The rise of neo-paganism (No, this one is NOT SATIRE)

America was founded by Christian Puritans, who had a deep aversion to idolatry, popery, and magic. The hardships and dangers of their predicament made them cling to their religion as the one thing that justified the perilous pilgrimage to the New World. And from time to time they would tremble before the thought that paganism lay not only around them, but within, where it was all the more dangerous because hidden from view. So began the trials of suspected witches and the vigilant denunciations of neighbors that tore the New England communities apart.

Constant immigration has diversified the religious inheritance of the United States. Nevertheless the country remained until recently predominantly Christian, with a continuing aversion to pagan cults and superstitions, and a trust in the Bible as the common inheritance of the Judeo-Christian faiths. Indeed the United States has been held together more effectively by its Bible culture than by its Constitution: for the Bible has shaped the language, the morality, and the aspirations of ordinary Americans and provided them with a common frame of reference. American patriotism is scarcely thinkable without the Judeo-Christian God as its Almighty Guardian, and it is hardly surprising to find that the outlying communities in America-many of them suspicious of the Constitution as a weapon used against them by urban liberals-cling to the Bible as their most trusted guide. Debates over school prayer, over creationism and the curriculum, over abortion and sex education, are not, in America, the halfhearted affairs they are in Europe. On the contrary, they are at the center of politics since they affect the deep-down loyalty of many Americans to the settlement under which they live.

Strange things are now happening to this religious inheritance. The Christian churches have clung to their congregations, but often at the cost of dividing and subdividing into ever more marginal sects, each striving to accommodate the eccentricities of some obstinate community of believers. Almost none of the old denominations retains any centralized authority that can control the doctrine, liturgy, or membership of its peripheral congregations, while new cults and new services spring up everywhere, as dormant religious passions ignite like forest fires. In Europe we observe the slow, steady decline in faith, and the gradual disappearance of human hopes behind a cloud of skepticism. In America, however, every loss of faith is met by a gain, as new religious practices rise in the places vacated by the old. That this should be happening now, in the age of scientific inquiry, is testimony to the strength of American society, which finds new sources of hope beneath the never-ending stream of disappointment. Nevertheless, these sources of hope make less and less reference to the Bible and the Judeo-Christian tradition and are more and more pagan in tone. That which the Pilgrim fathers found most horrendous- witchcraft-is the latest, and one of the most successful, among the pagan cults now colonizing America.

Of course the witches-devotees of "Wicca," as they like to say-strenuously argue that their faith has been traduced in the past, that it is older and deeper and more spiritual than Christianity, and that it was branded as evil only because it was seen as a threat to the "patriarchal" culture. And by way of proving the point they have cobbled together a very up-to- date and user-friendly version of goddess-worship, which answers so well to the spiritual hunger of modern Americans as to cast serious doubt on its antiquity. Their basic principle-"Harm none and do what you will"-is the gospel of liberalism dressed up as law, rather than the lack of it; their "covens" are in many cases vamped-up feminist circles, devoted to boosting the confidence of women downtrodden by men, or at any rate by their own image of men; their symbols-the pentagram, the altar, the nine- inch daggers or "athames," the long robes, and the leaping over flames-may have ancient precedents, but they come to the Wiccans from 19th-century charlatans like Eliphas Levi and Aleister Crowley, men who cannily judged the spiritual hunger of the new middle classes and thereby notched up women by the score. Indeed, as Philip G. Davis has shown (Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neo-pagan Feminist Spirituality), the Wiccan theology is derived not from the old forms of goddess-worship, but from the writings of 19th-century commentators like Johann Jacob Bachofen, who invented the notion of a lost matriarchal past in a work that is now entirely discredited.

Still, religion will survive any amount of skeptical scholarship, and the Wiccans are no exception. They offer the commodity for which modern Americans are hungry-the conversion experience, the transition from dark to light, lost to found, outsider to insider. In comparison with this redemptive gift, other things are of no account. The covens have been spreading through the suburbs; even the military now recognizes the Wiccans as a "minority religion," with the right to hold rituals and classes for serving personnel. Weak though their doctrines may be from any intellectual or historical perspective, they are a triumph of applied anthropology. Feminism, environmentalism, and liberalism all come together in a religion that recognizes the goddess as the object of worship, the priestess as her representative, and the earth and its seasons as the source of sacred rites.

It is tempting to regard the Wiccans in the same light as the other cults that have recently sprung up in America-the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, the Moonies, the church of the notorious Rev. Jim Jones. There are, however, two important features that distinguish them. There is no leader or founder of the Wiccan cult; and there is no sacred text. Witchcraft is a religion without any structure of command and without any written law. True, there is an attempt to compensate in the use of antique and fustian language-"yclad," "mote," "hallowmas." But the religion recognizes no objective authority to which the worshipper must submit. On the contrary, it is a religion of "empowerment," to use the feminist word. Spells and brews, chants and talismans are all weapons in the hands of the individual Wiccan, who gains power over self and others through the manipulation of things. True, the Wiccan draws on mysterious cosmic forces; but the purpose of the spell and ritual is to join these forces to yourself-to amplify your own power and so achieve a kind of here-and-now redemption.

