How They See Us: Troubled Teens, Single Moms and Revolutionaries

In the ongoing saga of modern pagans and the media one meme that keeps popping up is *why* do people choose Wicca or Asatru over the dominant Christian faiths. This leads to quite a bit of talk that makes our faith(s) resemble a caught illness. Witness this profile of troubled orphan Gina Rodriguez in the Dallas Morning News.

Going to Mass at Holy Family made too many memories too painful. Gina stopped attending her own church and made it clear that she didn’t care to go to anyone else’s, either. Wicca, an alternative, nature-based religious practice, interests her lately. Dabbling in “The Craft” is something of a trend among Goth teens, perhaps because nature worship has just one basic rule: “If it harm none, do what you will.”

Teens you see, turn to Wicca because they are sad or involved in the Goth scene. The equation of broken homes equaling paganism also seems to be a trend lately. In another story a single mother claims she was fired for being a pagan and a single mom.

” Gorgizian, who is originally from Fall River, Mass., claims in her complaint that she is a practicing pagan, and that she came to Hampton with her 10-month-old son to start over.She and her son moved into one of the rooms at the resort and shewas hired as a housekeeper April 25. Her employment only lasted two weeks.”When the owner, Thomas Saab, came back from Florida, he fired her after finding out she was a single mother and because she had a different religion than he did,” said Gorgizian?s lawyer, Philip Pettis.Saab allegedly advised Gorgizian, while he was firing her, to “marry the baby?s father, find faith and that God has a plan for people,” said Pettis.

So not only is the child without a father but growing up pagan! No wonder she was fired. Finally in a slightly different twist, modern pagans are presented as a part of an American tradition of religious “revolutionaries” dating back to the beginning of the Republic according to a book by religious-studies professor Robert C. Fuller.

“In his concluding chapter Fuller moves quickly ? sometimes too quickly ? through the different forms metaphysical religion takes today. His basic thesis is that those interested in everything from Wicca to vegetarianism to meditation exercises are all part of a well-established tradition of nonchurched “spiritual seekers” that goes back to the early days of the republic. However, the linkages between these different contemporary movements and the revolutionaries profiled earlier in the book are not always that clear.”

Wicca and the other “seekers” are portrayed as one side in a ever-polarized spilt in religion in America.

While the number of “spiritual seekers” continues to grow, so does the membership of some of the nation’s more conservative evangelical denominations. The most important phenomenon in contemporary American religion, Fuller notes, is that the two ends of the religious spectrum are moving further and further apart.

It seems that reporting on modern paganism may follow a similar trend. Glowing or mocking, sympathetic or hostile with little room for nuance or middle-ground.

Tags: Neopaganism