A refreshing article by Charlotte Kyle from the Murray States News, a student publication out of Murray State College in Murray, Kentucky, features Kyra Ledbetter, a senior from Shelbyville, Tennessee, her disillusionment with Christianity and her conversion to Wicca when she was 13 years old. Excerpts follow.
Everything is not what it seems.
When people hear “Wicca” their minds jump to witch and suddenly a myriad of pop culture references flow through their minds faster than you can say “I’ll get you, my pretty.”
These stereotypes and quick judgments could not be farther from the truth.
Kyra Ledbetter, senior from Shelbyville, Tenn., discovered and converted to Wicca when she was 13 years old. Ledbetter said it was “after a string of epiphanies following (her) home church being torn asunder between generations.”
As her Southern Baptist church began falling, Ledbetter watched as church members engaged in verbal brawls, calling each other “demon possessed” or refusing to even speak to each other. It stopped being about God or the Bible and she said she realized this was not the religion she wanted.
“It hurt to watch people I had grown up seeing three or more times a week tear into each other over theology,” she said. “Even at the time, in my early teens, I had some sense that I didn’t think of it was terribly important.”
