Top Story: While traditional media outlets continue to cut back on their coverage of religion, there’s been a slow expansion on the Internet. Beliefnet, one of the first Internet religion-news hubs, continues to reign supreme in terms of size and traffic, but it’s starting to see some competition from sites like Patheos and the Newsweek/Washington Post-supported On Faith. Now, another new-media contender is entering the God(s)-beat, as the left-leaning Huffington Post launches a religion section.

Site founder Arianna Huffington explains:

“Like all our sections, HuffPost Religion will bring you the latest news — in this case about all things religion-related — served up in the HuffPost style. It will also be home to an open and fearless dialogue about all the ways religion affects both our personal and our public lives. And it will do so in a way that moves beyond the pigeonhole depictions of both the faithful and the agnostic we see so frequently — and also beyond the tired assumption that God is a card-carrying member of one political party or another.

HuffPost Religion is being edited by Paul Raushenbush, an Associate Dean of Religious Life at Princeton University and an ordained Baptist minister. As a passionate and brilliant religious thinker, pastor, writer and college dean, Paul is ideally suited to the challenge of presenting multiple viewpoints and insights, as well as the real-world implications of religion for American life.”

Some of the big-name contributors include Jim Wallis, Deepak Chopra, Sister Joan Chittister, and Eboo Patel. But will HuffPost Religion cover modern Paganism? I’ve received some initial signs from folks working there that they are looking to add Pagan voices to the section, so we’ll see how things play out in the weeks ahead. Patheos, Beliefnet, and On Faith all now include a Pagan perspective (to varying degrees), so I can’t imagine HuffPost Religion will be far behind (especially since they have Pagans writing for them in other sections). I’ll keep you posted on developments.

In Other News:

An Earth-Based Discussion: Thorn Coyle has posted the audio from a panel discussion she led at this year’s Pantheacon on the question: “Earth-Based: Are We Really?”

“Organized by T. Thorn Coyle, this panel features Weiser authors T. Thorn Coyle, Diana Paxson, Zee Budapest, Orion Foxwood, and Lon Milo DuQuette. Discussion spans our definitions of ourselves as Earth- based, Nature-Based, Cosmos-based, etc. and addresses some of the problems of our times as well as positive media influences such as the movie Avatar.”

I briefly covered (and live-tweeted) this panel in my Pantheacon coverage, so I’m glad to see the audio for it released. While the panel didn’t really dig too deep into the question of how “earth-based” modern Pagan traditions really are, there were some fascinating and insightful things said and discussed, and I highly recommend checking it out.

The Fake Child Sacrifices: Earlier this year I noted the story of Ugandan anti-human-sacrifice campaigner Polino Angela, who claimed to have personally killed several children, including his own son. At the time I was deeply skeptical of his claims, seeing them as a strong echo of similar stories peddled by various ex-Satanists and Witches in America. Nor was I the only one to wonder if Angela was fabricating the story, and if he wasn’t, why he wasn’t in custody for his crimes. Now the house of cards has come tumbling down, as he’s been arrested for lying to a public officer.

“He allegedly repeated his claims to a Ugandan police officer and has been charged with “giving false information to a public officer”. He denied the charges and was remanded in custody in Lira Central Prison. Police officer Godwin Tumugumye, an officer at Lira Police Station, said BBC correspondent Tim Whewell is also wanted by the police over the case, reports Uganda’s New Vision newspaper.”

In another report, it’s come out that Angela was paid 200,000 Uganda shillings to play up child sacrifice, and has now confessed to lying.  If only we could do the same to some of the professional “ex”-workers in America. As I said in my initial post on this story, it isn’t that I don’t believe children aren’t being abducted, abused, and killed in several African nations. There’s of plenty of evidence for that. I also acknowledge that some witch-doctors are indeed killing and mutilating certain children for various reasons. But the lurid portrait painted by the BBC, with help from Mr. Angela, raised many of my old “Satanic Panic” red flags (most notably the idea of a centralized sacrifice industry/conspiracy). I’m glad that the truth has come to light in this story.

Max Beauvoir Declares War: After Tuesday’s incident in Haiti, where a mob of Christians drove off a small group of Vodouisants performing a ceremony for the dead, Vodou leader Max Beauvoir says it’s war.

“It will be war, open war,” Max Beauvoir, supreme head of Haitian voodoo, said at his home and temple outside the capital. “It’s unfortunate that at this moment where everybody’s suffering that they have to go to war. But if that is what they need, I think that is what they’ll get.”

You can see a photo essay of the inciting incident, here (thanks to Jennifer for the link). Since the clash of religions, Haitian officials have ensured that Vodou practitioners will be able to perform ceremonies at Cité Soleil in the future, but that seems cold comfort to those who were driven away with stones. However, not everyone in Haiti is seeing a religious war in the future, Mambos Elsie Théanou Joseph and Silviana Désir are busy working to feed and shelter the homeless, while Catholic priest Rev. Frantz-Michel Grandoit sees a new unity developing between Christians and Vodouisants.

