identified Pagans. After the fad ended, explosive growth also ended, leaving an established and maturing religious tradition in its wake.References
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Berger, Helen A., Evan A. Leach, and Leigh S. Shaffer. Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo–Pagans in the United States. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press 2003.
Ezzy, Douglas, and Helen Berger. “Witchcraft: Changing Patterns of Participation in the Early Twenty–First Century.” The Pomegranate: International Journal of Pagan Studies 11, no. 2 (2009): 166.
Hughes, Philip, and Sharon Bond. “Nature Religions.” Pointers: Bulletin of the Christian Research Association 13, no. 2 (2003): 1–7.
Jorgensen, Danny, and Scott Russell. “American Neopaganism: The Participants’ Social Identities,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 38, no. 3 (1999): 325–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1387755
Lewis, James R. “The Youth Crisis Model of Conversion: An Idea That’s Time has Passed?” Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 60. Forthcoming 2013.
Lewis, James R., and Andreas Bauman. “New Religions and the New Zealand Census: Are Meaningful Generalizations about NRM Members Still Possible?” International Journal for the Study of New Religions 2, no. 3 (2011): 179–200.
Lewis, James R. and Nicholas M. Levine. Children of Jesus and Mary: A Study of the Order of Christ Sophia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Pike, Sarah M. Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Reid, Sian Lee. “Disorganized Religion: An Exploration of the Neopagan Craft in Canada.” PhD thesis, Carleton University, 2001.
Published
2013-07-18
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Lewis, J. R. (2013). The Pagan Explosion Revisited: A Statistical Postmortem on the Teen Witch Fad. Pomegranate, 14(1), 128-139. https://doi.org/10.1558/pome.v14i1.128
