We were zipping down the interstate on our way to a concert one rainy summer afternoon when my best friend — let's call her Sabrina — turned to me after a short lull in the conversation and said, "Does it bother you that I'm a witch?"

Had I actually known before that very moment that she was a witch, I might have had the wits about me to make an intelligent remark. As it was, I was so shocked by this unprovoked announcement that all I could manage was, "Well, I don't exactly approve of it, but I'm not going to let it come between us."

I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was. Sabrina's religious wanderings had been the source of ongoing distress to me over the course of our five-year best-friendship. She and her family had been nominally Presbyterian when they were rich, and then nominally Catholic when they became unexpectedly poor, and after a while they gave up on church altogether.

But those collected Sundays in the pews left very little impression on Sabrina. The everyday life of the Church — weekly worship, talk about sin and atonement, tithing — was much too dull for her to be troubled with. If the subject of religion came up at all, the conversation turned to icons, saints, candles, hell, miracles, relics and myths. The exotic stuff. All of which is the fair inheritance of Christians, but Christians have also put their total faith in the death and resurrection of Christ and try to live up to their baptismal vows — an "ordinary" matter that never much interested Sabrina.

I tried to change the subject. She didn't want to. "This is my birthright," she said. "I was born with this power. The women of my family have been witches for generations. My mom doesn't know she's a witch, but she has the power, too."

My curiosity temporarily took over. "What powers do you have?" I dared to ask.

"I can tell when someone is going to die by looking at the bark on the trees," she answered solemnly. "I can lock up the evil spirits released by ouija boards. I can communicate with the wolves."

It sounds preposterous, I know. I was half inclined to laugh in her face at her self-delusions and half incensed that she presumed to know anyone's time of death. (I had recently lost my grandmother in a singularly awful way, which greatly heightened my sensitivity.) Instead I politely acknowledged the intensity of her convictions and then succeeded at last in re- routing our discussion back to the concert.

Power Beyond Belief

The name "witch" bears some examination. Most Americans, when they hear the word, conjure up mental pictures of hideous old hags with warts on their noses who try to ruin the good fortunes of virtuous young girls in medieval fairy tales. Those inclined to a slightly more positive image might think of pink-bubble Glinda in The Wizard of Oz. ("Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" she coos.) And the historically informed will shudder to recall the horrifically unjust Salem witch trials of 17th century Massachusetts.

The witches you meet today don't belong in any of these categories. Though they claim a more venerable pedigree, modern "Wiccans" have their origins entirely in this century, stemming from the deliberate revival of long-dead pagan practices by an Englishman named Gerald Gardner around the turn of the century. Witchcraft is just one part of the larger and vaguer "neopagan" movement, which in turn is one part of the even wider and vaguer New Age movement. None of these new "religions" can be rigidly classified — the notion of dogma is anathema to them — but one can at least accurately say that they are mystical, individualistic and decidedly non-Christian religious expressions reacting against a dominantly Christian society.

Wicca specifically is composed mostly but not entirely of women, emphasizes the close ties between humanity and nature, and, if it professes belief in deities at all, those will generally be the Goddess and her consort, the Horned God, or the members of ancient pantheons (Celtic ones are especially popular). But all this is purely optional; the litmus test for witchcraft is not belief, but power.

In this light, it is extremely important to remember that witches are not Satanists. The two are often equated, a mistake that is not only unfair to Wiccans, but also fails to recognize the real (albeit different) danger in their practices. The very idea of radical evil in the form of Satan is rejected by witches, but this ironically leaves them all the more vulnerable to demonic infiltration. It is easy to see how becoming a Satanist obsessed with the devil is a recipe for trouble, but it's a little harder to understand why repudiating his existence altogether is just as bad. The heart of the matter is that denying the devil makes it impossible to detect his evil presence in anything.

This has two insidious results. The first is the illusion of moral autonomy: without radical evil, there can't be any such thing as sin. At best there are "little evils" that can be overcome by the individual efforts of well-meaning witches. The Wiccan ethical code is very simple: do harm to no one. But that presumes that each and every witch can know for herself exactly what is harmful and what is not. History shows countless examples of the damage done by people who thought that they were actually doing the good (without encouraging mass hysteria, I would like to point out that Hitler wanted to revive pagan German practices since their ethical priorities included ethnic cleansing).