“Humanity doesn’t want us to be separated,” said the Rev. Frantz-Michel Grandoit, a Catholic priest. Grandoit has planned several interfaith prayer vigils with Voodoo priests, including a three-day national prayer for rebuilding, held earlier this month and sponsored by the Global Network of Religions for Children, an international nongovernmental organization. In a ceremony at the Croix-des-Bouquets temple earlier this month, priestesses and parishioners knelt at the base of a tree trunk, lighted candles and solemnly chanted prayers for the earthquake’s victims and for the future of their country. “Hold Haiti’s sweet hand!” they sang as they threw water on the tree trunk and conjured up what is known as the Veve, a mystical symbol embodying the Voodoo deities. “Save us! Give us grace and deliverance!”

So while Max Beauvoir is an important voice right now in post-earthquake Haiti, we must remember, despite his claims, that Vodou has no “supreme chief” that all Vodouisants, Mambos, and Houngans bow before. Beauvoir leads a faction, a group of practitioners who have acknowledged him as their leader, and is not a Vodou “pope”. Reporters must move beyond Beauvoir, and talk to many practitioners from different areas to get a fuller picture of religious interactions in Haiti. To be sure there are those how want a religious war, but I would say there are also many who want a sense of national unity to trump theological differences at this critical stage.

The UK Reburial Issue: The BBC tackles the issue of reburying “pagan” remains, and interviews Druid priestess Emma Restall Orr, and representatives from Honouring the Ancient Dead, about the connection some modern Pagans feel to their pre-Christian ancestors.

“Pagan groups are increasingly asking for human remains and grave goods from pre-Christian burials to be returned to the ground, and their voices are being taken increasingly seriously in the museum world.”

As I’ve said before on this site, there is no consensus among British Pagans on this issue, with many, most notably Pagans for Archeology, opposed to the reburial of ancient human remains. It would have been nice for the BBC to get more perspectives on this, rather than simply portraying HAD and Orr as representative of Pagan stances on this issue.

That’s all I have for now, have a great day!

Religion Dispatches interviews Bron Taylor, a specialist in environmental and social ethics, core faculty member in the Graduate Program in Religion and Nature at the University of Florida, and author of the new book “Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future”. According to Taylor, the future of religion is nature religion.

“…traditional religions with their beliefs in non-material divine beings are in decline. The desire for a spiritually meaningful understanding of the cosmos, however, did not wither away, and new forms of spirituality have been filling the cultural niches previously occupied by conventional religions. I argue that the forms I document in Dark Green Religion are much more likely to survive than longstanding religions, which involved beliefs in invisible, non-material beings. This is because most contemporary nature spiritualities are sensory (based on what we perceive with our senses, sometimes enhanced by clever gadgets), and thus sensible. They also tend to promote ecologically adaptive behaviors, which enhances the survival prospects of their carriers, and thus their own long-term survival prospects.”

On his web site, Taylor even envisions the possible emergence of a global “earth religion”.

“Dark green religion—religion that considers nature to be sacred, imbued with intrinsic value, and worthy of reverent care—has been spreading rapidly around the world … such religion is becoming increasingly important in global environmental politics. It motivates a wide array of individuals and movements that are engaged in some of the most trenchant environment- related struggles of our time. It increasingly shapes the worldviews and practices of grassroots social activists and the world’s intelligentsia. It is already important in global environmental politics. It may even inspire the emergence of a global, civic, earth religion.“

Taylor’s book seems to primarily focus on radical environmentalists, “surfer-spirituality”, and mainstream political and cultural “green” discourse in framing his “Dark Green Religion”, though modern Paganism does get mentioned in his chapter on Globalization in Arts, Sciences, and Letters.

“Starhawk, [Margot] Adler, and [Alice] Walker show that Paganism, by emphasizing Mother Earth as sacred and sometimes equating her with the body of the goddess, is fertile ground for enviornmentalism. Both Walker and Starhawk, who live in Northern California, have supported campaigns against logging in the redwood biome. Given the earthly ground of contemporary Paganism, it is unsurprising that when Paganism does lead to political action it would have a strong ecofeminist dimension.”

In addition, he also briefly mentions Gaian tendencies within the New Age movement. So it seems (at least some) Pagans are included in his “Dark Green” religious future. Though I’m a bit disappointed that he didn’t spend a bit more time on the topic, especially considering the growth of Pagan studies in recent years.

So how pervasive is this rising civic “earth religion” that Taylor posits? Christian scholar John Morehead wonders if the massive success of “Avatar”, with its pantheistic and environmental themes, may be connected to this phenomenon.

“…in terms of popular culture, such sentiments may also be seen underlying the science fiction/fantasy film Avatar. which has resonated with audiences for this and other reasons.”

Whether the future of religion is indeed nature religion, replacing the now-dominant monotheisms, remains to be seen, but the book looks like a fascinating exploration of the topic. You can download and read the entire first chapter of the book at the publisher’s web site. Taylor also promises more related content and a soon-to-be-launched blog on his personal web site.

