Reclaiming The Pagan Cultural Narrative
I was traveling back home from spending the holidays with family in the South when the now notorious article from conservative Rabbi David Wolpe was published in The Atlantic. I won’t be linking to it in an effort to not drive any more traffic there. In the days since it was published I’ve also read a number of the responses - either as social media posts, comments to the article, or as published articles themselves.
The Wild Hunt published an editorial response from Manny Moreno where he asks why Pagan voices are not included in publications such as The Atlantic, correctly noting that the Pagan community is not at a loss for prominent voices or scholarly community.
Jason Mankey published a response on their Patheos blog that uses Greek pagan mythology to refute the claims that paganism is rooted in greed and selfishness.
Casimira Davie posted a response on their Facebook page which speaks to the underlying theme of Rabbi Wolpe’s opinion piece: fear. With the rise of antisemitism what does it mean that a respected Jewish public figure is quick to throw Pagans under the bus as a scapegoat?
Alythia posted a response to their substack which calls out the tone-deafness of placing the blame for materiality on a warped ahistorical take on paganism without turning the same critical gaze to the most prominent religions in the West over the last millennium.
And several prominent pagan leaders have encouraged folks to comment directly on the Facebook post for the article on The Atlantic page in an effort to engage in community activism, with most comments offering some variant of condemnation and “that’s not my paganism”.
All of these voices and responses are correct and necessary, and I have nothing to add to the rebuttal. But in reading these and other responses I began to notice something both intriguing and concerning. All of these responses deal out a hefty dose of “This person clearly doesn’t know any Pagans or understand paganism” yet none of them really stop to ask the question of why.
The main thrust of my argument is that, as Christian Nationalism and it’s call for authoritarianism rise in the United States, the Pagan community will come under increasing attack and condemnation rooted in a lack of understanding about who and what we are. This lack of understanding is a result of us ceding the cultural narrative of what it means to be pagan, what we actually believe, and how our beliefs manifest in our community to capitalist media and assimilationist politics as a result of our inherently insular communities. To combat this we must each become more engaged and public in our communities by putting our faith into action.
**Before I go any further I want to make it clear that I fully understand the ability to be public about paganism is a personal choice. Often this choice has to take into account physical, emotional, and mental safety; financial wellbeing and domestic basics such as shelter and food; and whether or not access will be revoked to established communities such as friends, family, etc. As someone who grew up closeted (both as a gay man and, later, as a pagan) in the South around active KKK members I understand not having the ability to fully express yourself and respect the decision to prioritize safety.**
Think about the general American public and how they access or understand paganism or the Pagan community. While our community has made great strides in being included in international and interfaith arenas such as the Parliament of World Religions, and we have a deep bench of scholars and historians helping to contextualize our movement, these are not the spaces most Americans are engaging with. The easiest way that folks access information about who we are, what we do, how we do it, and what we believe is through mass market publications and social media. We’ve relinquished control of the story of who we are to publishing houses and algorithms.
While the increase in books about paganism has helped to expose more people to our various paths the majority of mass published books are introductions or primers, how-to spell books, or surface-level approaches to specific deities, pantheons, or cultures, not the deeper and more nuanced discussions on Pagan ethics, morality, etc. This approach to accessible Pagan resources does a disservice to our community by hamstringing the ability for folks to more deeply engage with their spirituality and develop the deep well of knowledge necessary to become not only an advocate for themselves, but for our community. But those more esoteric books aren’t the ones that sell so we allow spiritual growth to be sacrificed in the name of profit margins. Additionally, publishing houses control which voices and perspectives are given broader reach based on capitalist metrics that have historically excluded marginalized voices, especially those from the BIPOC communities. And this doesn’t even begin to account for the increasing menace of AI-generated books flooding the market with nonsense.
Social media is the other way many folks learn about paganism, and this is yet another space where we relinquish control, this time to the almighty Algorithm. By this point we all know that social media is awash in misinformation and disinformation, either out of ignorance or intentionally disseminated often by those associated with the alt-right as a way of subtly recruiting folks into Völkish movements. We also know that social media rewards negative emotional responses so we’re more likely to be shown something that we disagree with or will make us angry, and magnifies negative commentary. We compete in digital arenas for clicks, likes, and subscriptions in increasingly isolated echo chambers. The rise of the “social media influencer” has also magnified the creation of the “Big Name Pagan” as a sort of pseudo-celebrity, elevating folks into positions of authority or public notoriety for good or for ill, fracturing communities into cults of personality, and in many ways recreating the unequal distribution of power and visibility found in the publishing industry - in fact, these two realms overlap more often that you might think. Where our public leaders were once creating national networks such as Circle Sanctuary’s Lady Liberty League, who first organized as a response to anti-pagan federal legislation and have continued to be a force working to protect the rights of Pagans in the United States, todays “grind culture” and scarcity mentality has everyone competing against one another for an artificial market share.