In this, at least, the Wiccans are close to the witches as they were once imagined. The witch was anathema to the Christian believer because she had arrogated to herself the powers that belong to the Almighty. Her spells were the antithesis of the sacred text-indeed, it was often thought that they consisted in reciting Biblical or liturgical texts backwards. For they were expressions of the individual will, rather than admonitions and counsels of a higher power. All the discipline of religion-which consists in obedience to the divine command and a day-to-day study of its meaning- was negated in the Puritan image of the witch, which is why witches were so greatly feared. They were the archetype of the liberated human being- the human being who had stepped free from the chains of morality and seized the world and its glories for herself.

For this very reason, however, witchcraft has a singular appeal to modern Americans, increasing numbers of whom are brought up without any knowledge of a sacred text and without the language and the concepts of the Judeo- Christian tradition. The idea that religion might be a matter of obedience and example strikes them as weird; the idea that it is a matter of the self and its empowerment connects immediately with the surrounding secular culture.

But why isn't feminism enough? Why the need for a Wiccan religion? What is added by religion that is absent from the politics of the group?

The answer is enchantment. Science has disenchanted the universe and deprived us of our place at its center. Human beings cannot live with this demoralized world. They need to see their environment as their tribal forebears saw it: as an enchanted place, which mysteriously returns our glance. The spell answers directly to this need, since it enables the witch to reanimate her universe. It gives supernatural power to a human being, and so rescues her from nature.

Rituals, spells, and incantations are deliberate defiances of reason. They place nonsense in the center of people's lives and ask them to unite in believing it. People on their own are nothing-victims of the natural world, and at the mercy of their own skepticism. People in a group, however, have a power that is more than the sum of their individual efforts. And the spell symbolizes this power. Alone you could not possibly believe in it, since alone you have only reason as your guide. Together, however, you can believe anything. In short, the Wiccans have rediscovered the phenomenon observed by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep-the rite of passage, which purges the individual of his isolation and grants him membership in the tribe. The rite of passage works by summoning occult powers, by standing outside nature and against it, and by reassuring the individual that, absorbed into the community, he cannot be harmed.

And that is what is missing from modern life, and especially from life in the American city. The most important rite of passage in recent Western societies was marriage-the consecration before the community of a lifelong commitment. The collapse of marriage is not the result of feminism, but the cause of it. Without lasting marriages, women have no real guarantee of security, and no reason for trusting men. If men cannot be trusted, then women have to set up on their own. Feminism turns on the masculine realm and deconstructs it, representing it as a realm of lies, manipulation, and the brutal misuse of power. It thereby reassures women that they don't need men in any case. But it relies on rational arguments, sociological theories, and objective policies-so leaving the heart unconsoled. What is needed is a new form of membership, a new rite of passage, and a new lifelong commitment-hence a new form of nonsense. In other words, what is needed is witchcraft. This is surely why the Wiccans are expanding, even though they have neither a leader, nor a doctrine, nor a text.

On the other hand, a cult that spreads so quickly, and that has so little substance when it comes to answering the great metaphysical questions, is ripe for takeover by the real witches. Strong personalities like Aleister Crowley preyed on the vulnerable loners who had lost their religion but not their religious need, and who wanted to throw themselves beneath the juggernaut of some crushing ego. Modern America has seen the emergence of these leaders-Koresh and Jones being symptomatic. And it has discovered that their promise of a new life is also a death threat. For the moment, the Wiccans speak only of peace and love and finding oneself. But without a doctrine or a text to protect them, they may soon find themselves opening the door to the Devil. Those old Puritans were wrong about many things; but they were not entirely wrong about witchcraft.

I'm not trying to make fun or put you down or anything, but if, as you say, they're all pretty much the same, then why not adhere to the one most familiar to you, instead of searching high and low for the ultimate moral foundation?

You say it's an exhibition, not a competition, but you yourself are (or were, I don't know if you still are) "shopping", as it were, for the "ultimate" moral foundation, which I assume would mean the "best", which implies a selection process using your criteria. In other words, your characterization sounds exactly like a competition to me, and the best one gets you as a prize. I can't blame you for that. Why wager yourself for anything less than what you think is best?

As for me, I'm glad you told me they're pretty much all the same, since that means I'm not missing out on anything by not window-shopping for what I already have at home.

Religion has always been fascinating to me. To understand a society you have to understand the religion. I did spend a lot of time seeking but the deeper I got into it the more I saw the fingerprints of man and the further I got from an ability to believe in the supernatural. In the end I'm happiest as an atheist. The religion I was raised in was mostly Catholic, given the long history of child molestation that has plagues The Church for my entire life (this current spate is just the recent stuff, they've been shuffling child molesters from one parish to another for at least 30 years) there's going to have to be some major changes before I'll walk into that door.