As we reach the close of 2009, it is time to stop for a moment and take stock of the previous year. When you look at (and for) news stories regarding modern Paganism (and related topics) every day of the year, you can sometimes lose focus on the larger picture. So it can be a helpful thing to look at the broad strokes, the bigger themes, the events and developments that will have lasting impact on the modern Pagan movement. What follows are my picks for the top ten stories from this past year involving or affecting modern Pagans.

10. Counting (and not counting) the Pagans: Just as the Pew Forum’s 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey gave us new insights into just how many Pagans there are in America, so too does the release of Trinity College’s American Religious Identification Survey data in March of this year. The ARIS survey, like the Pew Forum, showed that modern Pagan religions remain vital and growing.

“As you can see, ‘New Religious Movements and Other Religions’ packed on over a million adherents since 2001, and over 1.5 million in the last twenty years. That brings the total of “others” to nearly 3 million … Both Pew and ARIS give “other” faiths 1.2% of the (American) pie. That in turn seems to back up my earlier assertion that there are at least one million modern Pagans in America (probably more like 1.5 million), add in the over half-million UUs (around 20% of whom are “earth-based” or Pagan) close to a million practitioners of Santeria (in North America), and a few hundred thousand indigenous practitioners, and it seems clear that notions of our continued (slow and steady) growth aren’t unfounded.” in some respect),

Paganism’s healthy growth among the “others”, wasn’t the only survey or poll that was of interest. We also saw proof that America is far more religiously eclectic than some might have imagined, that quite a few Pagans are politically active, and that around half of Americans have heard of Wicca (and aren’t too impressed).

However, not all polling organizations thought Pagans (and other “others”) were worth counting.

“Why were “other” non-Christians not included? No Muslims, no Buddhists, no Pagans. Nothing. They must have that data, so why not release it with the rest? It can’t be simple numerical preferences since the recent ARIS data puts “NRMs and Other Religions” on par with religiously observant Jews and just behind the Mormons, two groups that were included in the released data. Is it down to political influence? I’ve sent a request to Gallup to release the “others” data, but haven’t received a response yet.”

Of course, if you want something done right, why not do it yourself? Pagan scholar Helen Berger, co-author of “Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo-Pagans in the United States”, along with fellow researchers James R. Lewis and Henrik Bogdan, revisited the Pagan Census project this year. I very much look forward to seeing what the updated data will say about our movement.

09. Modern Paganism Goes Global: Even though the emergence of modern Paganism is a well known story in places like Britain, America, and Australia, we saw this year that the modern Pagan impulse has become a truly global phenomenon. Receiving press attention in places like India, Israel, Russia, and South Africa, where an out Pagan serves as an MP.

“Meet Adrian Williams, the only pentacle-wearing witch in parliament. But the card-carrying ANC and South African Communist Party member, 43, from Mpumalanga has renounced the terms “witch” and “witchcraft” because he maintains the issue needs to be treated with sensitivity in South Africa. Williams practises “magick”, but calls himself a pagan or eclectic wiccan.”

As we move forward, we’ll need to start considering what it means that modern forms of Paganism are now truly “world” religions, and adjust our expectations and views of global events in light of that fact. Problems “over there” do affect us, because “we” are now “over there” too. In tomorrow’s top-five, we’ll explore some of the issues that a global Paganism faces, and what that may mean for us in interfaith settings.

08. Our Media Landscape and the Shifting Sands of Religious Journalism: The whole idea of a “top ten stories” list hinges on there being enough stories about modern Pagans to read and evaluate, and 2009 certainly made some wonder if that prospect might become harder in the near future. With the combination punch of an ascendant new-media and a lousy economy, lots of newspapers eliminated their religion beats (or shuttered completely), and some religion journalists anticipated the future being rather bleak.

“Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Paulson called religion-beat reporters a “dwindling band” who have suffered a “serious reversal of fortune” compared to a decade ago. Meanwhile, veteran religion-reporter Gary Stern blogged about his paper eliminating the religion beat, and Mollie at Get Religion wondered how these shake-ups will change the way that blog analyzes religion reporting.”

What does that mean for us? It could mean a lot less attention being paid to Pagans on the ever-dwindling religion-beat. That could be a big problem for those of us who want to stay informed, because our Pagan-created sources of news have had a rough time of things this year as well.

“After the recent merger of PanGaia and newWitch into Witches & Pagans, and the announcement of Thorn magazine ceasing their print edition, I decided to take the temperature of various Pagan periodicals and the resulting picture is rather grim. Of the 32 periodicals listed at the Witches’ Voice, only a handful seem to still be active, operating on a regular publishing schedule, and dealing primarily with Pagan subject matter. Modern Witch Magazine is “out of publication” after one year and three issues, Witch Eye: A Journal of Feri Uprising promises to return in 2009, but the clock is quickly running out for that deadline, and the two best-known Pagan newspapers PagaNet and Widdershins have been out of commission for years.”

We all need to get our content from somewhere, and while the best blogs and podcasts have been doing more and more primary-source journalism, we face a major deficit of news and information if our community doesn’t pull together to pick up some of that slack.  Projects to address this issue are still in their infancy, and it will take a serious amount of collaboration and cooperation to see a robust and thriving Pagan journalism emerge from these troubled times.

