Witch Influencers Keep Converting: Is This How We Win Women? — show notes
MAGA Witches
I found a video talking about MAGA witches, but the creator (also someone into the occult) didn’t ultimately find any meaningful or super sizeable communities that were active (she did find a Conservative Pagans and Witches Facebook page that has 3.1K members and is private, but it denied her fake account(s) multiple times).
The posts by people who do identify as MAGA witches are pretty funny though—”Blessed lammas, Mr. Trump!”
The interesting thing that seems to be emphasized among the very few witches who are MAGA is heavy use of AI.
The Prominent Conversions
Alexandra Ashcroft (“Alex Reads Tarot” / @yourfiresignbestie)
Commentary on the announcement including footage of the announcement
Tarot, astrology, and energy work were her livelihood. In late June 2026 she deleted her entire occult catalog, announced she was done with readings, and started new accounts focused on Christianity.
People openly grieved her choice
- “We lost a baddie today”
- She appreciated that unlike Doreen Virtue, she did not criticize the occult or witchcraft. “You’re constantly challenged on the path to spirituality…. You know what you’re doing doesn’t hurt anybody”
- “It changes lives”
- “It makes people better people”
- She argues people who say witchcraft is condemned are “wrong”
- She says she tried talking with people from other faiths but kept returning to witchcraft because “It is the only thing that gives me the power that I need and I crave”
- “Why didn’t you give me a heads up so I could save some stuff first?”
- The change was gradual over nearly a year, not sudden.
- Faith in Christ became “the most important thing” in her life. She spent that time praying, reflecting, and questioning.
- For a long time she hoped she could “somehow reconcile” tarot with Christianity and keep practicing. She could not.
- “The more I prayed, the more that I reflected and sought God, the more that I realized I couldn’t ignore where this journey was leading me.”
Kat Von D (Katherine von Drachenberg)
Celebrity tattoo artist and LA Ink star known for a gothic/occult aesthetic, tarot collections tied to her makeup line, witchcraft books, and spellwork.
She publicly discarded her occult library and tarot decks in July 2022, was baptized in a Baptist church in Indiana in October 2023, and later entered the Orthodox Church (Pascha 2025).
- “Von D also shared that her priest encouraged her to refrain from sharing further details of her conversion from Protestantism to the Orthodox Church, The Christian Post reported.”
- HOWEVER, across later interviews, it came out that:
- After her 2023 Baptist baptism she “hit a wall” quickly. She had many questions and felt there was little discipleship. She described going through the motions with her “cup not full” and sensing “there’s more.”
- Church history. She said one of the strongest pulls was “a deeper understanding of actual church history, which… I had no clue about.” She wanted to be able to answer her son’s questions with that history rather than “because mommy and daddy brought us up this way.”
- Worship felt different. Protestant services had come to feel like “a lecture hall or a TED Talk.” In Orthodox liturgy she said she felt she was “worshiping the Lord with all my being.”
- Icons made immediate sense to her as a visual artist. She had first thought the flat style looked like people “before they learned how to draw.” Once she understood them as windows to heaven and as a way to learn about Christ and the saints without needing to be a theologian, they clicked. She noted they also help her ADHD because she can look at Christ and focus. Kissing an icon did not feel strange to her.
- Stability. She contrasted Orthodoxy’s settled paradigm with the endless rabbit trails of both New Age searching and some Protestant settings.
- Community. After years of isolation in Los Angeles she found a parish that felt like actual community.
Here’s a video montage of her visiting an orthodox church with her son that she posted to Instagram (it’s not the only one)
Her stated reasons for converting
- She said COVID lockdowns and conversations with her husband (“I think we got a lot of things wrong”) forced a full life audit.
- She said New Age practices (tarot, spellwork, meditation, nature worship, yoga) had been “band-aids” and “crutches” that never actually solved anything.
- She compared her Christian friends (who had “light”) with occult friends (who lived in “drama and dread and gloom and doom”) and realized she had been one of the miserable ones.
- She came to see a “spiritual battle” and no longer wanted those items in her home around her family.
- The change felt like “deprogramming.” Things that once attracted her became repulsive. She repeatedly said she just wanted Jesus: “I don’t want these crutches in my life anymore… I just want Jesus.” She also said the shift made her a better wife and mother.
Doreen Virtue
The longest-established of the three. She was one of the world’s bestselling New Age authors, created dozens of angel/oracle card decks (used like tarot), taught channeling and mediumship, and mixed Christian language with occult practice for decades. She was baptized in 2017 and has spent the years since publicly repudiating her old work and telling people not to use her cards. (Her wikipedia page)
Her stated reasons:
- She had a vision of Jesus in an Episcopal church in January 2017 that she said completely changed her.
- Reading the Bible, especially Deuteronomy 18:10–12 (the prohibition on divination, fortune-telling, witchcraft, and consulting the dead), was the decisive moment. She realized the exact practices she had taught and sold were described as “detestable” / an “abomination” to God.
- She had genuinely believed she was a Christian doing God’s work through angels. The passage lifted “the veil.” She fell to her knees, repented, and gave her life to Jesus.
- She now describes her former work as occult deception and regularly apologizes for the decks still in circulation.
Older examples exist (e.g., the Druid blogger Teo Bishop / Matt Morris around 2013), but they are less often cited in the current conversation.
Does the Inverse Exist?
Not really; it’s more people who were Christian by default (and not liking it) getting into tarot.
