But Christians hate them
Any religious or spiritual practice outside the church’s seal of approval can be attributed to only one source–Satan, another church contrivance created by religious ignoramuses and bigots. And Satan, we all know, must be destroyed.
Editor’s note: In the face of the more recent rise of right-wing, Christian bigotry, it’s worthwhile to revisit church bias and its influence on culture.
By Stacey Warde
The church’s myopic vision of itself often leaves believers thinking history started with Jesus. Christians forget the tens of thousands of years of human history that predate Jesus, or they write them off as irrelevant.
Or worse, they’re entirely ignorant of the way the world was before the time of Christ. They haven’t any clue about how people lived, or what they believed, unless it’s in the context of biblical archeology, or viewed through the theologically “superior” filters of the church doctors.
Thus, Christianity’s take on history is rife with prejudice and ignorance, strengthened by the supposed enlightened, God-inspired, doctrinaire twists and turns of yarns spun from the Bible. Christians wrap an entire history, no matter how inconvenient, in a fabric of their own making–”the world as it was,” as seen through the cloak of church dogma.
Of course, history viewed in this fashion makes it easier for Christians to discard as morally and spiritually inferior any and all other religious practices and faiths that don’t have the biblical and patriarchal colored thread running through them. Especially marked for scorn, if not outright hatred, by good Christians intent on spreading God’s love, are pagans and other nature lovers who lived and worshiped in the countryside, and who mostly resisted early Christianity’s claim to preeminence in all things spiritual. Pagans, by most accounts, were good people but the church has never viewed them that way.
This unfortunate myopia has led to needless persecution and suffering for those who have refused to acknowledge the church’s declarations of primacy, power and truth. The history of the church is replete with cruelty toward people who draw their spiritual nourishment from other sources, whether from trees, oracles, yoga, crystal balls or a stack of cards. Christians typically ascribe the source of these peculiar practices to the devil. Any religious or spiritual practice outside the church’s seal of approval can be attributed to only one source–Satan, another church contrivance created by religious ignoramuses and bigots. And Satan, we all know, must be destroyed.
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In 1999, I attended a spring conference of Episcopal Communicators at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. The aged and hallowed place of learning was the perfect setting for the annual gathering of intelligent, liberally minded editorial professionals, whose job is to offer clear-headed perspective and keep Episcopalians informed about the world around them, and on events affecting the modern American church.
While sitting at lunch one afternoon, I overheard at my table two women, both leaders in their respective dioceses, confide that they had examined and studied Wicca, a modern and, in some cases, formalized remake of ancient pagan rituals, derogatorily known as witchcraft. I respected these women because they had been doing their jobs for a long time, had advanced in their careers, kept a good humor about themselves and their work in the church, and were well-known and liked by their peers at the conference.
“You guys have looked into Wicca?” I queried, astounded at their admission of going outside church boundaries for spiritual nourishment. I’d never heard anyone in the church say one nice thing about pagans or witches. It’s more rare than a female Catholic priest, rarer still that highly esteemed women in the church would confide their own respectable interest in pagan practices. Coincidentally, I had also recently found a similar interest in nature religions and in people who had practiced pagan rituals long before Christians decided it was a good thing to burn them at the stake.
“Yes!” they responded in hushed tones. “We’ve even participated in some of their gatherings.”
“Why? What do you get out of it?”
For women, they said, Wicca offered empowering alternatives to the wooden assurances from an institution still essentially run and governed by men. Sure, women were being ordained, finally, after nearly 2,000 years of church history, and yes, the Episcopal Church was first among mainstream Christian institutions to ordain women, but they were basically still second-class citizens whose rise to prominence in church power circles was then being stifled by what was known as the “stained glass ceiling.”
Women aren’t likely to find stained-glass ceilings under a canopy of trees in the forest or in nature where feminine principles of birthing, nurture and sensuality abound and receive their due respect. I had also begun to look into the history of religious practices that predated the church and found that nature religions, which observed the seasons and the elements and respected the body as much as the spirit, were as sophisticated and intelligent as any. In fact, pagans appeared to be more at ease with themselves and natural systems, and better at understanding their environment than “subdue-and-dominate-the-earth” Christians.
In their discomfort with nature, and the formalized pagan observances associated with her, churchgoers will be quick to note that paganism–especially the Wiccan variety–offers devil-inspired, and ignorant, forms of worship. The church views paganism as aberrant spiritual practices that put destructive forces into play, where men and women perform rituals to invoke magick and demonic power, and engage in a tantalizing dance with the devil that leads to darkness and death. Sadly, Christian contempt for pagans is based as much on superstition and bugaboos as it is on practical experience or reasonable theological explanations.
Further investigation shows, however, that pagan rituals most likely originated from primitive, earth-based experiences in which devotees lived in closer contact with plants, animals and soil. Their knowledge of herbs and natural medicines, and their acute awareness of the seasons and how these played a vital role in the survival of the community or tribe, led to observances and practices that were often ritualized and celebrated.
Primitive cultures incorporated ritual to note the change of seasons, the passage of the sun and moon, the shortening and lengthening of days, and these helped to guide them in their seasonal rhythms for planting, tending, harvesting and storing food. These rituals played a vital role in the community’s survival. They weren’t merely window dressing, as some rituals in the church, for the emotionally distraught, or for casting spells on their enemies.
