“One of the Fastest-Growing Religious Movements…”

            So reads the bold script in an article from the religion journal of the New York Times entitled “Witches, Druids and Other Pagans Make Merry Again in the Magical Month of May.”  Dancing around a May Pole seems to be the central rite of this hodge-podge group of “self-described Druids, faeries, Dianics, Wiccans, Asatru and ceremonial magicians [whatever that is], as well as practitioners of Norse, Celtic, Germanic, Greco-Roman and other pre-Christian European traditions.”  Make your selection from the menu of options, or, I imagine, just design your own.

            “The [May] pole,” the reader is informed, “is the symbol of the axis mundi [hmm, a little Latin is even thrown in], a symbol of our connections with each other and of our connections with all of creation.”  Well, not exactly.  Actually, the May Pole is a phallic symbol, the center of ancient fertility rites, an invocation to the powers-that-be for the fostering of the upcoming autumn harvest and the flourishing of livestock and human procreation.  That last one is an oddity among a group of people well-known for their avid support of contraception and abortion. 

            But the whimsy only just begins here.  The article recounts a myriad of ritualistic opportunities for people who are, evidently, starving for some sort of “spirituality”:  dancing around the pole; a little West African chant answered by something a bit more modern – “back to the river, back to the sea, back to the ocean, home to me”; the “weaving of the web”; “fire circles”; a ceremonial welcoming of young men into the adult world; traditional witchcraft; a sharing-time that featured pleas for a child’s healing, rejoicing in the completion of academic degrees, and the announcing of the securing of a new job as a firefighter; a workshop on “Polyrhythmic Roads to Ecstasy”; and “a medieval-style feast.” 

            That is, a little bit of this and a little bit of that – all under the umbrella-rubric proclaimed by Margot Adler, a “recognized witch,” that “[t]his is a religion that says the world, the earth, is where holiness resides; it also says that there is no one path to the sacred.”  Pardon me at this point if I so indelicately scratch my head in confusion:  we’ve just been informed that the earth is the locale of holiness and yet, simultaneously, that there is no one path to the sacred.  Okay. But there must be, then, numerous religious paths that never get to the sacred, since these paths do not locate holiness in the earth – religions like Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam; or those religions like Hinduism and Buddhism which do not locate holiness anywhere.  And yet featured at the May Pole merry-making was the strange workshop entitled “Productive Interfacing with ‘Mainstream Religions’.”  “You don’t have to get it whittled down to one answer, one god, one way of being…”, Ms. Adler continued, even as she has just “whittled out” the great majority of the world’s religionists who do not believe that the “earth is where holiness resides.”  I do not point this out to question Ms. Adler’s integrity; I presume she is sincere.  I draw attention to it to delineate what I believe to be the two real hallmarks of this “revival” of paganism:  1) The location of “holiness” in the earth, the world, has the baneful effect of disassociating religion and morality.  Religion becomes a mere “spirituality” that evades the stringent requirement of conformity to and transformation through obedience to moral law; a “religion” that is reduced to spiritual experiences summed up in “Polyrhythmic Roads to Ecstasy.”  Even in ancient paganism – and certainly in Christianity and Judaism – true holiness is not in the earth, but is accomplished in the human being conformed to the will of the divine.  2)  The “doctrine” that there is no one path to the sacred, though it has the aura of “inclusiveness,” actually is exclusive; it excludes the stark exclusivity of Christ (“I am the way, the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”)  It postures as an openness to all, when in fact it tailors everything to the earth, to what its own adherents call an “earth-based spirituality.”

            And here is where we come to the crux of the matter, what this neo-paganism is really all about:  a ritualization – or “spiritualization” – of choice as the basis of earthly, worldly, well-being.  It is the contemporary misunderstanding of the essence of freedom – freedom as having innumerable choices, rather than the fruit of having chosen rightly, the fruit of growth in virtue.  It is the American spiritualization of the supermarket, the shopping mall as model of the new temple.  “Holiness” is “out there,” and I can choose whatever path that pleases me to come to it, whatever that is.  No really defined goal or standard; all is accomplished that needs to be accomplished when I feel good.  Or, as Ms. Hunt, a fallen-away Catholic, put it at the end of this news article:  “Walking in the woods made me feel alive spiritually, it fed me.  Then I began to hear of this group of people for whom the earth is sacred; it gave me goose bumps.”

            The new religion of goose bumps.  It could all be dismissed as just another fad, except that now this movement has the approbation of a prevalent culture that approves of religion only when it is a matter of self-pleasing choice, a feel-good spirituality that tolerates everything… with the exception of those who disagree with its basic principles.  The exclusive claims of Jesus Christ and His Church are an affront to goose-bump seekers.  And it is a matter of history as to what the ancient pagans – of far more noble a pedigree than their modern counterparts – did to Christians on account of this exclusivity of the Christian Gospel.  But the early Christians, over time, won over the pagan world to Christ, because they preached and lived the beauty of the Gospel, which calls all people to something far higher than what Ms. Hunt thought she had discovered.