The Church of Wicca was founded in 1968. Gavin Frost was a British-born aerospace engineer. While working for an aerospace company in southern England's
Salisbury Plain – an area replete with prehistoric monuments, he became interested in the
druids. His wife Yvonne was an American with a background in
Spiritualism. He then claimed to have been initiated into a Wiccan group in
St. Louis, Missouri. When living in St. Louis, they developed a correspondence course through which to teach people about Wicca, advertising these courses as the "School of Wicca". They argued that by spreading their religious teaching in the form of a correspondence course, they were reaching a wider range of people than initiatory-based forms of Wicca, and that this would be necessary in order for the religion to become a "strong religious force". They believed strongly that Wicca should be presented publicly, believing that the secrecy that is observed by some Wiccan groups brought mistrust and persecution from wider society. The Frosts had adopted the term "Wicca" in the late 1960s, when it was gaining increasing usage within the pagan witchcraft community, as a name for their religion. The pair resisted using the term "pagan" until the late 1970s. In 1975, Yvonne stated that "I do not consider myself a pagan. I do not worship any nature deity. I reach upward to the unnameable which has no gender". In conjunction with his lawyers, Gavin secured religious recognition for his church from the
Internal Revenue Service in 1972; this resulted in his church becoming the first recognized church of Wicca in the United States. Later that year, they began working on their Church and School full time. Gavin appointed himself as its archbishop, and Yvonne as a bishop, and they awarded themselves
doctorates of divinity through their church. The couple moved first to
Salem, Missouri, where they ran a pig farm, and then to
New Bern, North Carolina, in 1974. There they tried to establish a survival community, but it failed to materialize. In the late 1970s, they began holding an annual "Samhain Seminar", in which workshops, rituals, and lectures took place, primarily for students of their correspondence course. In 1996, they relocated to
Hinton, West Virginia. They subsequently moved to West Virginia in 1993, where Gavin died on 11 September 2016 at the age of 86. In 1985, the Church of Wicca was involved in the
Dettmer v. Landon case, during which the
District Court of Virginia ruled that Wicca constitutes a legitimate religion under U.S. law. The Virginia prison authorities appealed the case, and in 1986, Judge J. Butzner of the
Federal Appeals Court upheld the original decision. This made the Church of Wicca the only federally recognized Wiccan church to have its status as a religion upheld in a federal appeals court. Within the American Wiccan and wider modern pagan community, the Frosts have been at the center of various disputes, particularly surrounding issues such as
homosexuality and
theology. The Wiccan
Margot Adler suggested that much of this controversy stemmed from Gavin's "wry and rather bizarre sense of humor, and his tendency to say anything to get a rise out of someone", something which she thought had resulted in the Frosts often being "misunderstood". In person, she thought, the Frosts "have always been delightful", with Gavin being "kind and humorous" and Yvonne being "forthright and even a bit prim". They published a book titled ''The Witch's Bible
, which generated outrage within the Wiccan community. Many critics referred to it as a "witchcrap book". Many of the central teachings featured in the book, such as its emphasis upon the existence of an asexual monotheistic deity, were completely contradictory to mainstream Wiccan belief. Many Wiccans were angered at the word The'' as it appeared in the title, presupposing that it carried some form of authority within the Wiccan community. Its comments on race and sex also caused controversy. ==Belief and teaching==