The other half of my early life was spent in charismatic evangelical territory (Four Square Gospel, The Door, nice people) and that just wasn't a good fit. Having been formed in the rather stodgy environment of Catholocism where your faith was very private all that witnessing and stuff just didn't sit well with me (not saying it's bad but when you're idea of going to church is sitting down and listening to the priest for an hour people having seizures in the aisles is pretty frightening stuff). It's taken me a LONG time to overcome that uptight attitude enough that I can even discuss religion in anything more than a theoretical level. And I still get twitchy when I see athletes yelling out to Jesus and stuff... with how I was raised it's like they just took their thing out and started wanking right there on TV (sex being the other thing that simply is absolutely private in every way).

That's really the stuff that sent me on my way. But really religion has never sat well on my personality. If there is a God He made me a very self assured self reliant person who has a hard time bending knee to actual people I can actually see and who can deliver quick clear punishment; as for bending knee to someone I just have to believe is there, that's beyond out of the question.

But I still study religions, it's fun. It's an interesting view into how people think and have thought at various times in human history. But now I study them as a third party, I'm not thinking of joining any, I'm just studying them to study (gotta do something with all these hours I'm awake).

Not that I'm actually proposing mass executions, that's a bit extreme. But really don't you think that if all the Sharon's and Arafat's were out of the picture the normal Jews and Palestinians could settle things over coffee? Much like how if all the Christianity insulting atheists and atheism insulting Christians were out of the way this could be settled. In the end what to both Christians and atheists want? They want what everybody wants, to be left alone to do their thing without getting hassled for it.

But really religion has never sat well on my personality.

That may just be your problem. 'Religion' is man trying to make himself good enough for God...and it never works. Christianity is God doing all of that...and then simply asking us to receive His free gift of righteousness. There is a world of difference.

If there is a God He made me a very self assured self reliant person who has a hard time bending knee to actual people I can actually see...

You sound like you have the first part that the Revolutionists who founded this Republic had figured out...their battle-cry was, "NO KING BUT JESUS!".

I know exactly how you feel about how people think and used to think throughout history.

You'll forgive me for mentioning this, but it seems to me from your brief description of your journey that what has turned you off has been the actions of people, not God. Especially in Christianity, it's very troubling to me to see all the many different human mistakes being made, even with the best intentions. I can identify with you in that aspect. But in the end, for me, I decided never to let Christians stand between me and Christ.

Not that I'm actually proposing mass executions, that's a bit extreme. But really don't you think that if all the Sharon's and Arafat's were out of the picture the normal Jews and Palestinians could settle things over coffee? Much like how if all the Christianity insulting atheists and atheism insulting Christians were out of the way this could be settled.

You are hardly the first person to make this argument. I have a hunch your brand of thinking would have fit in quite well in 1920's and 30's German society.

As it was then it could easily be now. Start down that philosopical road, and at the end you will find death camps, and the destruction of nations.

But it just doesn't work for me. If it works for you great, run with it. My battle cry would be shorter, it would just be "NO KING". That's what works for me. That's how I'm happy. A lot of adult conversions talk about a moment of clarity, of everything being really confusing and then suddenly clicking into place, of being lost and then finally figuring out their place in the world. That exact same thing happened to me, but instead of it all being triggered by accepting God into my life it was all triggered when I kicked Him out. That's when the world finally made sense for me. This is why I don't harrangue the believers, I didn't become an atheist in an act of rebellion, I did it because it was the answer for me. But I understand that we can't all have the same answer, whatever answer works for you is the one you should use.

Sorry, Chesterson doesn't know what he's talking about. I've been an atheist for 20 years and haven't played with any of that stuff.
Here's what I think: the only thing I believe in is me, I know what I'm capable of and I know how to make my life work. I don't believe in God,

Do you actually know anything about Wicca? Of course not. The highest precept of their faith is "do no harm". Not a bad start for a moral foundation I think.

There appears to be a bit too much protesting goin’ on around here. Atheists interest me in their ability to demean those of established religions while vehemently defending those that are on the edges. I sometimes have to wonder about their protestations. I am a “lapsed” Baptist. I found that the effort to live by their creed was just something I was not able or willing to exert. However; I don’t blame the Baptists for “forcing their morality” on me I just decided not to be a hypocrite. The reason for the rise in the new-age religions IMO is they are really easy to follow since nothing is required to do so beyond the ability to “do as you will”.

All one has to imagine of such "peaceful", "enlightened", and "enchanting" belief systems as Islam, Scientology, and Wicca, is a world or country dominated by the likes of them...Pure Evil, even if its participants are oblivious.

That's as may be, but America was founded (partly) because people were not free to practice religion as they wished. Religious freedom is a cornerstone of our great land.

And when people start deciding THIS religion or THAT religion is unacceptable, how long before they get to Judaism? There has always been a worldwide intolerance of that religion.

But I understand that we can't all have the same answer, whatever answer works for you is the one you should use.

But what if I served the moon-god, and he told me to exterminate all athiests like yourself?

What would happen then to your 'you do your thing, I'll do mine' fallacy?

If there is no God, why would it be wrong for me to exterminate you?

After all, I'm just doing my thing, right?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.