Dear Monotheists, Please stop using 'pagan' for everything about current culture you hate.

Paganism is a recognized religion.

The land around my ancestral home

This post is intended to be something to share with people who have no idea what Paganism is and are concerned.

My mother was a member of the local Presbyterian church in Pennsylvania where I grew up. When I started Jr. High she encouraged me to join the youth group. I was wary. I was one of the kids that got picked on and the last thing I wanted was to get harassed on the weekends, as well as in school. However, the leadership stopped anyone from bullying, and the youth pastor was kind and had a true calling to Christian leadership. The other adults who helped were always there, a consistent, supportive presence. It seemed perfectly reasonable that I would take the confirmation classes required to become a member of the church.

The classes were dreadful.

The required beliefs of Presbyterianism didn’t seem to have any connection to the people who’d been guiding and protecting me for the last two years. These beliefs made me a bad person for what I was feeling, feelings I didn’t have much control over. Some of those feelings seemed like they might be a good thing rather than a bad thing [such as sexual desire.] The worst part was the [Calvinist] idea that some of us were already saved, and some weren’t and that was that. There was nothing we could do about it.

Conservatives object to the nihilism that can arise from the lack of belief in something greater than ourselves. This is entirely justifiable.

However, predetermination about who goes to heaven is also a recipe for nihilism. I didn’t see myself being the rigid, conforming adult which was my only model of a good Christian person. I couldn’t forgo what I felt in the forest or heard in the stars, couldn’t stomp down the pulse of creativity that made life worth living, or even deny the blooming sexual urges that are a biological fact at that age.

I did the Confirmation but I cried for two hours before, and through the entire ritual. I didn’t know why.

Later, I realized I desperately wanted it to mean something and it didn’t. The whole thing felt hollow and broken. I decided to look at other religions. I read about Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others that were more obscure. [Religion continues to be something I study 40 years later, and I got 58 credits into an M. Div. before quitting. Maybe I’ll go back someday.] It was Paganism that spoke to me. The book The New Pagans, by Hans Holtzer [first printed in 1972] left me with chills. The people he interviewed had similar experiences to my own. Most Pagans don’t convert. We recognize what we are.

I have some friends who are ardently Christian. Sometimes they have really [really] incorrect ideas about Pagan religion. The other day one of them posted ‘A 1955 letter sharpens our understanding of what the left’s return to paganism means,’ By Andrea Widberg, and tagged me.

I’ve written about what I see as the positive aspects of Christianity here, and about the Mennonite woman who raised me here. I agree with several things Widberg says. Marxism is a bane on our society and a horrid ideology. Male and female is a primal biological fact and we ignore it at our peril, and human sacrifice and cannibalism are bad. [Apparently, this now needs to be said. Sigh.]

Widberg uses the term ‘pagan’ to encompass anything that isn’t Christianity. Presumably, Jews don’t fall into this category, and Dennis Prager [whom she cites] has a positive view of Judaism. But she’s no more specific than that, and ‘pagan’ appears to mean ‘people whose views I find abhorrent.’

Christians aren’t the only ones unfamiliar with Paganism, The Atlantic published a piece by Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, a man who is ostensibly an expert in religion. The essay is an extensive critique of current cultural behaviors the Rabbi deplores, on both sides of the political spectrum.

As with Widberg, I agree with Wolpe’s sentiment. The rest of the essay is… inaccurate. Wolpe claims that everything he doesn’t like in modern culture is ‘pagan.’ He makes multiple assertions about what followers of the pre-Christian religions thought and the morals they valued. Despite being an educated man he gets everything wrong when it comes to the religious practices of Greece and Rome, not to mention the Nordic practices. [Dear gods, Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets!] There is much to critique in modern Paganism [as there is with any other religion], but none of what the rabbi describes as ‘pagan’ has anything to do with either pre-Christian religion or modern Paganism.

Wolpe got pushback from modern academic Pagans such as anthropologist Sabina Magliocco, and Holli Emore, Director of Cherry Hill Seminary, who have tried to address Wolpe’s use of language. He [sort of] apologized as published in the Pagan news blog The Wild Hunt. There’s no evidence that he plans to reconsider his opinion.

I understand why my Pagan brethren get upset about this sort of misunderstanding. While I live in a religiously tolerant part of the US, Pagans [that would be Wiccans, Asatru, Norse, Druids, and others,] who live in other regions can get treated very badly by Christians.* President - then governor - GW Bush famously said he didn’t believe Wicca was a religion. In the South and Midwest, we get accused of crazy things like drinking the blood of infants. This sort of accusation comes from people who are afraid, and it’s nonsense.

Veterans and soldiers fought in the courts for over ten years to allow Pagan symbols on headstones. The Wiccan star was approved in 2007, Thor’s hammer in 2013, and the Druidic Awen symbol in 2017. If someone is willing to die to serve the principles on which the United States was founded, they should get to have what they want on their headstone. [Any argument?]

