A popular theme for children's books and movies, Wicca is a pagan religion attracting countless young people today. And most parents are unaware of its influence. Learn what you need to know on the next HAVEN Today as Steve Russo joins Charles Morris for a program called "Protecting Your Child From Witchcraft".

October 30, 2006

Protecting Your Child from Witchcraft with Steve Russo

Her name is Reverend Irene Jericho. She was born in Seattle and grew up in Frederick, Maryland. It’s not exactly Hogwarts, but Reverend Jericho shares her magic with students in her witchcraft classes in Leesburg, Virginia. I’m Charles Morris and this is Haven Today a program telling the great story of Jesus who’s overcome the powers of evil and sets people free from darkness. Witchcraft is on the rise, especially among young people, and parents don’t even know it. Turn your radio up because you’re going to want to hear the next few minutes with a youth culture expert Steve Russo. He’s going to be with us two days and you may want to get one or both of his books on witchcraft, one book is for parents the other for teens. This is a program called, “Protecting Your Teen from Today’s Witchcraft”. The day before Halloween Haven opens our program leading us to the holy, pure ways of the Lord.

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Performed by: Haven

This is Haven Today and we are one day away from Halloween, October 31 and with me in the studio is Steve Russo who is from “Real Answers with Steve Russo”. Steve, welcome to the broadcast.
SR: Charles it’s great to be with you today.
CM: You have a little bit of history. You’ve been in front of a microphone before and I’m glad, I want to thank you for being in front of our microphone for the very first time.
SR: Oh, it’s fun. I appreciate this ministry and you know, going all the way back to First Mate Bob
CM: “Eight bells and all’s well”
SR: Oh, his passion and his heart for evangelism. That just gets me going.
CM: Yeah, a lot of people met the Lord, especially when this program got started. You understand leading people to the Lord, you’ve been involved in bringing, especially teens and twenty-somethings to the Lord for quite a while now, I think.
SR: Very much so, my passion is for young people, in fact it was a teenager that first shared Christ with me.
CM: You know, you told me that story. It was interesting. You were actually his drum teacher, right?
SR: Yes, I was in the music industry making my living full time doing studio work at concerts and shows, and I was also teaching on the side. And this little 13 year old guy who was 19 at the time just kept talking about his best friend. Well, one thing led to another –
CM: Who is your best friend?
SR: Yeah, who’s your best friend, you know? And he said “Jesus” and I’ve got to be honest, I was clueless he was talking about Jesus Christ. I thought he had this little Latino friend. So I asked him what his last name was and he said, “Christ. And he can be your best friend tool.”
CM: Oh, that’s great and that was the start of your meeting Jesus.
SR: It really was because ultimately it was through his family, his aunt and uncle that were entertainers in Hollywood, Billy and Danielle, who led me to Christ, took me all the way to the cross.
CM: That’s a good place to go and you never have to go anywhere else do you, after you’ve found that.
SR: Yes, that’s right.
CM: Well, Steve, let me just throw out a question here and this is what we’re going to be talking about on the program today. Let me just ask you the question because you already told me the question and the answer. What is the fastest growing religion in North America among teenagers?
SR: Wicca Charles. It’s Wicca or witchcraft. We could use the terms interchangeably, some in that religion would dispute that, but I think for the sake of our listening audience that will help the picture because Wicca really is a, it’s a newer word connected to an old word.
CM: To something that’s been around for, well ever since Satan’s been around and that’s a long time.
SR: That’s right. That’s right. But Wicca is the new packaging of the old lie that was started way back in the beginning of human history.
CM: And contrast that. This is a little different, isn’t it, what you see Wicca in North America and Western Europe as opposed to just good old dark magic witchcraft that you might find in Africa, you would find it in South America and parts of Asia? It’s been cast in a new light as you said.
SR: It really has. It’s the religion that fits perfectly with our culture and with this generation. I call it the “buffet style religion”. It’s a self-styled religion. You can’t walk down the street and start picking people and say, “Oh, she’s into Wicca. He’s into Wicca.” Because there is no look that they particularly have. It’s all in the religious beliefs that they have put together. Now I mentioned “buffet style religion”, literally, people that are into Wicca, there’s no 2 that would believe exactly the same thing or practice it in the same way.
