The Salem Witch Trials: A 17th Century Scam
Andy Jacques
Many people in the modern world have been scammed or taken advantage of because their beliefs were used against them, and that number has been growing. In the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller, some girls of Salem take advantage of the Puritan religion of the town to accuse their enemies of witchcraft and have them hanged. Abigail and her co-conspirators in The Crucible are a lot like Salem’s version of modern day scammers, using a lot of the same tricks that scammers use to exploit people. They use the town’s dependence on religion to manipulate everyone in their favor because the other characters in the play justify their acts solely by their beliefs, making them prone to being used for exploitation by others.
People are more prone to exploitation by others when they act solely on their beliefs. In The Crucible, Miller writes, “The people of Salem developed a theocracy, a combination of state and religious power whose function was to keep the community together, and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by material or ideological enemies. It was forged for a necessary purpose and accomplished that purpose. But all organization is and must be grounded on the idea of exclusion and prohibition, just as two objects cannot occupy the same space. Evidently the time came in New England when the repressions of order were heavier than seemed warranted by the dangers against which the order was organized. The witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom”(p. 7). Since everyone in the town believed in and was afraid of witches, the girls were able to use the fear to mold the people of the town to their will. Abigail, for example, used blackmail to control the other girls, fear of people thinking of them harshly to control the judges, and fear of witches to control everyone else.
The town of Salem had no separation between church and state at the time, which makes it easier to manipulate based on religious beliefs. In the play, this is shown when Mary Warren says, “And so I told that to Judge Hathorne, and he asked her so. ‘Sarah Good,’ says he, ‘what curse do you mumble that this girl must fall sick after turning you away?’ And then she replies - mimicking an old crone - ‘Why, your excellence, no curse at all. I only say my commandments; I hope I may say my commandments,’ says she! And that’s an upright answer, but then Judge Hathorne says, ‘Recite for us your commandments!’ - leaning avidly toward them - and of all the ten she could not say a single one. She never knew any commandments, and they had her in a flat lie!”(p. 51). Whether or not Sarah Good strongly adhered to Puritan beliefs greatly determined the outcome of the case. In the modern world, this would have been extremely discriminatory, but in Salem, where almost everyone was a Puritan, that was not the case. On top of this, all of these trials were about something that was inherently religious: the devil supposedly interfering in the well being of the town, making the court and the judges act even more on their beliefs. There are many other problems with this system, like how without the separation of church and state, it is much easier to sway the population by simply saying that everything you do is justified by the major religion.
Without the separation of church and state in the town of Salem, it is easy for someone to corrupt the governing body of the town. In this quote, Marry Warren is trying to prove that Abigail forced her to put the needle in the poppet, saying, “I am only wondering how I may prove what [Abigail] told me, Elizabeth. If the girl’s a saint now, I think it is not easy to prove she’s fraud, and the town gone so silly. She told it to me in a room alone - I have no proof for it.”(p. 55). . In this quote, Abigail uses her state as someone who is supposedly tormented by the devil to break many laws and say many lies without the fear of being accused for any of them, since she can deflect blame by saying that the devil took control of her again. In the modern day, if a politician would want to stay in or gain more power, they would use tactics like gerrymandering, election hacking, or bribery to do so. In Salem, these people had one more thing: the church. Because religion is inherently what people believe, if someone in Salem wanted to use something that the populace already believed in, like religion, their messages to the people of Salem, they would be more likely to act in their interests because they share a common belief, making them more favorable than everyone else. On the other hand, it would be much harder to remove them from power, since they could convince people that staying in power is the will of a greater being, further corrupting the governing body of the town. Abigail uses this tactic to great lengths by convincing everyone that she was the voice of the church, telling everyone who did and did not practice witchcraft, while letting all of her enemies get hanged and never letting any harm fall on her own hands.
Since the people of Salem beliefs justify their actions by their beliefs, religious or otherwise, it opened up to exploitation by the young girls of the town, who were using the town’s dependence on religion to manipulate everyone in their favor. There was no separation of church and state, allowing the judges of the court to use their beliefs to justify their actions, making them prone to exploitation by others, allowing the girls to corrupt the governing body of the town. Although all of this happened a long time ago, there are still people in this world (like scammers) who use similar tricks that the girls in Salem used to manipulate people, which is why it is always helpful to keep your guard up and never justify your actions solely by your beliefs in case someone tries to use these tricks against you.
