For its first twenty years the religion moved only by initiation, and a coven that would not take you left you nowhere to go. That changed when Wiccans began publishing practical manuals. Raymond Buckland brought a Gardnerian line to the United States in 1964 and later wrote a self-teaching course; Starhawk's The Spiral Dance (1979) tied witchcraft to feminism and ecological politics; Scott Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner (1988) told readers plainly that they could initiate themselves. The result is a religion with a small initiatory core and a very large unaffiliated majority, and no mechanism by which the first can govern the second.
Courts have treated it as a religion. In Dettmer v. Landon (1986) the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit accepted Wicca as a religion for First Amendment purposes in a prisoner case. In 2007 the Department of Veterans Affairs settled litigation and added the pentacle to the emblems of belief permitted on military headstones.
Counting is hard, because no register exists and many practitioners answer census questions with a broader word. The 2021 census of England and Wales recorded roughly 74,000 people writing in Pagan and about 13,000 writing in Wicca, alongside smaller counts for Shamanism, Heathenry and Druidry. Those are self-descriptions collected once, not membership rolls, and American estimates vary by an order of magnitude depending on method.
The tradition has also become diffuse. Much of what is sold and posted as witchcraft borrows Wiccan structure without the theology, and initiatory Wiccans frequently decline to recognise it as the same religion at all.