In her work, Berger interprets Wicca as a religion of late modernity, as opposed to postmodernity, and subsequently examines it using the theories of sociologists Anthony Giddens and James A. Beckford.

Gardnerian Wicca revolved around the veneration of both a Horned God and a Mother Goddess, the celebration of eight seasonally-based festivals in a Wheel of the Year and the practice of magical rituals in groups known as covens.

The first of these was the practicing Wiccan, journalist and political activist Margot Adler in her Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, which was first published by Viking Press in 1979.

Living Witchcraft had been co-written by three academics, the sociologist Allen Scarboro, psychologist Nancy Campbell and literary critic Shirley Stave, herself a Wiccan practitioner.

[12] Three of the Wiccans at the lecture invited Berger to "participate as a researcher" as they founded their own coven, the Circle of Light, and she attended their weekly meetings and festival celebrations for the next two years.

Attending many of the ESC's open rituals and festivals, she was introduced to a "diverse group" of Wiccans and other Pagans, and developed a contact base in the community.

[16] Accepting that this regional focus might affect her results, she supplemented her fieldwork by reading literature on Paganism from across the country, concluding that "the differences among groups and practitioners within the United States are less important than the similarities.

[18] A Community of Witches was a part of a series of books entitled 'Studies in Comparative Religion' that were published by the University of South Carolina Press, and edited by Frederick M. Denny.

[28] Whereas the sociologist Loretta Orion had believed that contemporary Paganism was a postmodern movement,[29] in A Community of Witches, Berger argued against this, instead considering Wicca to be a religion of late modernity.

"[32] Berger's choice of "framework for understanding Wicca within the context of late modernity" was that of structuration, a theory put forward by the English sociologist and political theorist Anthony Giddens in his book The Constitution of Society (1984).

[20] As evidence, she noted that the religion had been created by modern westerners adopting elements from a variety of "older and geographically disparate religious practices" in order to fashion their new faith, something which she believed was only possible in a globalised world.

[37] In Berger's view, these children born into the faith would act as "maintainers of their families' practice", replacing the role that had formerly been played by neophytes in the community.

Glazier commended it as an improvement on earlier sociological studies of contemporary Paganism, which in his opinion had dwelt on "personal experiences" and acted as something of "proselytizers for Neo-Pagan beliefs and practices."

He also expressed several criticisms, for instance noting that Berger had used the terms "Wiccan" and "Neo-Pagan" interchangeably, even though they have different meanings, something that he felt might confuse some of the book's readers.

[39] In her review of A Community of Witches published in the Sociology of Religion journal, Frances Kostarelos of the Governors State University commented positively on Berger's work, describing it as "an invaluable theoretical and descriptive account of Wicca" that is also "a fine example of ethnographic research and writing.

"[40] Stefanie von Schnurbein of the University of Chicago described A Community of Witches as "an exciting and important approach to the study of contemporary neopaganism" in her review published in The Journal of Religion.

"[41] Writing in the Contemporary Sociology journal, Tanice G. Foltz of Indiana University Northwest described A Community of Witches as "Well organized, clearly written, and aimed at an academic audience".

[45] The publication of A Community of Witches did not signal the end of Berger's studies on the subject of American Paganism, and over the following several years she would publish several more volumes detailing her work in this area.

[48] In 2007, Berger's third book was published, Teenage Witches: Magical Youth and the Search for the Soul, which had been co-written with Douglas Ezzy, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Tasmania in Australia.