07. Paganism in Pop-Culture, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: While serious news may be hurting, the past 12 months have been one of the biggest in recent memory for Pagan themes in popular media. There was the Wiccan-centric episode of “The Simpsons”, the (awful) Wiccan-centric episode of “The Mentalist”, Santeria on “CSI”, a maenad on “True Blood”, and we remained popular on a variety of reality television programs. Still, it wasn’t all awful on the little screen, Ken Burns’ “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” was a beautiful endorsement of American-grown pantheistic nature religion.

“While the bulk of the twelve hours is spent recounting various grass-roots efforts and political struggles over park creation, almost the entire first episode is devoted to the spiritual dimension of nature (called, appropriately enough, “The Scripture of Nature”). Briefly referencing the influence of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Burns makes ground-breaking naturalist and preservationist John Muir the centerpiece. “National Parks” clearly illustrates how his unique brand of Christian-colored pantheism (along with a keen scientific mind) would go on to inspire many, including President Theodore Roosevelt, to preserve vast swathes of American wilderness. The early episodes also take care to mention Native American spiritual and political perspectives, and extensively interviews National Parks superintendent, and Mandan-Hidatsa Indian, Gerard Baker (who says that John Muir would have made a good Medicine Man).”

Meanwhile, on the big screen, most of the big news were about films that we won’t see until 2010. There was news of the long-awaited companion/sequel to “The Wicker Man”, entitled “The Wicker Tree”, that is now filming. The film “Agora”, about the famous Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria, was adrift looking for an American distributor for months despite positive box office and reviews in Europe. Many thought it was because distributors were worried it might offend Christians. In addition, two upcoming Greek-myth-drenched films “Clash of the Titans” and “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” may make 2010 the year of pop-polytheism.

2009, however, seems to be the year of rampant Hollywood pantheism according to the various conservative critics who saw the blockbuster “Avatar”.

“So I guess the conservative intelligentsia has spoken (David Brooks must not have gotten the memo). Pantheism is bad, Hollywood is bad, Americans are foolish eclectic-syncretic Eckhart Tolle-reading dupes who love pantheism, and we (and our souls) are all in big (I assume) trouble. Of course this reading of Hollywood’s output is a tad skewed, and relies on a rather scatter-shot selection of films (“Dances With Wolves”, Disney’s “Pocahontas” and “The Lion King”, “Star Wars”, and, well, “Fern Gully”, I guess) to convince us that pantheism is the with-it thing in Hollywood and beyond. But it just doesn’t seem to line up as well as they seem to think it does.”

I can only imagine that my 2010 round-up will be even more full of surprises, disappointments, and opportunities than 2009. Oh, and speaking of pagan-ish pop-culture in 2009, some guy named Dan Brown released a book about Masons, it also made some conservatives unhappy.

06. Equal Treatment at Work and School, and the Litigation that Follows: This year has seen a lot of high-profile cases of discrimination (and alleged discrimination) of Pagans in the news. You had the Witch who was fired from the University of Nebraska receive a settlement, the Bath & Body Works manager who was fired for making a pilgrimage to Salem, and a Pagan employee of Google who claims he was mocked and fired for his faith. In addition to those cases, you had the school child who was accused of threatening demon possession, though the parent was not allowed to examine the evidence.

“Denise DeSadier was not allowed to read the accusations made against her son that got him suspended, and their veracity was seemingly never questioned by the principle (who assured a reporter from the local college paper that the matter was investigated fully) . Further, Shaun was forced to undergo an evaluation of his mental stability before being allowed to return to class, and this incident was placed in his permanent record, marking him as some sort of potential safety risk. Short of pursuing a lawsuit against the school, or dropping out altogether, there is no recourse for these accusations that have marred Shaun’s record.  Wishing only to finish high-school and move on to college, Shaun has jumped through the necessary hoops, and wants to move on with his life.”

In our search for equal treatment, in our slow integration into the mainstream, there will be those who want to destroy lives simply for being different. Who will use our litigation victories as a pretext to fan the populist flames to further their own careers. But I think these cases, disturbing as some of them are, are a sign of progress. That they highlight just how far we’ve come, a place where the ACLU readily fights for us, where our standing as “real religions” are usually taken as a given. We’ll no doubt see more cases like this in 2010, but I also think we’ll see fewer than 2009, and we’ll see even more victories establishing our equal protection and equal treatment under the law. These cases are big news, but I think we’ll see a day where they are truly rare.

Tomorrow I will post the top five Pagan stories for 2009. In the meantime, I invite you to check out the top religion stories from some different perspectives. Here are the Religion Newswriters Association’s picks, the top 10 from Time, the top 10 from The Telegraph, US News and World Report, and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Freedom.

Top Story: The U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, once the poster child of creeping Christian militarism and religious intolerance, has apparently made vast improvement in recent months. So significant are these  improvements that even Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is impressed, and accommodations are being made for minority religions, including modern Pagan cadets.

