Arizona State University, one of the largest public universities in the country, offers a revealing snapshot of priorities in its fall 2026 course catalogue. Students can choose from eight classes with witchcraft, magic, or the occult in the title. Christianity receives exactly one.
That disparity is not a minor scheduling quirk. It is a signal. At a taxpayer-supported institution charged with transmitting the intellectual inheritance of the West, the sacred and the supernatural of the Christian tradition are treated as marginal, while the occult is given a small festival of dedicated courses. The predictable defence arrives immediately: these are merely historical inquiries. They study witchcraft; they do not promote it. The syllabi tell a different story.
One recent ASU syllabus frames the subject by examining how the identity of the heretic and the witch was constructed against its binary opposite, the "orthodox" Christian. It then pivots to "religious Othering," with special attention to "the female as Other," and requires students to explain how centuries-old witch persecutions continue to shape their own lives today. History is not being studied for its own sake. It is being conscripted into a pre-selected moral architecture in which orthodox Christianity is the principal villain and power relations are the only meaningful category of analysis.
The pattern is familiar. Across large stretches of the contemporary humanities, the operating question is no longer "What is true?" but "Who has power?" Orthodox Christianity is cast as the force that invents the Other, marginalises women, and sustains systems of oppression. Witchcraft, by contrast, is reframed either as a genuine spiritual tradition unjustly suppressed or as a social category invented by Christians for the same oppressive ends. The two claims sit uneasily together, but consistency is not the point. Both preserve the same binary: Christians as oppressors, everyone else as the oppressed. Medieval Europe becomes raw material for a contemporary sermon about ongoing Christian hostility to female autonomy, even if that autonomy occasionally involves necromancy.
This is not neutral scholarship. It is the application of a fixed interpretive grid, oppression studies, to whatever subject is at hand. Whether the catalogue entry concerns witchcraft, fairy tales, Shakespeare, or climate, the destination is often the same. The language of "Othering," "lived experience," "hegemonic," and "intersectionality" functions as a philosophical skeleton key. Once students learn to recognize it, large sections of the catalogue become legible as ideological conformity dressed in academic jargon.
The deeper issue is civilisational. Western civilization is not a neutral container that can be filled with any content. Its distinctive achievements in science, law, individual rights, and limited government grew out of a specific religious and philosophical matrix in which the Christian claim about the nature of God, the human person, and truth played a central role. To treat that tradition as the primary historical antagonist while elevating the occult is not "inclusion." It is a quiet revolt against the foundations that made the modern university possible in the first place. A public university that systematically under-represents the intellectual tradition that shaped the West, while multiplying courses that frame that tradition as the root of oppression, is not expanding the marketplace of ideas. It is narrowing it.
Parents and students still hold the decisive power: tuition dollars and enrolment choices. Course catalogues are written in a dialect designed to obscure more than they reveal. Learning to decode the signals, recognizing when a class has already decided its moral and political framework before the first reading, is an essential act of intellectual self-defence. University is expensive enough without paying to discover, after the drop deadline, that one has enrolled in a seminar whose real subject is the systematic diminution of the Christian West.
https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/welcome-to-witchcraft-state-university-bring-plenty-of-sunblock