CM: So it’s really hard to come up with fast, hard rules of this is exactly what every person in Wicca believes?
SR: Absolutely. We could bring in 10 young people for example, into the studio today who claim to be Wiccans and ask them, “How do you practice Wicca? What do you believe?” And Charles we’d have 50 or more responses. So trying to define this thing or contain this thing is like nailing applesauce to the wall, you can’t do it, because there’s so many different things. There’s some key values, key beliefs, but it fits perfect in the postmodern culture in which we live here in North America, in with the “whatever” generation today who basically says, “Whatever.”
CM: What’s the allure? What gets a young woman, a young man, 13,14,15,16 whatever years old, what brings them to Wicca?
SR: Two things primarily and I say primarily because there’s a lot more. Number one is control. I like to call it big “C” Control. This young person, whether it’s a guy or a girl, can control not only what they believe, because once again they can take a little bit from Christianity, a little bit from Buddhism, Hinduism, the occult, paganism, stir it all up and that can be their religious beliefs. So they can control what they believe, how they practice it, they can even control their deities because Wicca allows you the freedom to design your own gods. So if you want -
CM: So really it’s a self-made paganism. It’s idolatry by design.
SR: It is, truly. And ultimately you’re worshipping yourself because if you’re making your own god designing your own god, you’re worshipping yourself. But there’s another key factor and that’s power. And so many kids today are feeling disenfranchised, dissolutioned, they’re discouraged the broken homes that they’re coming from, the abuse, the bullying on campus. They feel like their life is spinning out of control so they’ve got the big “C” Control, but they’ve got power. And they want power like everybody wants power.
CM: And many of them, a lot of kids today are coming out of homes of course where there is no history of Christianity, so they have no history of going to a church. The Bible means nothing to them and so to be shown, here’s a way that you can create a religion of your own, and they don’t even really know it’s counter to Christianity
SR: No
CM: until they get into it, I guess.
SR: And a religion that offers power. You know power to feel special, power in some cases, to get vengeance over people that have hurt you, everybody’s looking for power and this religion offers power. And I think we would be remiss as followers of Christ to discount it and say, “Oh, there’s no power there,” because we know Satan does have power, limited but he has power.
CM: Right. Steve, you of course have had your own radio program for, well you had a talk program for about 5 years with Focus on the Family
SR: Yes
CM: That reached teenagers live each weekend. You also do specials yourself. And how do personally know that the religion of Wicca is growing among younger people in the United States?
SR: Charles let me give you three things quickly, because there are so many things I could tell you.
CM: sure.
SR: One would be the number of emails that we get at my office of young people asking about Wicca or saying they’re involved, or parents saying, “Help, my son or daughter is involved,” I’ve even had women writing and saying, “My husband’s involved,” or vice versa. So that’s a huge thing and just one day out of curiosity I googled the word “Wicca” and it is increasing astronomically. Most recently I did it and there were over 9 million listings on the internet for the word “Wicca”. That says something. A year and a half ago it was 2 ½ million.
CM: So it’s growing.
SR: It’s growing. I do school assemblies. I go on public school campuses.
CM: You’re still a drummer.
SR: I’m still a drummer as this one little junior high kid came, he came up to me after an assembly and he was about half my size and he was saying, “You, you you!” and I said, “What?” and he said, “You are the drummer dude!” He had to come up with something. So I still go bring the drums on, that’s my hook. That’s how I disarm the administration and get kids attention. But after every assembly I always get kids coming up wanting to talk about a variety of subjects including Wicca and witchcraft. One particular school had 3 kids come up, 2 girls and a guy and they said, “Hey Steve,” they’re high school students, they said, “We want you to know, we used to be Christians but we’re Wiccans now.” I don’t know if they thought I was going to run and hide or hold up a wooden cross and I said, “Tell me about it.” And they said, “Steve we went to church, we couldn’t find anybody who told us what they believed, why they believed it and they were all living powerless lives,”
CM: What an indictment
SR: OH! “And so we went to Wicca”. And I think what they were saying was we used to go to church, because I have a hard time believing that if somebody truly knows the Lord Jesus Christ and has that intimate relationship that they’re going to bail on him…it just doesn’t work well with me. but here’s another thing, you mentioned radio shows. Our ministry did a special on Wicca and witchcraft and prior to recording that I read an article on line about a man that started a “Witch School”. That’s what he called it.