“The academy superintendent, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Gould, says the improvements are the result of a topdown campaign to foster respect and a commitment to accommodate all cadets, even nonbelievers and an “Earth-centered” religious group that needed a place for a stone circle so it could worship outdoors. “If we are going to have success in our primary mission of developing leaders of character, we have to do that based on respect in all things, whether we’re talking gender, race or religion,” Gould said. Academy commanders say the school has started to seek out the religious needs of its cadets and accommodate them, instead of waiting for cadets to ask. For example, a Cadet Interfaith Council with about 20 members helps identify upcoming religious holidays so schedules can be adjusted around them, when possible.”

This is hugely good news, not only for our military-bound Pagans, but for the military as a whole. Despite the insinuations by some that religious tolerance and inclusion is counter-productive to good discipline, the reality is that a trustworthy military is one that truly reflects the diversity and values of our nation. That means a military where Pagans, atheists, and other minority belief systems are given the same considerations, without threat of retaliation (or intimidation), during their service, taken care of in peace-time, and fully honored in death.

In Other News: Egyptian archaeologists have managed to raise a 9-ton pylon from the Mediterranean Sea that was a part of a temple to Isis and part of Cleopatra’s palace complex.

“The tower was originally part of the entrance to a temple of Isis, a pharaonic goddess of fertility and magic. The temple is believed to have been near the palace that belonged to the 1st century B.C. Queen Cleopatra in the ancient city of Alexandria, submerged in the sea centuries ago.”

The pylon will be the centerpiece of a new museum dedicated to antiquities recovered from the Mediterranean Sea. You can catch a pretty good glimpse of the pylon, here.

For those of you not keeping track of the Pagans at the Parliament blog, some great content has been uploaded to that site recently. Including audio and video from the “People Call Us Pagans” panel, audio from the “Indigenous Peoples’ Statement to the World”, and video of the “Australian Pagans Speak” community forum. In addition, I’ve also linked to a Patheos.com interview with COG representative Don Frew from the Parliament.

There’s even more great stuff to be found at the Pagans at the Parliament blog, including my previous audio interviews with Michael York, Ed Hubbard, and Zay Speer.

From the “didn’t this happen ages ago” files, it seems that  Jonathon “The Impaler” Sharkey, that subject of documentary filmmakers, and founder of the “Vampyres, Witches, and Pagans Party”, has landed himself in jail for two years.

“Forty-five-year-old Rocky Flash, also known as Jonathon Sharkey, was sentenced in a Marion County court on Wednesday to more than two years in jail. Prosecutors say the man threatened to beat, torture, impale, dismember and decapitate Judge David Certo, who is presiding over another case involving Flash.”

Sharkey was already in trouble for harassing an underage girl, and the judge he was threatening is no doubt the one in charge of that case. Perhaps this will finally close the casket (no pun intended, OK, pun intended) on this perennial Pagan embarrassment’s fifteen minutes of fame.

In a final note, FaithWorld is looking at various picks for the top religious stories of 2009.

“It’s Top 10 time again. As 2009 nears its end, Time magazine and the Religion Newswriters Association in the U.S. have produced their lists of the main religion news stories of the year. They take quite different views. Time’s list is quite broad, the top three being the advance of secularism in Europe, Pope Benedict’s invitation to conservative Anglicans and President Barack Obama’s decision to expand the faith-based office created by George Bush. The RNA picked Obama’s Cairo address to the Muslim world as its top story, followed by the role of religious groups in the U.S. health care reform debate and the Fort Hood massacre allegedly carried out by an American Muslim officer.”

As long-time readers may know, I like to count down the top Pagan stories of the year at the end of December (here’s a link for my 2006, 2007, and 2008 picks), and you can bet I have some great ideas for this year’s list. I’d also like to hear your ideas. Which Pagan stories, in your opinion, were the most notable in 2009? Let me know in the comments.

That’s all I have for now, have a great day!

You have to love the Unitarian Universalists, they’re the only religious denomination that’s includes more theological diversity than the modern Pagan movement does. Pagans, Christians, Humanists, Buddhists, and Jews mix and mingle freely at UU churches across the country. So when I heard about the controversy over the election of Cecil Bothwell, a writer and avowed “post-theist”, to the Asheville city council, I wasn’t at all surprised to hear he’s an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville. What’s the controversy? He’s making national headlines because local Christians are arguing that he can’t serve because he doesn’t believe in God.

“North Carolina’s constitution is clear: politicians who deny the existence of God are barred from holding office. Opponents of Cecil Bothwell are seizing on that law to argue he should not be seated as a City Council member today, even though federal courts have ruled religious tests for public office are unlawful under the U.S. Constitution. Voters elected the writer and builder to the council last month … Article 6, section 8 of the state constitution says: “The following persons shall be disqualified for office: First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God.” Rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution trump the restriction in the state constitution, said Bob Orr, executive director of the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law.”

The story has made On Faith, Fox, the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune, and Rachel Maddow (among other outlets).

