By Olman Brocoman

December 10, 2025

Fort Worth — Dallas–Fort Worth likes to sell itself as the beating heart of American Christianity — a region where megachurches loom like indoor sports arenas and pastors command audiences bigger than local news stations. But underneath that polished, performative surface is a thriving alternative spiritual ecosystem that the mainstream rarely acknowledges: pagans, witches, occultists, reconstructionists, Druids, spiritual independents, and a long list of people who simply refuse to let someone else define their relationship with the divine.

You won’t see this community on church billboards, and you won’t hear them on Sunday broadcasts. But they’re there — in bookstores, in living rooms, in outdoor circles, in tiny metaphysical shops tucked between strip-mall churches, and in every suburb from Denton to Mansfield. And their growth isn’t an accident. It’s a response.

Dallas–Fort Worth has more pagans and occult practitioners than many locals realize. Some estimate that North Texas has one of the largest pagan populations in the South, rivaled only by Austin and New Orleans. The reason isn’t complicated: people who feel pushed out of Christianity — by judgment, by nationalism, by culture-war sermons that treat political ideology as gospel truth — go looking for their own path. And many find it.

That’s the part traditional Christianity doesn’t want to talk about.

For decades, the loudest forms of Christianity in Texas have framed alternative spiritualities as fringe, rebellious, or even dangerous. But talk to members of the DFW pagan community and you hear a different story entirely. They’re schoolteachers, nurses, IT workers, artists, parents, veterans, retirees — ordinary people building meaning on their own terms. Few of them fit Hollywood caricatures. Most describe their practice as peaceful, structured, and deeply ethical.

What they resent — loudly — is being treated as the enemy.

And that, right there, is the core of the problem: this isn’t about theology. This is about Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism doesn’t care what you believe. It cares whether your beliefs fit inside a political identity — an identity that demands cultural dominance, public obedience, and social conformity. When religion becomes a flag instead of a spiritual life, pluralism becomes a threat. And pluralism is exactly what Dallas–Fort Worth actually has, whether the gatekeepers want to admit it or not.

Witchcraft shops in the Metroplex report steady growth, especially among young adults who never felt welcome in church or who were burned by purity culture. Pagan meet-ups in Arlington, Irving, and Dallas routinely attract newcomers. Online groups in the region number in the thousands. And the most common story these new practitioners tell is simple: “I was pushed out of Christianity, not pulled in by paganism.”

For would-be independent travelers, writers, or spiritual explorers, the takeaway is clear: DFW is not a monolith. It’s a crossroads. People here are experimenting, questioning, rebuilding, and re-imagining their spiritual lives in ways that the old religious establishment no longer controls.

For Christians worried about this shift, here’s the blunt truth: your problem isn’t paganism. Your problem is intolerance. It’s the insistence that Christianity should dominate public life, legislate private behavior, and silence those who don’t fit the mold. That pressure is exactly what sends people looking elsewhere.

And here’s what they don’t want to hear: the pagan, alternative-religion, and occult community isn’t going anywhere. It’s growing because it offers something Christianity in Dallas–Fort Worth too often refuses — autonomy, authenticity, and a space where questions aren’t treated as threats.

If local newspapers (which once prided themselves on community storytelling) actually covered this side of the Metroplex, they might discover what you discover when you actually talk to these people: they’re not dangerous. They’re not rebels without a cause. They’re Texans — building a life without asking the megachurches for permission.

And that deserves a little sunlight.

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Pew Research Center. (2023). Religious “nones” and alternative spiritual practices in the United States.
York, M. (2003). Pagan theology: Paganism as a world religion. NYU Press.
Simpson, S. (2019). Christian nationalism and its influence on American religious behavior. Journal of Church and State, 61(2), 234–256.⁸