But the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. The type of love that I stress here is not eros, a sort of esthetic or romantic love; not philia, a sort of reciprocal love between personal friends; but it is agape which is understanding goodwill for all men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the lives of men. This is the love that may well be the salvation of our civilization.
— the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
For a long time, I’ve been weighing a post – or a series of posts – on the ways that Paganism fails. Or, if you prefer, the ways Paganisms fail, since members of our community cannot agree that we are practicing different iterations of the same religion. I suppose this sort of gatekeeping is endemic to human endeavor; there’s a tendency to differentiate one’s own tribe from those who might do or believe something differently – even when those differences seem piddling or minor to the true outsider.
That tribalism, in effect, gives a whiff of danger to explorations like this. All too often, we view any sort of critique or criticism as enmity: You are either with us or against us. That, in a nutshell, is tribalism: the expectation of conformity, the withholding of questions, the adherence to “tradition” even when that tradition desperately needs changing.
Yeah, I know what I write may piss people off. “You’re not really a Pagan, then!” I assure you that I am, and remain, Pagan. I do rituals every weekend. I sang a prayer to Brighid while getting into my car this morning.
But just because I am Pagan doesn’t mean I think we’re problem-free. Obviously, we’re not, since we’re people. And like all people, we fall into conceptual ruts, avoiding the thorns and pointy bits and leaning into comfort – both shiny and soul-sucking. Because despair is also a kind of comfort.
I have this weird drive to ask the uncomfortable questions – the questions about values, meaning and purpose, the design of the world we are ultimately choosing to create.
For reasons of power dynamics, though, we tend to avoid values-related questions and prickle at those who ask such questions. To admit the existence of unknowns, much less acknowledge mistakes, is to enter into a kind of vulnerability. We don’t like to be vulnerable or to humble ourselves; we find comfort in knowing all the answers and feeling the press of the herd at our flanks, even when that herd is headed off a cliff.
And our society, which prizes hierarchy and force, embraces this. Don’t question: Just do what you’re told and buy lots of plastic shit to make yourself feel better.
Granted, it’s one of those weird truths that we become what we most fiercely reject. (I’ll come back to this point repeatedly.) Ergo: People who fiercely reject authority and embrace questioning can end up unilaterally believing any old thing they read on the Internet, as long as it’s “subversive” and weird … and thus QAnon is born. Conspiratorial thinking isn’t just limited to New Agers and evangelicals; it cuts a swathe across religions, political orientations and any other category you care to name.
So, even questioning can go awry when done without discernment; we require a certain tension from opposing functions to maintain the balance. It’s not enough to “question everything”; you also need to evaluate ideas as to their applicability, goals and values.
I’m a big proponent of the messy middle. In my view, we are all co-creators of Flatland, along with microbes and meteors; we have sovereignty and thus agency, although not sole agency. The immensely complicated web of All-That-Is exists somewhere between the New Age “we create our own reality” horseshit and the “we’re all just passive pawns on the Divine gameboard” bullshit.
And … purpose shapes cultures, societies and ecosystems on the micro and macro scales, so choose your purpose wisely.
Praying for the meteor
There is a hole at the heart of Paganism.
And that hole is why Christianity was able to gain ground in the first place – because it’s situated squarely in our human values… or rather, our lack of human values.
Earth religions are well-known for valuing nature; pretty universally, we see the Divine within the Green World and natural phenomena of all types. We are also known for relationality of another sort: with Gods and spirits. Pagans of a more atheistic bent may interpret this metaphorically, but I’d wager that most of us are saguna types who fall somewhere on the polytheistic spectrum.
If you look at the long arc of history, Pagans absolutely suck when it comes to fellow human beings, from human sacrifice the world over, to slavery and caste systems, to empire.
Obviously, monotheists do all of these things, too, but Pagans did them first because we were here first. (Yes, monotheists engage in human sacrifice all the time. We call it “state execution” and “the Second Amendment,” but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.) Polytheistic peoples invented these systems of oppression.
We flee from this recognition – and so we become what we reject. This is why Pagans are prone, sadly, to some truly dysfunctional lines of thought. How many times do you hear things like, “Humans are a cancer and should be wiped out!” “The earth is better off without us!” “Praying for the meteor in 2024!”
Who is the “we” in this scenario? Are the Indigenous people in the Brazilian rainforest the problem? A villager in rural India? And if we say that no, we actually mean Americans or First World people in general, which Americans? Is the poor woman working as a hotel cleaner part of the problem? How about your grandma? The postal worker who always has a smile and a wave for you on her route?
How is wishing death on humanity not a form of oppression? By the same token, fantasizing an Apocalypse-type scenario with civil war, mass death and remaking the world in the image of the in-group is also a form of oppression, whether it comes from Christians, Pagans or “godless Commies.”
There is some debate over the definition of “ecofascism,” but personally, I think that any philosophy that romanticizes the mass death of human beings as protective of nature fits the bill, regardless of whether they fall to the left or right on the political spectrum.
It is not enough to love Nature. It is not enough to love the Gods.
To fill that hole in our ethical heart, Pagans need to care about other people. Human people.
In which I am put into the weird position of actually defending Christ
Paganism, as a whole, lacks the concept of “beloved community” as set forth by MLK Jr. Variants of that concept are found in all three Abrahamic religions, but Christianity is most pertinent to my purposes, so that’s what I will talk about.