Naturally, any legal actions to remove Bothwell are ultimately doomed to failure thanks to this thing called the United States Constitution, where Article VI, section 3, states that:

“The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

That not only allows atheists and post-theists to hold political office despite local laws and prejudices, but also allows Pagan politicians like Dan Halloran and Jessica Orsini to do so as well. This right of freedom from a religious test for government office or employment was strengthened by the 1961 Supreme Court case Torcaso v. Watkins, that ruled:

“We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person “to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.” Neither can constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against non-believers, and neither can aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs.“

In short, it doesn’t matter if you are a theist, post-theist, atheist, or polytheist, you can’t be denied government office or position, at any level, due to your belief, or lack of belief, in divinity. A level playing field that infuriates those who continually insist that America belongs to Christianity alone. A win here for this UU post-theist is a win for all religious minorities, and those concerned about maintaining a separation of church and state.

“I’m fielding e-mails from dozens of people around the country—so far all supportive—and the writers include Christians as well as atheists and Quakers and Muslims and pagans and more. I’ve read some of the thousands of comments posted on blogs and the vast majority of folks support the separation of church and state that has figured so prominently in the history of this country. It is reassuring to me that there is such a broad understanding that freedom OF religion necessarily includes freedom FROM religion, else such a guarantee has no real meaning.”

Congratulations to Councilman Bothwell, may he serve Asheville, and its many Pagan citizens, well.

Even though negotiations for a new global climate accord at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen seem to be rapidly deteriorating, with frustrated demonstrators trying to force their way into the talks, you wouldn’t know it by reading the (largely) right-leaning pundits. They all seem convinced that global environmental-pagan-cult rule is only days away. For example, we have this little gem from Joe Soucheray.

“It is a religious gathering in Copenhagen, nothing more and strikingly pagan in nature, but religious. They might as well be wearing hemp cassocks and green vestments, with a glittering crown of recycled pop-can tops for their spiritual leader, Al Gore, who is trying to pioneer the theological mischief known as plenary indulgences, only this time you can use gasoline to sin in St. Paul if only you plant a tree in Keokuk after first paying a middleman.”

The environmentalism = paganism rhetoric ranges from conspiratorial to spectacularly florid. It makes the usual climate-accord supporting disclaimer by Pope Benedict XVI seem so understated and reasonable.

“The final point of the Pope is dedicated to challenging those notions of man’s relationship with the environment that lead to “absolutizing nature ” or “considering it more important than the human person”, as it eliminates the “ontological” difference between the human person and other living beings”. In the name of a supposedly egalitarian vision of the “dignity” of all living creatures, such notions end up abolishing the distinctiveness and superior role of human beings. They also open the way to a new pantheism tinged with neo-paganism, which would see the source of man’s salvation in nature alone, understood in purely naturalistic terms.“

You know discourse on the topic has flown off the rails when the Pope’s “beware of paganism” boilerplate seems like a breath of fresh air. Amidst the accusations that we’ll all soon be worshiping Gaia in an imaginary socialist utopia, there’s still the issue of if the world can actually move forward on an issue that hundreds of institutions and thousands of scientists have a broad consensus on.

“The fundamental question is who are we as human beings if at some future date the next generation lives in a world with declining prospects and no possibility of reclaiming the beauty of this planet. They will look back at Copenhagen and ask why did you let this fail? What were the arguments? Didn’t you realize that we were at stake?” – Al Gore at Copenhagen.

With all the hot air over the “climategate” e-mails, and the lockouts and walkouts at Copenhagen, I have a hard time believing we’ll be forcing Michelle Malkin to sing “we all come from the Goddess” anytime soon, let alone see a comprehensive accord from the world’s nations that is anything more than a face-saving fig-leaf at this point. Then again, who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky (about the treaty part, not Malkin singing goddess-chants). As for tarring anyone who supports forward movement on climate change as a pagan cultist, I suspect the meme itself will never die, but that it will grow increasingly hollow as the world’s  (non-Pagan) religions increasingly see the need to engage in “climate justice” for their global flocks.

A legal gambit in the battles over the separation of Church and State has been that the Christian cross is a “secular” symbol, removed from its original religious meaning by time and history. This has resulted in some rather insulting assumptions by cross-defenders and involves a good bit of historical revisionism. Now with the Supreme Court of the United States hearing arguments in the case of Salazar v. Buono, we may finally see if there can truly be a “secular cross”.

Mr. Eliasberg said many Jewish war veterans would not wish to be honored by “the predominant symbol of Christianity,” one that “signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins.” Justice Scalia disagreed, saying, “The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead.” “What would you have them erect?” Justice Scalia asked. “Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David and, you know, a Muslim half moon and star?” Mr. Eliasberg said he had visited Jewish cemeteries. “There is never a cross on the tombstone of a Jew,” he said, to laughter in the courtroom. Justice Scalia grew visibly angry. “I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead,” he said. “I think that’s an outrageous conclusion.”

Now the case could be decided narrowly, simply on the legality of the land-transfer that Congress approved to keep the cross standing, or, if Scalia gets his way, the court could decided that Christian crosses can be defined as a “common symbol” of the dead, ending several potential lawsuits over the issue. However, while Christians may welcome a sweeping victory here, Beliefnet founder Steven Waldman warns of the spiritually unwise slippery-slope implications of a “win”.