All religions have been guilty of serious wrongdoing, but paganism in particular has always been tied to blood (read: sacrifice) and soil (read: local ethnic preference) — a far cry from seeing every person created in the image of God. Although witchcraft today doesn't indulge in such violence, it being a newly revived practice, the more witches emphasize their historical continuity, the more they'll have to face up to this violent potential inherent in their beliefs.

The other result is the conjuring of spirits. Much of the actual practice of witchcraft relies on calling up various powers, whether as all-encompassing as the Goddess or as minor as tree or river spirits. Wiccan holidays are times of heightened activity between the mortal and immortal realms. The presupposition is, of course, that these spirits will either be indifferent at worst or benign at best to the interests of mere mortals. Sabrina spoke to me once about her acute awareness of the local powers in nature, and how she felt constrained to revere them. The spiritual danger in such a compulsion is dire. There is a very good reason why God-fearing people have been forbidden to conjure up spirits since Old Testament times: their interests are most decidedly not indifferent or benign. When witches are led to believe otherwise, it is a further reminder that the devil is the father of all lies. It's an easy conquest: Sabrina, like many witches, denies the existence of truth, too.

Irreconcilable Differences

A year passed. Sabrina and I had once been enthusiastic correspondents, treating our epistle-writing as a highly evolved art form, but our communication began to wane. Not deliberately, or at least we didn't think it was deliberately. I was about to graduate from college, embroiled in the writing of a senior thesis; she was in college also, a long way off from me, and too busy to sustain our old intimacy. We assumed that when the next summer came and we were near each other again, we could just pick up where we left off.

Of course, it wasn't really that simple. Even on the rare occasions that we did scrounge up the cash to indulge in a chat on the phone, I sensed again something strange about her — or at least stranger than before. We seemed to be talking at cross purposes, not really connecting. There were lots of easy explanations for that, though — the long separation, bad moods, school stress. I put the witchcraft thing out of my head, wistfully hoping it was just a passing phase.

It's much easier to see now the source of our increasing personal distance. Christianity and paganism cultivate very different sorts of virtues. The latter emphasizes power: ritual is a flexing of spiritual mastery that thrives on secrecy, itself a potent kind of power. Magic spells are a means manipulating the natural world — there's no such thing as "unnatural" in Wicca — using body and mind as a channel to control natural powers. But the lust for power spills over into the daily life of witches, well beyond the moonlit meetings for magic.

Sabrina described to me once the difficulties she was having concealing her witchliness from her boyfriend. She was going away for a weekend with another witch, and she told him, coyly, that they would be doing some "stuff." What "stuff"? inquired the naturally suspicious boyfriend. She eluded the answer, and then agonized over what to tell him. It was perfectly clear, though, that the real thrill was not in any of the "stuff" she was planning on doing, but on having such a stupendous secret to withhold or bestow as she pleased.

Christian spiritual values are quite the opposite. Christianity is the story of giving up power again and again in obedience to the all-powerful God, who in turn gave up His power in the ultimate humiliation of weakness on the cross. The disparity between Christianity and paganism in this respect could hardly be greater. Sabrina unwittingly drove the point home to me once when she thanked me again for the silver St. Brigid's cross I brought her from a trip to Ireland. "I believe the Goddess was using you a bit," she said. "It's one of the most powerful talismans I've ever seen." I could barely contain my fury; in fact, I felt positively violent. I wanted desperately to rip it right from the chain that hung around her neck. Nothing could be more offensive to me than her perversion of the cross on which my Savior died for the sake of her pagan power- play.

Witch Came First

That year of bare-bones friendship was the beginning of the end. The real end began rather innocently: we had some miscommunications via email (a medium that makes it notoriously difficult to convey the exact nuances of expression without resorting to endless smiley faces) and needed to clear the air. That was easily accomplished; they really were just silly misunderstandings. But in the process of patching things up, I inquired if this was not at root a matter of our increasingly great "religious" differences.

