Bewitched by Bigotry: John Buchan’s Witch Wood
Bewitched by Bigotry: John Buchan’s Witch Wood

Summary/Abstract: The present article proposes to address the problematics of ethics as related to religion by tackling the problem of religious extremism in John Buchan’s Witch Wood (1927). Buchan (1875–1940), a Scottish author and historian and a Free Kirk minister’s son who had developed a passionate hatred for religious fanaticism, being all too familiar with his church’s record blemished with violence, in Witch Wood examines how the Gospel of Love of the New Testament is perverted by the Scottish Kirk into a creed of hate and violence in seventeenth-century Scotland by the Kirk’s bid to seize secular power. The book resounds with astonishing topicality. In the 1920s the book was a response to the emergence of extremist ideologies which had wreaked havoc with the European civilization during and after the Great War.

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