“…the more you want Christian symbols in the public square, the more you have to prove they’re lacking religious meaning. A question for devout Christians: Do you really want the cross and the creche to become akin to the Christmas tree — or the Easter Bunny? The “secular purpose” trap isn’t the only reason the “pro-religion” position can end up hurting Christianity. Legal cases pressing Christian symbols tend to argue that these efforts are acceptable as long as the government isn’t excluding other faiths. That’s how we’ve ended up with town squares with Menorahs alongside the creches. But this is the ultimate slippery slope. The Courts cannot and should not say that pluralism is limited only to Jews. Over time, Islam, Buddhism, Paganism will inevitably end up having greater public displays, too. That means conservative Christians need to ponder a more subtle theological point. If you believe visible public displays convey important social messages, doesn’t a pluralistic scene convey a second message: that all faiths are equal?“

In other words, a secular cross would create more theological problems for the Christians who desire such a decision than they would care to currently admit. Remember the Green Bay nativity case? You could expect a lot more like that, because other religious groups in America, as they grow in size and prominence, are going to want full inclusion as well. The legal loopholes that Christian advocacy groups are trying to create will eventually, no doubt to their dismay, benefit the Wiccans, Buddhists, and Hindus who won’t be contented to simply stand by and be represented by “secular” symbols of Christianity. They should be careful about how “secularized” they want their cross.

If you’ve been paying attention to some the more prominent religion bloggers lately, you’ll have noticed quite a bit of thought given to the decline of professional reporters on the religion (or God) beat. As newspapers cut their budgets across the country, those who cover religion and faith-related issues are feeling the pinch.

“The numbers told the story at this year’s Religion Newswriters Association Conference. It was the 60th time religion reporters from secular news outlets gathered to discuss their craft, gather new story ideas, recognize the best religion stories from the previous year and generally recharge their batteries on a beat that is one of the most challenging and rewarding in journalism … Kevin Eckstrom, editor of the Religion News Service and president of the Religion Newswriters Association, said attendance was half that of last year’s conference in Washington … Last year,  40 exhibitors staffed booths outside the conference ballroom, hoping to attract the attention of journalists. This year, there are 15. Travel budgets are down, both inside newsrooms and among faith-related companies and non-profits. But the fact remains that there are simply fewer reporters covering religion.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Paulson called religion-beat reporters a “dwindling band” who have suffered a “serious reversal of fortune” compared to a decade ago. Meanwhile, veteran religion-reporter Gary Stern blogged about his paper eliminating the religion beat, and Mollie at Get Religion wondered how these shake-ups will change the way that blog analyzes religion reporting.

“It will be interesting to watch this change in print media and it will be interesting to see if and how that changes our role here at GetReligion. In the meantime, our best wishes to Stern and all of the other veteran Godbeat scribes who are adjusting to the new landscape.”

But what does this mean for modern Pagans? This is anecdotal, but in my daily scouring of various news sources concerning modern Pagans I see more and more entries from blog-sites like Examiner.com and far less from what we would call “mainstream” media sources. Further, an increasing number of stories that I blog here aren’t directly related to modern Pagans, but are instead of some related concern to our communities (Santeria legal cases, for example) . Could this be due to dwindling resources and fewer reporters exclusively covering religion? CUUPs official David Pollard recently pointed out something interesting to me about a graph from the Google News Archive search that I had recently posted.

A representation of how many times the word “Wicca” was used in news stories since 1970, it showed a huge spike in 1999 (when modern Paganism and religion journalism were both riding high) and a noticeable drop in the last few years. Now, I know that Wicca hasn’t shrunk in any discernable way lately, and indeed seems to remain popular among the teens that many said artificially inflated our numbers and would eventually abandon us back in the 1990s. Nor has Wicca, not to mention other modern Pagan faiths, failed to be involved in newsworthy events. Pollard wondered if that drop was instead related a decline in news coverage in general, and that seems to be the case. A look at Google Trends (which combines news mentions with search trends) shows declines not just for Wicca, Paganism, and Asatru, but for more mainstream faiths like Christianity and Judaism. Are these trends related to a diminishing of religion-beat reporting? Out of sight, out of mind?

What has become ever-clearer to me is that it may be years before the mainstream media reorganizes and stabilizes enough to start spending resources on religion reporting again. In those years the only religion stories that will be getting regular coverage are those that will involve millions of people or dollars (or votes). Religious leaders will have to be powerful (or scandalous) enough to demand attention from reporters on the “hard” news-beats. This will leave minority faiths with an ever-dwindling access to news that could have a direct effect on their lives. Religion coverage could increasingly become an editorial page instead of an investigation. It’s for this reason that I’m working to help build a Pagan-centric newswire, because if we can’t report on ourselves, we may find no one else willing or able to.

Back in 2001 the British census was rocked by a massive Internet campaign/practical joke, where, for a variety of reasons, 400,000 people listed “Jedi” as their religious affiliation. The Pagan community, though ranking as the seventh-largest faith in Britain with a combined number of nearly 40,000, paled in comparison (Pagan groups, who feel they could actually number in the hundreds of thousands, are organizing to ensure a more accurate count in 2011). While I don’t doubt that there are sincere adherents to some sort of constructed Jedi-faith, it seems more likely that it became a haven for people who don’t like the idea of telling the government their religious affiliation, or even having to decide on a religious affiliation. I bring all this up because the Washington Post is doing a spotlight on faith within the popular social networking site Facebook, and it looks like the return of the Jedi.