"Sarah," she bluntly told me, "I have tried and I cannot be anything but a pagan." I rather doubt she really tried. In any event, she was very pleased with her new identity as a witch. It had been a process of enormous self-discovery, and she had been very sorry not to include me in it. But now that we were being honest about these things, she hoped I would take a look at her new world. Even if I didn't agree with it, I could at least recognize the beneficial change it wrought in her. Instead, I spent the weekend wondering whether I should be angrier at her for making that awful choice, or at God for not calling her more irresistibly to be a Christian.

I knew already that our friendship was over. But it is vitally important to understand just why it was over. It was never a matter of hating her, or damning her, or even thinking that two people with different religious commitments couldn't be friends. I would have lost the certainty that she could offer me good advice when I was in a crisis, but that was a fairly minor aspect of our friendship. No, it came down to a direct challenge to my faith: she wanted me either to roundly condemn her to the fire and brimstone and try to burn her at the stake (which would prove that Christians are intolerant bigots), or to fully affirm her chosen religion as a totally legitimate, true and morally compelling option (which would concede that Wicca is not idolatry).

Naturally, I had no intention of persecuting her; quite aside from that being a decidedly un-Christian thing to do, I loved her too much to want to hurt her, and I still pray for her eventual conversion. Persecution can never accomplish that. But supporting her was equally impossible. She was willfully stumbling into the hands of powers who had slyly persuaded her that she was still in control. As her best friend, I couldn't endorse that, no matter how much it meant to her or how good her own intentions were. Even when witches band together wanting nothing more than a loving spiritual support group, it doesn't change the ugly facts of reality.

We debated these matters back and forth and got nowhere. She tried to beg off by insisting that she still did believe in the Holy Trinity and Jesus the redeeming Son of God. (How this fits in with her proclamation that she could be nothing but a pagan is beyond me; but then, postmodern witches can reject reason quite as easily as revelation.) A classic theological distinction came to mind: the distinction between the mere assent that even demons have, and the faith which puts complete trust in the love of God. Sabrina might have sense enough to believe that the God of Christians exists, but she wouldn't worship Him herself. That would require too much humility.

There was one other matter: if she really was coming into contact with superhuman forces, the consequences could only be disastrous. I couldn't drag her out of a dangerous situation, but I had the responsibility to keep myself away from it. My fondness for her personally was completely clouded over by my recoiling horror at the situation she had put herself in. I was willing to accept any consequences, as long as I had no traffic with these pretenders to godly power. The tragedy was that she had become the point of contact between them and me.

My prediction was right: our friendship went down in flames. She openly scorned my vocation to theology and accused me of deeming her unworthy of my love. The friend I once knew was gone, and I didn't recognize the replacement. The new Sabrina was a monument to spiritual blindness.

The whole dreadful experience was not without its spiritual repercussions for me as well. I was forced to turn my heart inside out and examine my motives. It wouldn't do for me to lose my dearest friend out of some deep-seated desire to be a martyr. And every time I declared the sole truth of the Gospel against the lies of idolatry, I had to fight off my own demons of pharisaism. I constantly feared that my presentation of the divine word of love would be unloving — and drive her even further away from it.

All these flaws were present in me to some extent; for all my good intentions, I'm still a sinner in need of gracious correction. Finally, though, I was granted the peace of heart — if not mind — to know that this was a sacrifice required of me, and, however reluctantly, I gave it up to God. We can never choose our own crosses, after all, and the crosses that are presented to us are usually the ones we want least to carry.

I couldn't have managed it without the love of Christ guiding me through it. But ultimately it was a choice of the ultimate thing in my life: Was I going to value friendship above all else, or my God? The seductive notions of tolerance that float around our American culture want us to think that staying on good terms with everybody is the most important thing in the world. There's a grain of truth in that. Our relationships are of extraordinary, even cosmic, importance in our lives. But they can never take priority over the baptismal commitment to our Lord and Savior.

At some point, even friendships fail; but God in heaven never does.