Fortean Times ran an an article with an interesting brief history of the emergence of Wicca in Great Britain as well as a look at some pagans who believe their religion is destined to be the religion of the 21st century.
David Barrett covers the 2001 edition of the Pagan Federation conference and writes that,
. . . [Prudence] Jones stressed the strength in Paganism’s diversity. “In our pluralism we have so much to offer the world. In monotheistic religions, one answer solves everything.” In reality, this just wasn’t so, she said. “Paganism is pluralistic–we have many ways of worshipping deity. It is the religion of the 21st century. It respects individuality and it respects others. It welcomes diversity and others ideas.”
. . . Diversity there certainly was in Croydon, and a great deal of celebration too. Fundamentalists of other religions may continue, incorrectly, to attack Paganism as Satanism, but fundamentalists by definition can’t cope with diversity and pluralism. Pagans have already spoken at world religious conference; the time may not be far off when a Pagan priest or priestess stands alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and other religious leaders at major national events, with equality and mutual respect.
I strongly doubt that Paganism is the religion of the future for the same reason that I strongly doubt that libertarianism or anarchocapitalism is the politics of the future (as much as I might like it to be) — it is inherently difficult to create a mass movement from an ideology that explicitly eschews the sort of organizational structures required to spread such ideas widely.
This is especially compounded with religion. In a footnote to his article, Barrett offers that he told a participant to this conference that he was not a pagan. The Wiccan asked him, “You accept that all paths are equally valid?”
“Yes,” Barrett replied, “I’m a pluralist.”
“Then you’re a Pagan,” his unidentified correspondent said.
But standing for some vague pseudo-relativist ideology hardly a religion makes. When people are looking for answers to the big “why questions,” Paganism’s major insight is that there is no correct answer — actually it’s worse than that, Paganism’s true insight is that there are multiple, potentially contradictory, yet nonetheless correct answers (at least correct in the mind of the practitioner).
I think Barrett is spot on when he says that, “the Spirit of the Sixties never died; it transformed into Paganism.”
I’m reminded of two of the most intelligent people I’ve personally known who were both pagans when I met them. One is now an Orthodox priest. The other admits that she is really an atheist but achieves emotional satisfaction through religious rituals, but cannot stomach traditional religions.
“Everything goes” is ultimately an extraordinarily dissatisfying answer to the sort of questions about the universe that traditional religions try to answer (personally, if I ever abandon atheism I’m going to convert to Judaism).
It is also interesting that, like many in the West, the pagans that Barrett quote seem to simply assume that a) individualism and diversity will mark the 21st century, and b) individualism and diversity can be sustained in the absence of strict moral guidelines which everyone accepts to be true.
The first condition is very up in the air. Even without the September 11 attacks, numerous commentators have noted the rise of religious extremism around the world. Many parts of the world — Nigeria comes to mind — are backsliding from relatively liberal regimes back into extremely cruel religious extremism (Nigeria has sentenced a woman to be stoned to death for adultery).
All evidence is that the 9/11 terrorists belong to an ideological group which sees its role as the reconquest of Muslim lands in the name of Allah and a literal interpretation and application of the Koran. That they could actually accomplish this seems absurd at the moment, but stranger things have happened. Who at the turn of the 20th century could have imagined the horrors that Hitler, Stalin and the Khmer Rouge would unleash? If anything, by the 20th century standard, Al Qaeda is aiming a bit low.
A bigger problem for the various pagan variants is whether or not they contain within them the ideas necessary to perpetuate the West’s liberal emphasis on diversity and individualism. The role that Judaism and Christianity played in establishing these facets of our society cannot be underestimated. Today, everyone from athletes to politicians invoke the Christian deity almost absentmindedly, but when Jefferson wrote that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” the inclusion of the Creator was hardly idle talk.
Darwin really opened the floodgates on a process of questioning religious doctrine that had begun with the Reformation. Today the idea that God endows people with inalienable rights is largely fallen by the wayside, especially in Europe — and with it, so has the respect for rights. In fact, the whole idea of “rights” seems like an increasingly untenable concept with little external basis.
As a result, clearly even Western societies have increasingly moved toward utilitarian-based decision making which largely ignores rights. State actions are rarely judged in terms of rights any longer, but rather in terms of whether they produce a net benefit or loss to “society.”
To bring this back to paganism, it would see to be most unprepared to slow down much less reverse this trend. It is interesting to consider that today is Martin Luther King Jr. day in the United States, and King was not motivated by the view that “all paths are valid” but rather by a righteous indignation at the violation of the very rigid moral code that King believed was handed down by God.
We certainly can’t live with the Al Qaeda extremists, but can we survive without folks like King? It seems to this writer that what we need is a return to rational moral absolutism. All paths simply are not valid.
Which is not to say that paganism is simply going to disappear nor that it is necessarily a bad thing, but as an atheist I don’t think a world in which a wishy washy “do your own thing” brand of religion predominates is much of an improvement over the monothestic “our way or the highway” brand of morality.
Source:
Paganism–the Religion of the 21st Century? David V. Barrett, Fortean Times, 2001.