There aren’t major prominent Christian religious leaders
Lots of people raised evangelical or conservative Christian leave church and pick up tarot, astrology, or witchcraft. Religion News Service profiled this in 2025 with practitioners like Kevin Garcia, Elliot Adam, and Charlie Claire Burgess. They describe tarot as a way to rebuild spirituality after “bad religion.” That pattern is common. It is not the same as a Hillsong worship leader or a 2-million-follower Christian TikToker announcing “I am a witch now.”
Closest examples:
- Kevin Garcia came out as a queer Christian in 2015, built a deconstruction audience, wrote Bad Theology Kills, and later added tarot as spiritual direction. He still talks about Jesus as a mystic path among others. His following is in the tens of thousands, not the million-plus range of Alex Reads Tarot or Kat Von D.
- Hana O’Neill (Suburban Witchery) has written explicitly about a “Christian to witch pipeline” from evangelical girl to practicing witch. Niche platform.
- Many WitchTok creators mention a Christian childhood. Almost none of them were first known as Christian influencers.
On Witches
Percentage of women
Pew’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study put pagans at roughly 0.3–0.4% of all U.S. adults.
One Pagan Census-based summary reports approximately 68% of Wiccans and 67% of Pagans as female.
Combining these stats, we can suppose that roughly 1 in 250 to 1 in 170 women identify as a witch (0.4% to 0.6% of women in the USA).
- This is conservative as there are, for example, Christians (albeit not very high fidelity Christians) who practice witchcraft, at least until they discover that Christianity and witchcraft are incompatible.
Size
Broad witchcraft is small compared to markers for interest in organized religion (like searches for the Bible) but nontrivial
The industry is big:
- Psychic / fortune / tarot readings: $2.3 billion (Best single figure (IBISWorld))
- Tarot/oracle decks and kits $50–300 million (Reports conflict)
- Etsy spells + cheap digital castings: $20–100 million (Heavily overlapping with psychic/fortune/tarot readings)
- Forbes’s 2024 reporting: the platform has facilitated “millions of dollars” in spell sales; some top sellers have made hundreds of thousands.
- Occult / spell / spiritualism books~$50–200 million (Soft estimate)
- Crystals, herbs, ritual goods, shops: $1–2+ billion if included (Wellness, not “occult services”)
For scale: US religious giving is well over $100 billion. The legal US cannabis market is larger than psychic services. Halloween retail alone is several times the deck-and-spell slice. The occult economy is real and has professionalized; it is still a mid-size niche next to church, wellness, or self-help.
What are People into Witches Even Into?
Top selling books on spells/witchcraft on Amazon
- The Spell Book for New Witches: Essential Spells to Change Your Life by Ambrosia Hawthorn | Feb 4, 2020 - $9.99 paperback; 20.4K review (4.5 stars)
- Preview pages show things like
- significant objects one might use, including a Book of Shadows (to keep a record of one’s practice), an alter bowl (to hold salt, herbs, crystals, and waters for portions or scrying), a mortar and pestle, candles, and crystal
- Spells, grouped into
- Spells for romantic love
- E.g. A lover’s bind rune to preserve or attract a loving relationship
- Spells for money and prosperity
- Spells for work and career
- A sweetheart sachet, to attract a sweetheart
- One choice review by Felicia Nelson: “This is exactly what I wanted. So many of the books out there spend the majority of the book talking about how to become a witch or how to be a witch. I don’t need tons of chapters about crystals and the moon and all that. Most books spend way too much time going over those things. I just want the spells. For someone who has already gotten down the basics, or who’s been doing this a long time already, you’re going to like this book. It says that it’s for new wedges, but I don’t find that to be true at all. All I wanted was a book of spells that I could use to compare or cross-reference or add to my own. I’m a solitary witch. This book glosses over all of those basic things that so many other books go on and on and on about, and just gets down to business. This is a book of spells, period. And they aren’t ridiculous spells that make you have all sorts of special hard to get ingredients. You can follow these spells step-by-step, or adapt them to incorporate into your own traditions. I think it’s a great reference; a great starting point. You definitely want to add this book to your collection.”
- The Green Witch: Your Complete Guide to the Natural Magic of Herbs, Flowers, Essential Oils, and More (Green Witch Witchcraft Series) by Arin Murphy-Hiscock | Sep 19, 2017 - $10.22; 28.2K reviews (5 stars)
- This book has a heavy emphasis in gardening and reconnecting to the earth and natural world
- Natural healing, kitchen recipes, “working with green energy”, etc.
- Psychic Witch: A Metaphysical Guide to Meditation, Magick & Manifestation (Mat Auryn’s Psychic Witch, 1) Book 1 of 2: Mat Auryn’s Psychic Witch | by Mat Auryn and Devin Hunter | Feb 8, 2020; $16.12, 10.3K reviews (5 stars)
- Part of a review from a deconstructing Christian: “Let me preface this review by saying that I am a former Christian conservative and have been deconstructing my beliefs over the course of the last one and a half years. I have always felt drawn to witchcraft and spirituality, but toxic Christianity and Christian nationalism made me believe that witchcraft is “evil” and “demonic,” which I now know is anything but. As a part of my journey back to spirituality, this book called out to me-I felt incredibly drawn to it. I am so glad that I bought this book because I learned so much about witchcraft, mysticism and metaphysics that I haven’t known before! Everything in the world is a lot more connected than we think, and the author cites legitimate scientific, psychological, and historical studies to prove this link. I’ve never been one to be a complete science nerd, but the science used in this book was absolutely fascinating to me.”