Almost ten years ago, Oberon Zell and a coalition of Pagan scholars that included author and historian Chas Clifton, editor of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, a peer-reviewed academic journal focused on contemporary Paganism and other forms of Pagan religion, launched a petition asking for journalists, scholars, and other writers to capitalize the P in “Pagan.”
A capital P [Pixabay]
“The Pagan community is worldwide,” the petition said, “with millions of adherents in many countries. Moreover, increasing numbers of contemporary Hindus, First Nations activists, European reconstructionists, indigenous peoples, and other polytheists are accepting the term ‘Pagan’ as a wide umbrella under which they all can gather, distinct from the monotheists and secularists. They are using it positively, not to mean ‘godless’ or ‘lacking (true) religion.'”
The petition further noted that the “current journalistic convention of printing lowercase for these terms [i.e., “pagan”] seems to have originated with the Associated Press Stylebook, first published in 1953. However, a new era of religious pluralism has emerged over the past sixty years. The terms ‘Pagan’ and ‘Paganism’ are now being capitalized in a variety of publications, texts, documents, and references, including religious diversity education resources such as On Common Ground: World Religions in America, The Pluralism Project, Harvard University, and Inmate Religious Beliefs and Practices, Technical Reference Manual, Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Department of Justice.
“In order to assure greater accuracy in 21st-century journalism,” the petition concluded, “we hereby petition the AP and Chicago Stylebooks to capitalize ‘Pagan’ and ‘Paganism’ when speaking of the modern faiths and their adherents in future editions.”
A copy of the petition remains available on Change.org to view but the petition has closed, having garnered 573 supporters.
Prominent Pagan leaders also added their support to the petition. Rev. Selena Fox, for example, noted in her support of the petition via Facebook, “I have been capitalizing Pagan for more than 40 years. I always capitalize it in my writing. I also ask those in the media who interview me to have it capitalized, but because style manuals do not state that Pagan should be capitalized it sometimes is not capitalized in media reports. Let’s hope that administrators of the style manuals we contacted will make this change.”
Unfortunately, little has changed, at least in the world of journalism and style guides. A notable exception is the American Psychological Association, at least when used in reference to modern Paganism and despite its preference for lowercase.
A sharp-eyed reader of The Wild Hunt recently noticed that the question of capitalization had resurfaced on Wikipedia. There, editors are hashing through Wikipedia’s standards to identify guidance on the issue. The conversation on Wikipedia remains at a stalemate. (Editor’s note: The Wild Hunt has no presence on the platform either interactively or even as the subject of an article.)
The result on Wikipedia is equivocal. Some editors noted being torn while also noting that “modern paganism is certainly capitalized much less than recognized religions.”
The Wild Hunt consistently capitalizes “Paganism” when referring to contemporary practice. (We do use lower-case “paganism” to refer to the general historical grouping of ancient polytheistic religions, though even this is not without debate.) Our journalistic colleagues in sources like Religion News Service do not share this commitment and routinely lowercase Pagan even when referring to contemporary practices. Pagans are also relegated to sections such as “alternative faiths” rather than “other faiths.”
English capitalization rules derive from the presence of proper nouns and media and academic sources routinely lock onto that history. So, “a local church” is lowercase but “the local Catholic Church” is uppercase. One should add that some languages like Spanish have inoculated themselves from this issue, by using lowercase for all religions and their adherents.
Defenders of lowercase Paganism also note that it is often used as a blanket term, much like “fundamentalism.” They often point to terms like “evangelism” vs “Evangelical” or “communist” vs. “Marxist.”
Fair enough. There is a rational argument to be made that “communist” encompasses various forms of a political and economic ideology in the same way that Paganism encompasses various branches of different faiths. The latter is also true of the term “Christianity,” as there are numerous doctrinal differences across Christians, yet Christianity remains capitalized. Moreover, a member who is part of a movement results in capitalization, such as a member of the Communist Party or an individual speaking for the Communist government. Both of these precedents suggest that Pagan must be capitalized.
What is exposed in many arguments is that Paganism suffers from a particular form of historical erasure. The lowercase use of Paganism is not the result of an orthographically neutral decision but an echo of the thousand-year rivalry between Pagans and Christians. As Dr. Charles King, professor of Roman history, late antiquity, social and religious history at the University of Omaha wrote on this topic:
The use of a lower case “p” for “Paganism” is not a neutral convention of spelling, but one that is deliberately dismissive of an ancient rival of Christianity. One could note again that the other complex aggregative religions that I have mentioned—Hinduism, Daoism, Shinto, and even Roman-era Druidism—all get capital initial letters, because that is the normal way to refer to other religions in English writing, even those religions that in practice are complex aggregates. To deny an initial capital letter to “Paganism” is to endorse an outdated form of Christianizing bias, which is simply not appropriate to modern scholarship.
We agree. Dr. King also notes the false flag about requiring uniformity of beliefs as a rationale for capitalization.
There is also an occasional editor who argues that veracity is a requirement for the capitalization of a religion, raising the immediate question of why we capitalize fictional religions, such as “Bene Gesserit,” “Robotology,” and “the Sith.”
The lowercase use of Paganism is nothing short of a bias to mollify certain Christians. Practically every website and style guide responds to the question, “Do You Capitalize Religions When Writing?” with a yes. They should do the same for our religious tradition.
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