Don't Let Ideology Become Your Religion
Ideology makes promises it can't keep
On the day I was to be confirmed in my mother’s Presbyterianism, I cried. For two hours before the ritual [don’t get me started on Reformation ‘rituals’], through most of it, [which made doing the reading challenging] and for a while afterward. I’m sure my 14-year-old girl hormones weren’t helping, but what I realized later was that I wanted it to mean something and it didn’t. Something was wrong, missing.
It didn’t help that Presbyterianism went right along with John Calvin’s theory of predestination. That meant some people were saved [the Elect] and some weren’t [the non-Elect] and god had decided this and there was nothing to be done about it. I don’t think my friends who were being confirmed beside me concerned themselves with this. Either they did what humans are perfectly capable of doing and ignored it, or they assumed they were among the Elect. I didn’t think to ask. My problem was that I wasn’t able to convince myself I was one of the Elect, and I didn’t much like the idea of predestination anyway.* After that unpleasant day, I began a sincere search for a religion that made more sense and at last found Paganism.
But why search at all? Why not just do without it and embrace atheism? Entirely aside from the fact that the New Atheists hadn’t yet risen [and are now taking some hits] I simply couldn’t. Epistemology means “how we know what we know.” For Christians, the existence of the Bible and the words of god are how they know god exists. I was sure god existed, but until I read Hans Holtzer’s The New Pagans, I didn’t realize that the voices in the trees, the revelations and peace that came when I was outdoors in the woods or on the hillside could also be evidence of the presence of god, and that there were other people like me.
For a long time, that had to be enough. I read what I could find on Paganism - which at the time was mostly Wicca - and put together a solitary practice. I didn’t find others to work with until after college. It wasn’t hard to feel the presence of the goddess, [the lack of female representation being another reason why Christianity had lost me] but it was lonely. I’m ambivalent about calling a solitary practice ‘religious,’ since religion is a group activity that binds people together and there solid benefits to having people around us who share our beliefs.
But since I’d ripped myself free of the story of Christ’s sacrifice for the sake of humanity, I had no story to replace it with. Paganism doesn’t have a sacred book that organizes how we think. Story is the default for how our brains determine value, something that’s now well established in neuroscience. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my brain was looking for a story like the ones I’d been raised with, something that would give me an understanding of how to behave in the world.
There were two other stories that I’d been brought up with: environmentalism, and feminism. Without my realizing it, those stories began to fill that void. It made so much sense. I felt at peace when I was outdoors, therefore the earth was sacred and should be protected. Women were oppressed, and the goddess was the antithesis of that, and so women were also sacred. This felt very comfortable for a long time because this was what important to my mother. She was an ardent - and angry - feminist, and we did recycling long before it was mandated anywhere.
The problem was these are not complete stories, let alone a good myth that would tell me how to live. In reality, they were politics. These issue are important, and well worthy of discussion and debate on how to solve the very real problems they describe. But the story of ‘humans destroying the environment’ and ‘men treat women badly’ are not a story that tells us how to live our best lives. This is because ultimately, neither is life-affirming. ‘Humans destroy the environment’ implies that humans are bad. Bad means we shouldn’t exist. ‘Men treat women badly,’ is at best outdated, and at worst discourages human reproduction. These are not religious principles but ideologies; incomplete stories that don’t lead us toward the betterment of the human condition.
Until I was able to start breaking free of first ‘feminism’ and then ‘environmentalism,’ I couldn’t begin to formulate an organizing principle that gave my life meaning and purpose. This didn’t mean throwing out the idea that we should care for the earth, or that women should be treated with respect. It meant looking at a bigger picture than the one I was raised with. It meant reading history, psychology [I have a BA], religion, mythology, biology [I had to study that for massage therapy] and most recently, evolutionary biology.
It also took formulating a regular practice [they used to call that piety] of prayer in which I humbly asked to be shown what to do next. [My practice is based in Neo-Platonism but with a specific twist.] Then I had to do it. Sometimes I was able to run group rituals but for most of that period, I practiced alone because life had thrown me a huge challenge that took years to resolve. When I didn’t have the energy to light the candles on my altar, I just prayed.
The gods answered. They held me when I needed holding, and assured me I was strong enough to bear the burden I’d taken on. When I needed an answer to what seemed an impossible problem they literally dropped the answer on me [at 3 am of course, LOL.] Then they kept supporting me while I finished the course. I am a much better person from having done this, even though there was no happy ending. [I’ll write more about why later.] I don’t get to look at my work and get the satisfaction a parent gets from a child who has moved forward into a goodlife.
But there is still meaning in what I did. This is what was missing from the ideologies I’d been using instead of a real myth.
The gods want the best for us. They and the other elements of the unseen world are there to support us in this aim. But we have to ask for that help and humbly accept the answers. We have to step up to take the challenge and agree to the Hero’s Journey if we are to receive their help and blessings. We cannot assume we know the answers or that some incomplete ideology is the gods’ will.
Ideologies give answers on what we should do to make the world better. But they conveniently ignore whole swaths of what is known about human psychology, biology, brain function, and economic behavior. They also ignore the very things that can make a given problem better or worse. Ideologies are the product of an era when religion was being thrown out the window and High Modernism sang that humans could do anything.**
Well, we can’t.
We have achieved amazing things. But ideologies also killed over 100 million people in the 20th century. That’s only good if you think humans deserve to die. We can still achieve amazing things but trying to do so without the values that religion provides is a recipe for human decline. Pagans don’t have to be part of that decline.
*Plenty of adult Christians have issues with this doctrine, [there are books on the subject] so a teenager struggling with it isn’t that strange. However the mental gyrations needed to deal with it are of no interest to me now. Nor is the concept of predestination unique. Norse religion holds that the Norns spin out a person’s life and the best way to deal with it is with boldness and nobility [which isn’t wildly different from Calvin.]
**That would be the 1800s and into the 20th century.
Pagans have things to fix if we aren’t going to fade into oblivion. If you’re Pagan [or Heathen] and believe we have practices that could be part of a vibrant community of religions [as was the case in the ancient world] then subscribe now. The free posts will be problems and suggestions. Paid posts will go into theology, How to live as a Pagan in the 21st century, and what will help us talk to Christians.
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.