CM: Uh oh, sounds a little like a “Harry Potter” movie or something.
SR: exactly.
CM: But in real life.
SR: In real life. And I thought wouldn’t it be interesting to interview this guy? Because you know, some people even within the Christian community think, “Oh Steve, you’ve kind of gone a little overboard this time with this witchcraft stuff. And it’s not as big of a deal.” Long story short, we talked to, his name is Ed. He calls himself Ed the Pagan and I asked him a series of questions. Charles he has over 160,000 people registered online taking classes in his school.
CM: Wow.
SR: That’s significant.
CM: Sure.
SR: Now he doesn’t have anywhere near that number of people that are physically attending the school
CM: Although he has some.
SR: He has some though and it’s growing slowly
CM: This is in Illinois, a little town in Illinois
SR: It’s a little town in Illinois. In fact the town fought him for, I think 3 or 4 years to keep him out of the town and he won the opportunity to open the school, he and his partner. And he’s just very matter of fact about this school he has, this religion he has, but here’s what concerns me among many things: He’s a former Southern Baptist. As a teenager he was involved in a Southern Baptist church. He talked about doing missions and evangelism work and I said, “Ed, help me understand. How does this happen?” And he said, “I got dissolutioned with the church, their lack of tolerance,” he got off on some strange things, but he said, “I couldn’t get the answers I wanted and I needed as a teenager.”
CM: What did you say to him?
SR: I said, “What happened next? How do you go from the Southern Baptist church to the witch school?”
CM: That’s right. The founder and headmaster.
SR: Yeah, interesting transition. I said, “Did you go on a spiritual search?” He said, “No.” He said, “When I left the church I gave up on Christianity, and the church and God. I was neutral to anything spiritual.” 10 years later, late 20’s, he meets a pagan witch who introduces him to Wicca and next thing you know –
CM: He is one.
SR: He’s got this school. He is one and now he’s got this school.
CM: Teaching others.
SR: In fact I asked him, I said, “Where do you get your theology? Do you get it from the Bible and – “ He goes, “No, no, no. We get it from nature.” This thing is huge. You talked about how do I know it’s growing? Look at the number of television programs that have a Wicca or witchcraft or occultic, supernatural kind of theme.
CM: It certainly has worked its way into the Hollywood community. You see it among stars too.
SR: Oh absolutely. You’ve got well known stars practicing this, well known musicians. Look at video games and computer games. Look at comic books.
CM: by the way, before we go on I just need to mention, we have a couple of resources. Steve Russo is our special guest here the day before October 31 and he’s our special guest on the program today. He understands teenagers, he understands twenty somethings. He’s got a book for younger people called, “What’s the Deal with Wicca? A deeper look at the dark side of Wicca” But if you may be a parent and you just turned your radio volume way up when you heard Steve start the program with me today, he also has a book called, “Protecting Your Teen from Today’s Witchcraft”. It’s a parents’ guide to confronting Wicca and the Occult. And we’ll tell you all about how to get that a little bit later on in the program. Steve, there’s got to be an answer for this. It’s growing and I guess that’s something, it’s an indictment to the society that we live in today.
SR: Yes.
CM: It says that the occult, it says that the darker things are growing perhaps, but yet you are an advocate of light and at the same time I know somebody that I’ve met that’s a wiccan, in the past. They want to tell me about how their witchcraft is good witchcraft and it’s actually white witchcraft not dark witchcraft. Any truth to that?