Additionally, much of what it means to be Pagan in the United States in the 21st century is often framed in opposition to Christianity, either Christian beliefs or assumption. The “Satanic Panic”, either from the 1980’s or its contemporary counterpart, is a great example of this. We spend more time debunking assumptions about what it means to be Wiccan, Heathen, etc. than explaining our beliefs or the why behind our rituals. Even the spaces we tend to find increasing acceptance within are niches within a Christian over-culture, such as the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. Mind you, I love my local CUUPs group and they do amazing things for our community, but the history of Unitarianism and Universalism are rooted in Christianity and the typical weekly service, while it may include sermons from Pagan leaders, tends to skew thematically Christian in its structure. Additionally, many folks in the United States come to paganism from some form of Christianity even if it’s just cultural immersion, and transpose their socialized Christian worldview into a pagan setting, especially when the only resources they have reliable access to are a torrent of “beginner” books that don’t provide an adequate path for deeper spiritual connection or growth.
Given all of this, what are we doing as a community to position the discourse around who we are in a way that is detached from Christianity - as neither followers of The Adversary or as some form of post-Christian eco-spirituality? How is the information we are putting out for public consumption actively engaged in shaping the understanding of who we are? How and where are we engaged in the fight for what it actually means to be Pagan in the United States?
It doesn’t help that we Pagans are also a fairly insular group. We tend to come together in small, known groups for ritual and community, assuming we have one that is accessible to us. When we do engage in larger or more public rituals it is usually under the coordination of a local group, like CUUPs, and/or part of a Pagan Pride Day. There are also the larger multi-day conferences or retreats that happen across the country, some of which go a long way to providing a diversity of voices and perspectives, but that remain financially or logistically inaccessible to many. We also generally don’t tend to evangelize or convert people to Paganism, so we don’t have any sort of coordinated spiritual outreach arm that is well-suited to providing an appealing elevator pitch. (Not that a comprehensive one could even exist given the variety not just of paths or traditions under the Pagan umbrella, but also the importance we place on personal gnosis.)
In thinking about all of this I kept thinking about the queer liberation movement. There is a reason we refer to being publicly Pagan as “coming out of the broom closet”, it carries parallel risks to “coming out of the closet” as LGBTQ+. The early LGBTQ+ civil rights movement lead by folks like Frank Kameny sought to gain tolerance and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community by showing the American public that we are just like them, that we can fit into the same boxes as they do. For example, the early strikes required men to wear suits and women to wear skirts. It was an early attempt at liberation by assimilation and being as non-threatening as possible in an effort to be seen as human. Later groups like the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Lavender Menace formed embraced the idea of “queerness” and reframed the debate around LGBTQ+ identity and rights from being a defensive approach to a proactive, celebratory grassroots movement that sought not only to humanize LGBTQ+ individuals but encourage those in the community to be public about who they were. National Coming Out Day (NCOD), established in 1988, is one example of how this shift in controlling the narrative manifested. NCOD was originally established by Robert Eichberg and Jean O’Leary as a political and social mechanism for increasing the awareness of the lived experiences of the LGBTQ+ community. As Eichberg stated in 1993:
Most people think they don't know anyone gay or lesbian, and in fact, everybody does. It is imperative that we come out and let people know who we are and disabuse them of their fears and stereotypes.
It is this history of queer liberation and organizing that I kept coming back to when reading the many responses to Rabbi Wolpe’s article. Research has shown that knowing someone who is LGBTQ+ can go a long way towards combatting homophobia and support for anti-LGBTQ+ policies. The power to shift the narrative about a group doesn’t exist solely in the hands of those who find themselves elevated into positions of public prominence, it is a power we all share and should put to use. A great example of how we can show up publicly as Pagans in a way that pushes back against conservative rhetoric and provides a tangible example of our faith in action is the Southern Delta Church of Wicca. The Wild Hunt has a great article about their food pantry garden which they recently received a federal grant to expand, and how they are helping to not only feed folks in their local community but changing the perception of Wicca in rural Arkansas.
We are right to push back against attacks on our community. It is vitally important to point out when someone is misrepresenting us or clearly has no understanding of who we are. But we cannot stop there and then act surprised when these types of attacks driven by ignorance and misinformation continue. Talking amongst ourselves will do nothing to change the public perception of the Pagan community, and ceding our community power to the forces of capitalist exploitation and techbros will not shift the discourse. The only way to change the conversation is to be part of it as often as possible.
In the time between writing and publishing this post I came across Byron Ballard’s response to the article on her Facebook page. She is the first person I’ve seen to explicitly share the importance of the grassroots work of talking about who we are, and the increasing need to keep those conversations going. Given her work around community organizing, practical survival magic, and the coining of ‘Tower Time’ for our current era, I’m not surprised her response centers on the daily person-to-person work we can do. You can find the full response on her Facebook page, but I’ll share the conclusion here:
We as Pagan and Pagan-affiliated communities have some choices to make. Once we are past the outrage of this opinion piece, we would be wise to consider how we keep our events, our gathering places and our people as safe as possible and how we have the conversation about who we are and what we do—again and again.
