Pagan Quill

By John Williams of Thudfactor.

My colleagues and I were gossiping about some co-workers, folks from another department I hadn’t yet met. There’s one person who strikes them as particularly strange. There are, of course, the small things — how he speaks, how he decorates his cubical — but the clincher seems to be his religion.

“He says he’s pagan,” says Julie. “In the twenty-first century. Can you believe that?”

As a matter of fact, I can. Julie doesn’t know this, but I am pagan in the twenty-first century, too. And it strikes me as a particularly modern way to live.

Before I called myself pagan, I used to be a lot of things. I was nominally Christian, which is also known as “Christian by habit.” As I got older, I became an apatheist. That’s kind of like an agnostic. Agnostics say they don’t know whether or not God exists — apatheists don’t much care. When I started to care, more for political reasons rather than spiritual ones, I became what I think of as a “big-S Skeptic,” although I probably would not have used that word at the time. And then I was a “liberal Christian,” which in my case meant I chose to focus more on the philosophy of Christ than on his alleged holy heritage.

Notice that nearly all of these attitudes towards religion are intellectual. They are philosophical positions or attitudes. And the more involved I became in the Christian church, the more I realized that everyone around me, right down to the fundamentalists who swore up and down that they spoke to God directly on a daily basis, were operating entirely out of the brain. And I began to wonder: what happened to our spirituality? Where is the heart of religion?

I found it in paganism. I could not find it in Christianity, which often seems to hate this world. Even at it’s most liberal, it sees creation as little more than possession. We are in it, but above it. Stewards or caretakers, not inhabitants. And we must not get too attached.

Once I opened myself up to spirituality, that’s not the message I was getting. The message I was getting was that the world — this world — was alive, that I had a place in it, and that I shared it with everything else. The paths I found that expressed this were the pagan ones, the so-called “earth centered” religions.

But I am at heart an intellectual person. And once I started thinking about theology, paganism appeared to make more and more sense. Christians turn themselves into logical pretzels trying to reconcile science, the supposed infallibility of their holy book, and their personal experience. Trying to match up any of those two is hard enough. Try to make all three fit together, and you begin to understand why Fred Phelps is such a sour-puss.

Paganism, which tends to be explicitly approximate from the very start, has a much easier time of it. Absolute truth is overrated. Pagans are not wrapped up in infallibility. We can change our minds, change our understanding, not only grow within our religion but actually grow our religion.

And what of science’s threat to paganism? Many Christians certainly seem threatened by it. They go to extraordinary lengths to explain both why science cannot work and, strangely, how “good” science proves the existence of their god. The pagans I know appreciate science deeply — we are, after all, worshippers in and of this world. And science can teach us much. We have made no claims of perfect knowledge. We get the benefits of science.

But — and this is important — we also get the benefits of our religion, too. The Skeptic and the Materialist do not get to do this. They can only see what they see clearly. Gods, magic, and spiritual experience aren’t closed to them. They simply choose to turn their backs on it.  Because they cannot prove it, they think it is not there. This is fine. I doubt that their lack of faith will damn them to an eternity of torment. But I do think they are unnecessarily denying themselves.

I said earlier that paganism is a modern way of living. Religion serves us best as such. Not as politics or intellectual pursuit, but as an emotional and narrative framework which allows us to be full, emotional, humanly participants in the process of life. Unique of nearly all the established religions, the various paganisms — with their polytheistic cosmology and aggressively non-literalist outlook — is uniquely suited to address the complex, chaotic, and sometimes capricious character of Nature revealed to us in Science. As a former Christian, I would hate to be accused of evangelism. But my growing pagan understanding has left me happier and more secure in my surroundings than any other religious practice ever has.

So yes, I am pagan in the twenty-first century. Not because I reject modernity, but because I embrace it.