This post is for those Christians who are quite unclear about exactly what Pagan religion is. When talking about ‘paganism,’ Widberg, Wolpe, and my Christian friends see a broad sweep of things that will pull an individual away from moral behavior and toward depravity and darkness.

Why would any sane person want to live in depravity and darkness? Those who go in that direction can’t get along with other humans- or even animals. Anyone who can work productively in a group, by definition, has some form of moral restraint, or they’ll be ejected. [Or the group won’t produce anything of value.]

The word ‘pagan’ comes from the Latin ‘paganus,’ which means rural, or rustic. Christianity rose first in cities, and the people of the countryside were slower to adopt it, so the term became an insult among devout, practicing Christians. It’s worth noting that people who farm tend toward a more conservative view. Conservative, in that change should be viewed with wariness and adopted with caution. [Much as many Christians do now.]

In the middle years of the Roman Empire, Christianity was the new thing, an upstart religion only recently adopted by Constantine. He asked for the Christian god to help him win a battle. Upon doing so, he rolled back Diocleatian’s rules for Christians. [This was a good thing, at least by modern standards. Diocletian was the emperor who slaughtered Christians in large numbers.]

However, while it was usual in ancient empires for the god of the winning side to be revered and raised above local gods, it doesn’t appear that Constantine did this, and ordinary people weren’t expected to stop worshiping the gods they knew and related to. Monotheism wasn’t common in the ancient world.

In any case, the things Widberg fears weren’t an issue back then as her essay implies. Socialism didn’t exist except in communities of Ascetics. In the corner of Earth from which Christianity emerged, human sacrifice was no longer acceptable, and cannibalism was never a thing. Slavery was already being questioned by the early Greek Stoics and the Jewish Essenes, while even devout Christians still owned slaves.

As the power of the Catholic Church spread, it co-opted existing old religious sites and holidays, changing their original meaning. Augustine even co-opted ancient Pagan theology [we’d call it philosophy] into his City of God. According to Dante, Plato resides in the first circle of hell, which isn’t unpleasant at all. He’s only there instead of in heaven because he was born before Christ arrived to spread his message. Plato was a pagan.

The modern version of Paganism as a formal religion emerged in Great Britain in the 1950s with Wicca, and branched outward to reclaim some of the ancient religious practices that Christianity had largely wiped out. Gods from Egypt, Greece, and the Viking and Celtic cultures were extracted from mythology, addressed, meditated upon, and given offerings. They answered.

This is not the generalized ‘paganism’ Widberg refers to.

Much as many modern Pagans deny it, we all come from a Christianized culture. Not one of us is going to think that human sacrifice or cannibalism is acceptable. The Pagan friends I cherish are people who have moral sensibilities that aren’t so different from Christians’. In Wicca, the big rule is ‘harm none.’ That rules out things like murder, theft, and non-defensive violence. Norse Pagans follow the 9 Noble Virtues.

There aren’t very many of us talking publically about our religion and what it means to us. So, I get why Widberg and others can’t be bothered to make a distinction. We haven’t made it worth her time to do so.

For my part, it’s possible that if my Christian mentors had a clearer explanation of the purpose and value of what they were offering, I might have embraced it. Jordan Peterson points out that conservatives often aren’t good at articulating the ‘why’ of the rules they follow. For them it is self-evident, so why waste time articulating when there’s so much else to do?**

My mentors didn’t. I’m not even sure they believed all of what was being taught [especially that predestination thing.] Nothing they offered gave me more solace from my internal pain than being outside and feeling the wind on my skin, the rain on my face, and the earth under my bare feet. They offered neither meaning nor how to take on more responsibility.

In addition, there was the issue of me being female and there being nothing female in the Christianity of my youth. Humans are not all male. Conservatives are legitimately discussing the differences between male and female but this happens in a space that still claims that god is genderless while always referring to him in the masculine.

Not. Helpful.

At 59, I’m still trying to figure out what it means to be female in a world that told me I should want to be male. Christianity went right along with that, offering nothing about how to be a female in the 20th century. [Hint Christians: you need some updated theological thought if you don’t want to keep losing people.]

My bio says I’ve been to Hades in a handbasket more than once. My gods have been with me while this happened. They held me up and kept me from feeling utterly alone. They guided me directly and helped me be a better person. Some Christians would claim that the ancient gods were all demons. They can claim what they like but that’s not my experience.***

*If Muslims were in charge, I’m quite aware it would be worse. Dear Christians, we don’t want that either.

**And now we don’t know the difference between male and female, so conservatives might want to work on that.

***I do NOT address the gods for whom human sacrifice was desirable. I don’t see how that’s a good idea and I don’t know anyone Pagan who does.

Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. She has direct communication with her gods and they’ve always given her answers when she asks. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. Be warned.