The Pentacle Headstone Decision

For years, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs maintained an approved list of religious emblems that could be engraved on government-provided headstones and markers for veterans buried in national and other qualifying cemeteries, a list that included symbols for numerous Christian denominations, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and a range of other recognized religions, but which did not include the pentacle, the circumscribed five-pointed star widely used as a symbol of Wiccan religious identity. Wiccan veterans and their families seeking to have the pentacle added to the approved list found their requests repeatedly delayed without resolution over a period of roughly a decade.

The issue came to a head following the death of Patrick Stewart, a Wiccan chaplain's assistant killed in action in Afghanistan in 2005, whose widow sought to have a pentacle placed on his headstone and encountered the same unresolved delay other Wiccan families had faced. Together with several other affected families, she and advocacy organizations including the Lady Liberty League and Americans United for Separation of Church and State brought legal action against the Department of Veterans Affairs, arguing that the exclusion amounted to unconstitutional religious discrimination in a government program.

Facing the lawsuit and continued public pressure, the Department of Veterans Affairs agreed in April 2007 to add the pentacle to its approved list of emblems, resolving the specific legal dispute and, more broadly, the underlying question of Wiccan symbol recognition on veterans' government-provided memorials.

The 2007 settlement is widely regarded by historians of American Wicca and legal scholars studying religious accommodation as a significant milestone in the broader legal and social recognition of Wicca as a legitimate religion within the United States, distinct from and following after earlier, more piecemeal legal victories addressing matters such as prison chaplaincy access for Wiccan inmates. Unlike many of those earlier cases, the headstone decision addressed the treatment of Wiccan military veterans specifically, a context carrying particular symbolic weight in American public life given the cultural prominence of military service and memorial practice.

Following the settlement, several of the families who had been waiting for approval, including Patrick Stewart's widow, were able to have pentacle headstones placed relatively quickly, and the pentacle has remained on the Department of Veterans Affairs' approved emblem list since, available to any veteran or veteran's family who requests it under the same process used for any other recognized religious symbol.

The decision did not require or produce any broader change in Wicca's general legal status in the United States, where the religion had already secured various forms of recognition in other contexts over preceding decades, but it closed a specific, long standing and symbolically significant gap in one particular area of federal religious accommodation, and it remains one of the most frequently cited episodes in accounts of Wicca's legal recognition history.