“Since then, Facebook’s beliefs box has generated a staggering number of entries. So exactly how many users put down “beer” as their religion? How many “Catholic”? What correlations exist between religion and number of friends? Company spokeswoman Meredith Chin declined to answer such questions, citing user privacy. But Chin agreed to compile a list of the most popular religious identities and offered some tantalizing hints at what a full readout might show. Not surprisingly, the most popular faith professed is “Christian” and the various denominations associated with it. The category is so dominant that for this list, Facebook’s statisticians insisted on combining such other designations as “Protestant,” “Catholic” and “Mormon” under the “Christian” label. As a result, the second most popular entry on the list is “Islam,” followed by “Atheist.” “Jedi,” interestingly enough, makes an appearance at No. 10.”

There are so many questions about Facebook’s religion data that aren’t asked or answered in William Wan’s breezy little article. For instance, Facebook statisticians “insisted” on combining all the Christian variations, but did they do the same for other religious groupings? Were all the various Pagan faiths combined as well? If not, why not? Is “spiritual” a catch-all category, or is it just people who listed themselves solely as “spiritual”, and why include a Washington DC top-ten but not one for the USA as a whole?  Why only ten? If it isn’t a violation of user privacy to give us a top-ten list, why not a top twenty or fifty? Further, why did Wan classify “Seguidor del Wiccanismo” (follower of Wicca in Spanish, of which there are 2000 on Facebook) as “offbeat”, did he not bother to run it through a translator? Does the fact that this listing was given as an example of “offbeat” answers to the religion question (along with “Heavy Metal” and “Amish”) in fact prove that Facebook statisticians didn’t bother to gather the modern Pagans into an easy-to-count single grouping?

Instead of doing a real investigation of religion on Facebook, Wan focuses instead on how “hard” it is to fill in that text box, when all you want to do is hook up with some friends.

“It’s Facebook. The whole point is to keep it light and playful, you know?” said Heim, 27, a college student from Dumfries. “But a question like that kind of makes you think.”

Indeed, it does make you think, I just wish the Washington Post were similarly inspired. It’s “interesting” that Jedi came in tenth, but not interesting enough to probe a bit deeper into why it’s the tenth-most-popular faith category on Facebook. If only the The Force could spur some more in-depth journalism on these questions.

ADDENDUM: Get Religion and I seem to be on the same wavelength today.

Yesterday the Gallup polling organization released a new set of analyses from 170,000 interviews over the last six months regarding religion in America. The focus was on religious identity in different states, showing where different religions were the most (and least) concentrated.

“The accompanying maps give a portrait of this remarkable pattern of religious dispersion in the U.S. for these religious groups, based on a new analysis of more than 170,000 Gallup interviews conducted between January and June of this year. A good deal of the religious dispersion across the states is explainable by historical immigration patterns — particularly the impact of the large waves of European Catholics and Jews who came through ports of entry in the Middle Atlantic states in the 19th and early 20th centuries.”

Their results are much what you’d expect, the Pacific Northwest has a lot of “nones”, Utah and surrounding states have a lot of Mormons, Protestantism dominates in the South, there are lots of Jewish people in New York and Florida, and Catholicism remains vital in New England. All fine and good, but when I looked at the breakdown of their numbers I noticed something odd.

Why were “other” non-Christians not included? No Muslims, no Buddhists, no Pagans. Nothing. They must have that data, so why not release it with the rest? It can’t be simple numerical preferences since the recent ARIS data puts “NRMs and Other Religions” on par with religiously observant Jews and just behind the Mormons, two groups that were included in the released data. Is it down to political influence? I’ve sent a request to Gallup to release the “others” data, but haven’t received a response yet. With such a large sample size we could get some interesting results as to where the “others” live, data that could be useful to Pagan organizations and advocacy groups as we continue to grow. Hopefully the rest of their data is forthcoming, but it couldn’t hurt to politely and respectfully request that Gallup release their state-by-state data on “Other non-Christian Religions”.

ADDENDUM: Folks in the comments are starting to get the following canned reply from Gallup on the matter of the “others”.

“As noted in our article, “Religious Identity: States Differ Widely,” the table “does not include Muslims or other non-Christian religions due to small sample sizes. Table also does not show “No opinion” responses.” Added together, all the “No opinion” responses and “other non-Christian” responses were about 5% of the total responses. Individually, each of the many religions included in the “other non-Christian” category received less than 1% of the responses – many were substantially less than 1%. The numbers were, in fact, so small that differences between states were not statistically significant, and could be misleading. That’s not to say there aren’t significant numbers of people associated with each of these religions, but they are relatively small percentages of the total population. Because the margin of error depends on sample size, a much larger (and more expensive) survey would be required to get reliable figures for the smaller groups.”

If there is a standard reply, we must not be the only ones wondering about Gallup’s omissions.