SR: No truth to that because from a biblical world view - I won’t say Christian world view because some Christians, I’m not sure where they get their theology today though, or at least people that call themselves Christians – from a biblical world view we know that God does not differentiate in scripture between white magic and black magic.
CM: Magic is magic
SR: Magic is magic
CM: Occult is occult
SR: Exactly it’s there, but we’ve got to understand a couple things in our culture as we approach this and as we think about people like you just mentioned. Number one is we’ve become desensitized to evil and violence. Just look at where we’ve come from. Look at what’s, I mean we truly have a global community. We can see people getting shot around the globe now. We see these airliners that crash. We see, you know, the 9/11. I mean, you just look at this, we’ve become desensitized to this. It’s everywhere. It’s all over the media, it’s in books. Now I’m not paranoid I’m not, because I know where the source of truth is and I’m a communicator of the light as you said. But the other thing we have to deal is a generation that does not think in a linear fashion. They don’t think logically, so they’ve bought into this very illogical religion because it fits perfect with their thinking pattern. So for us to help lead them out of the darkness, we’ve got to understand that. We’ve got to set in one sense, our demands, our desires that they think logically aside and figure out how do we help them connect the dots, because there’s a lot of dots out there that they need to connect.
CM: And they’ve never been taught how to connect the dots either.
SR: Exactly.
CM: You know the other day, I’ve noticed this living in Southern California I’ve seen the wave come through of kids dressing in a goth style, dark, lots of piercings, maybe more tattoos. Now you can’t say every kid that dresses like that is a Wiccan because that’s certainly not true, but I do recall about 2 weeks before the Amish school massacre driving through and noticing the number of teenagers that are now dressing like they are in the, into the goth movement and I thought, “Isn’t this interesting.” That particular clothing style has begun to wane in California where I live, but yet here it is in someplace that is considered the Bible belt of America. What do you see in the way of trends among young people today?
SR: I see 2 things mainly. I see a desperation. Kids are desperate for reality. They are desperate for truth. They may not articulate the fact that they’re looking for truth, but that’s really what they are searching for.
CM: What their bottom line is, yes.
SR: Exactly. And they’re desperate for some kind of spiritual meaning in life. The anger issue, we’ve got an angry generation Charles on our hands. Ever since Columbine, the horrible, tragic shooting in Colorado a number of years ago I have said – and I’m not a prophet of doom – but Columbine is the tip of the iceberg. And of course you mentioned the shooting in Lancaster County and I mean who would dream that somebody would go into a –
CM: It happen in an Amish school.
SR: An Amish school
CM: Yes.
SR: OK now that was an adult, but inside of a week there were three shootings
CM: That’s right.
SR: And the one young man in Wisconsin, why did he, he went back to school with guns because –
CM: He couldn’t smoke!
SR: He couldn’t smoke on campus. And you know we’ve got a generation that doesn’t know how to handle their anger, and partly because they’re not being mentored or taught by adults, by their parents how to handle anger. Look at the abuse that’s going on in American homes today, physical violence and people handle their anger with violence. And so kids are desperate, they’re searching and yet they’re so hungry. I see this everyplace. In fact, I was doing school assemblies in Ohio and I was being followed around all day by a newspaper reporter and we got done with the assemblies and afterward he said, came up and said, “All right Russo,” he said, “What kind of mind technique are you using on these kids?” I laughed. I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “After every assembly you’ve got 150-200 kids are just storming you.” He said, “It’s goth kids, it’s jocks, it’s the techies, it’s the cheerleaders,” he said, “all these different kids,” he said, “You’re obviously using some kind of mind technique.” And I said, “You really want to know what I’m doing?” “Oh, yeah!” He wants to write it down.
CM: Right.
SR: And I said, “I’m just being real with them.” I said, “These kids are looking for reality.” We look at the popularity of reality TV shows. Kids are saying, “Give me real life! I know there’s got to be more to it.” And we have so much promise in this generation. Kids are the most, the greatest natural resource we have in this country, you know, the most precious valuable thing we have. And they’re hungry for somebody to come along side and say, “Look. I think I’ve got a little bit of handle on life let me show you how to go.”