Along the way, Christian orthodoxy demonized even the simplest and most basic of these rituals, which were birthed from the natural order of things. And where these rituals weren’t demonized or outlawed upon penalty of death, or where indigenous people refused to let go of them, they were co-opted by the church and turned into “Christian” observations. Most notable, of course, are Christmas and Easter, originally pagan observances noting the cycles of life, and respectively, the return of the sun and rebirth.
Unfortunately, so many of today’s Christians fail to understand where their own rituals and observations originated. Consequently, they tend to view their sacred traditions as unique, original, and the only “true” forms of religious practice for understanding the spiritual and material worlds. It’s easy, therefore, to demonize any religious form that doesn’t conform to their models, and to ostracize or condemn anyone who participates in unorthodox or non-Christian religious observances.
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The women at the conference agreed that earth-based religions offered another viable option for understanding the world, for gaining self-knowledge, enlightenment, personal power and spiritual renewal–albeit in a context viewed unfavorably by the church. The church claims its right as the only institution in which these qualities can be properly exercised, under the watchful care and eye of the priesthood, which in turn performs the task of submitting everything to the scrutiny of church doctrine.
Ideally, the hierarchy works best under the compassionate embrace of Jesus. The benefits of self-knowledge and the wielding of personal power, especially, ought to always be engaged with the same measure of humility as Christ, which you seldom see in church circles where women do not share seats of power.
I understood the women’s curiosity about paganism and spiritual sources outside the church that promise renewed energy, power, or even love. The church, try as it might, seemed often to fail individual believers, as well as the larger Christian community, in giving them the necessary tools to grow and rely less on authority, to find personal strength through love and through a healthful, life-affirming connection with nature. It had generally failed, as it does today, to challenge power structures that have destroyed communities through graft, greed, corruption, and environmental decimation. It had failed to appreciate the wisdom of ancient nature religions, pointing instead to their aberrations, rather than acknowledging their reverence for natural processes upon which all life depends. Finally, it had failed in myriad other ways and it was no wonder why Christians would then seek hope or empowerment outside the church.
The conversation struck a chord and I couldn’t shake it from my mind. Weary of the hypocrisy, the false enthusiasms and ennui hobbling church gatherings, weary in fact of its authoritarian governance and crippling oversight, and outraged at the ongoing intolerance for and prejudice against other religious groups and practices, I wrote an account of my encounter with these daring women, defending pagans and encouraging a dialog with them in the diocesan newspaper that I was then editing. (Friends later observed that I had written my own termination piece.)
The piece lobbied readers to consider the benefits of an interfaith dialog with pagans in a similar vein to the church’s attempts to converse with other denominations. Clearly, an earth-based connection to the numinous might give Christians new insight into their religious experiences, might even lead to new sources of inspiration, and a more complete understanding of the world in which we live.
“The revival of ancient pre-Christian religious practices,” I wrote, “including shamanism, suggests to me that the Living Water we seek might also be found in sources other than in official church doctrines, fables and rituals, which remain in desperate need of renewal.”
I threw open the possibility of finding spiritual truth and renewal in sources beyond the confines of church dogma and hierarchy and ritual. I never suggested Christians join their pagan brothers and sisters, also children of God whom God loves, to worship the forces of darkness. I asked only that Christians try to open their minds and look at history with a different, less biased filter, one not so densely opaque with prejudice against non-Christians. I had hoped, rather naively it turns out, that Christians might find at least an objective interest in and curiosity about the way people lived and worshiped during the tens of thousands of years prior to the birth of Christ, especially since so many of their own traditions were established long before the various church councils wrote them into law.
The commentary, titled “Neopaganism: Revival of nature religions could be instructive for Christians languishing from church torpor,” resulted in numerous letters, most notable of which were those sent by church leaders. One, from an abbot in a Midwest monastery, suggested I quit the church immediately and go work for Satan. Another letter writer, pretending to agree with the commentary, suggested that we go on a church outing, climb a mountain and “throw human sacrifices into a volcano.”
Reactions like these, I thought, proved my point. Dogmatized Christians live in fear of and cannot fathom holding an intelligent or rational conversation with people who would rather spend a day in the forest than sit in a musty church and listen to diatribes against gays, pagans, and women priests. That’s less of an issue for Episcopalians but it’s easy to find members who’ll squawk just the same, as they did in response to my commentary about the possibility of pagans in their midst.
In the end, I got fired for it. The bishop’s secretary called within days of publication and said the good bishop was eager to meet with me to talk about my article. She made it sound like fun and games and I expressed my concern that the bishop was going to fire me. “Oh, he wouldn’t fire you,” she assured me. “He just wants to meet with you.” I knew better and on a warm afternoon at Keefer’s Restaurant in King City, over tea and tapioca pudding, the bishop informed me that my services were no longer needed. I reminded him that four months and nearly $18,000 of income remained in our contract.
“Well, we’ve got a problem,” he said.
“You should honor our contract and let me go after it’s completed,” I urged.
He refused and cut me off, effective immediately. Suddenly, I had no job and no means to support myself, and in the end I had to hire an attorney and threaten a lawsuit before I received compensation for the four months remaining in the breached contract. Meanwhile, I incurred debts and was forced to move out of my home. The bishop’s vindictiveness spoke volumes about his commitment to God’s love for sinners and of his willingness to honor his word. But most of all it reconfirmed for me the terrible meanness and ignorance that arise when Christians choose to demonize the things they don’t understand.
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Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice.