Agape, or spiritual love, is the actual foundation of Christianity – the original, “following Jesus” kind that came before the religion’s unholy alliance with empire and the firearms industry. God loves humanity, and therefore humanity must love one another. And we must enact that love: specifically, to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Agape provides the foundation for social justice – and that’s why Christianity took off during the Roman Empire. There are actually fine and worthy things about polytheistic Rome … but the treatment of fellow human beings isn’t one of them, particularly after its devolution from messy republic to authoritarian empire. This is a world that viewed gladiatorial contests as popular entertainment, for example, and sacrificed people during triumphal parades for the glory of Rome.
In short, Rome lost its founding virtues because Julius Caesar saw the phenomenon of “divine kings” in Egypt and the ancient Middle East and wanted it for himself. As Lord Acton put it: “Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.” Acton is also the original author of “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Once you start on that slide, a bunch of stabby senators in togas aren’t enough to put a stop to it.
Jesus was born into a nation overrun and ruled by the Roman Empire and fighting against that empire for liberation. The expanding, multicultural empire aside, it was still a tribal world, in which people warred against their neighbors.
It used to be even worse: The Old Testament is heavy on the genocide, for example, and demonizes neighbors even if they were technically the same people. Random fun facts: the ancient Israelites were a subset of the larger Canaanite people, who were called the Phoenicians by Greece and Rome. The Samaritans actually practiced – and still do, although they’re a tiny population – a mildly divergent form of Judaism. There were a shit-ton of conflicts and wars, and the ancient Israelite tribes – known for being warriors and hired in Egypt as mercenaries – ended up losing to the Assyrians and Babylonians long before the fall to Rome.
Tribalism is a blood stain splashed upon the entire Old Testament, although the Israelites certainly weren’t alone in this; they just wrote it down, which is how we know about it. Celtic peoples, for example, were intensely tribal – which is how Rome was able to divide and conquer Gaul and Britain.
In such a world, the idea that we can come together in a community that cares for one another – even slaves! – was utterly radical. Early Christianity was immensely different from the personal, state and mystery religions of polytheistic Rome because it had a utopian, communitarian vision at its heart that was unlike anything else around. Which is why the powerless flocked to it – including women, who appeared to have equal or nearly equal standing in the early Church, an inconvenient fact erased by subsequent millennia.
The Eleusinian Mysteries probably came the closest, in that everyone who spoke Greek could take part in them. Still, “beloved community” wasn’t the point of Eleusis – but it was in early Christianity.
‘Have you no sense of decency, sir?’
Obviously, Christianity went off the rails quite early on – when it accepted the opportunity proffered by Constantine to become a tool of empire, in exchange for becoming the only game in town. Out went the women and the slaves because absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But that utopian, communitarian instinct remained – and has popped up repeatedly, fueling calls for social justice, albeit exercised in fairly narrow parameters given the prejudices of the day. It’s not a coincidence that MLK Jr. was a Christian minister.
Some Pagans, at least, seem to recognize that we have areas of lack in contrast to other, more established faith-paths. Ergo: the thrust in some corners of Paganism to establish sanctioned clergy.
But you can’t structure your way to beloved community; that’s just rearranging deck chairs, and there are other problems besides. Beloved community is a question of values, the theology that undergirds our practices and our practices themselves.
I’ve written a lot about virtue through the years, mostly because Pagan organizations – probably inspired by modern Asatru – not infrequently adopt lists of virtues to promote. But the famous Nine Noble Virtues were created by honest-to-Gods fascists. I am not kidding. I am not exaggerating. I am not making this up.
And all of those virtues are very individual in nature (“self-reliance!” “industriousness!”), based on – well – a very stereotypically macho, libertarian view of the world. There is no kindness, or care, or love of one’s fellows. They are “warrior virtues” that actually bear no relation to the lived experience of the ancient Norse, who were farmers, lived in communities and gave their plunder to their wives to manage.
I love ADF, but I find their virtues similarly problematic. Like the Asatru version, they are all about individual achievement and excellence. There is no community here, no love.
No human decency. There: I’ve said it.
“Why not excellence?” the ADF motto asks. Because actually giving a shit about each other is more important than piety or scholarship.
The Wiccan Rede comes closer to care: “An’ it harm none, do what thou wilt.” In less fancy language: “You can do what you want, as long as you don’t hurt anybody. Please don’t hurt anybody.” But not doing harm is the bare minimum for ethics, isn’t it?
People are people, and people are not cancer.
To address this huge, gaping hole, Pagans have to let go of all the ecofascist (and regular fascist) tendencies and take an honest and loving look at the place and value of humanity within the multiverse. We are animals, of course, and therefore a part of nature – no different than bees, termites or yellow-bellied sapsuckers. And we are part of the Divine. We are Earth and Sky … just like everything else.
We don’t have to adhere to tribal practices because our ancestors did. We’re creatures who learn and who co-create: We can do one better, and grow better systems and philosophies and practices from the ground up.
I don’t propose that we just swap in concepts or practices from Christianity because spiritual worldviews aren’t exactly plug-and-play. But we can be inspired – and create our own versions of beloved community and start living that community out there in the human wild. Because that’s how change happens: When we make the honest attempt to live up to our values.
First, though, we need to make honest inquiries as to what those values are – and the purpose behind our practices. (More on that in a future episode.) Rather than flee or oppose and risk becoming that which we reject, we need to face our flaws with honesty, humility and discernment. To be daring and look at that hole in our center, and the role we play in filling that hole in a holy, wholesome way.
Beloved community is two words, and we need to learn the meaning of both.
White Cat Grove 
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