CM: I know there are parents listening right now and they want to say, “Just tell me what to do. You know, should I eliminate Halloween? Should I you know, what do I need to do with my kid?” Well let’s start with what you and I know is the baseline for a parent. Let’s talk about Jesus for a minute here. What do kids really need today? What do their parents really need today? What do you and I really need today?
SR: We need that intimate relationship with the Living God. Where we have come to the place and time in our lives where we have surrendered – and see that’s a hard thing for people to do today – surrender control of their life to the Lord Jesus Christ. We need to experience his forgiveness. We need to experience his love and his power in our lives. And then we need to demonstrate that to our children and lead them, as I mentioned early in the broadcast, to the cross.
CM: I think we ought to pray for that right now. And then we’ll have you back tomorrow as well, Halloween day.
SR: Terrific!
CM: And, and we’re not going to tell parents to totally dump Halloween, but we want to tell them how to bring Christ into Halloween and every day of their child’s life as well their lives as well. So, Steve Russo would you lead us in prayer? Pray for parents but also maybe, Steve pray for parents listening right now, but would you also perhaps pray for maybe we’ve got a teenager or 2 listening to this program today too. Please lead us in prayer.
SR: I’d be happy to. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this opportunity to have a conversation about a very, very important topic that’s just getting to teens and young people at every level. I pray for the parent there listening right now who says, “Help me. My son or daughter, I found these books, I found this literature. I need help.” Lord strengthen them. Give them your wisdom, your power, your insight. Break down the barriers, the emotional barriers between this mom, this dad and that son or daughter. Give them the, the communication skills which are just very basic to build a relationship with that child. If that parent does not know Christ, I pray that they would put their faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, that they would understand that they need to surrender their lives because of this disease we’ve all been born with called sin that separates us from you, our Father in Heaven. May they recognize that need and come to the place and time where they surrender and say, “Yes, Lord Jesus forgive me for my sin. Help me to be a new person. Give me the power for living that I need not just for my life but to demonstrate to my children the source and the answers. Lord you are the only way. You’re the way the truth and the life. I pray for teens that might be listening right now who may be so steeped in this confusion. Their life feels like it’s spinning out of control, that they would look up, look up, Lord bring them to the place in their life that they recognize again that there is no other way, there is no other hope, that you are the answer that they’ve been looking for. Help them to get their eyes off other people because that can be so misleading and put their eyes on you. Rescue them from the darkness. Lord we love you, we’re so grateful for your love for us. Thank you Lord Jesus for sacrificing your life on the cross for us and thank you that you didn’t stay dead in the grave or on the cross, but you’re alive right now and you’re in the business of changing lives. As you have changed our lives we pray that you continue to multiply this to those that are listening today whether they be parents, grandparents, single moms and dads or teenagers, we pray this in your name Jesus, amen.

CM: Amen. Thank you Steve Russo for being with us on a program called, “Protecting Your Child from Today’s Witchcraft” and that’s from Steve’s book for parents, “Confronting Wicca and the Occult”. We’ve got that book available for you as a thank you for your financial support of Haven Today. We also have a second book by Steve for young people called, “What’s the Deal with Wicca? A deeper look into the dark side of today’s witchcraft”. Now you can get one or both for your financial gift to Haven Today the gift amount is on our website where you can read more about both books and you can reach our home page by going to haventoday.org, that’s haventoday.org. Now this issue is so important, in fact I used the word critical earlier together. We decided to send a CD with both programs of Steve Russo with me in the studio when you get either book or both from us here at Haven Today, haventoday.org. Now you can also call us on our toll free number at 1-800-654-2836, that’s 1-800654-2836. Please let us know the radio station you’re listening to when you call us. I’m Charles Morris and I want to thank you for being with me and with Steve Russo on a very, very important topic. We live in a world where evil abounds, but the great story is that grace abounds and overcomes all because of Jesus and that’s what we‘re going to talk about again tomorrow together here on Haven Today.