Pagan Community Notes: Week of December 26, 2023

Deck: Dancing in the Dark Tarot, by Gianfranco Pereno and Lunaea Weatherstone, published by Lo Scarabeo.

Card: Nine (9) of Pentacles

This week may offer up opportunities to appreciate the progress that has been made and enjoy the benefits of success. Whether this involves splurging on a special treat or simply taking a day off to relax is up to the individual.

Conversely, while success can come at a price, carrying an excessive workload can lead to isolation and loneliness. Avoid the temptation to devalue or even fail to recognize one’s self-worth.

Responses to Rabbi Wolpe and The Atlantic

Byron Ballard

Pagan versus Pagan

Like many people who have spent decades in the modern Pagan movement, I have been explaining why I use the word “Pagan” to describe myself, my spirituality, and my worldview. It seems I have more explaining to do, though I have had this conversation many, many times.

A woman of my acquaintance (the relative of a friend who later became a beloved Elder and friend herself) was in a bit of trouble and I counseled her, sent cheery cards, and brought food. As one does. She asked our mutual friend where I went to church and was shocked to hear I was a Pagan. “A pagan? But she’s so nice.” Taking this as an opportunity, I pushed past any fear or anxiety she may have had and we had many conversations about belief and faith, about what loving one’s neighbor meant in real terms, et cetera.

This dear woman was not the first nor was she the last with whom I had this conversation since I declared myself a Pagan in high school. After four years of Latin, leadership roles in the Junior Classical League, and an unseemly adoration of that other smart Daddy’s girl, Pallas Athene, it seemed logical to declare myself a Pagan. High school graduation took place in 1974—you can do the math to see how long that has been.

In those days and through the 80s and 90s, there were many people who understood “pagan” to mean godless, immoral, hedonistic–but specifically non-Christian. There is and was the sense that only the one true religion could impart morality and only belief in the Abrahamic Supreme Being would do. There were fund-raisers to “save pagan babies” and to send missionaries from evangelical churches to bring Jesus to Catholic Italy.
After five years of Latin (yes, I took another one in college) and a passionate study of European history, this position seemed to me ludicrous at best and dangerous at worst. I knew “Church” history better than most of the conservative Christians I knew and certainly had a better grasp on the Bible than they did. I would laugh at the phrase “godless pagans”—god-full Pagans is nearer the mark. The same riff again and again about the cycle of the seasons, full Moons, European tribal life, and real tax-paying American citizens practicing our First Amendment rights to religious expression.

Many people understood. Most people didn’t care. Outside of the people who wear the Great Commission like a lodestone around their necks, in my experience, few Americans actually care what religion you are. Until they do. Until someone they idolize tells them they need to pay attention to the group of people that is bringing down the stability of the nation or ruining the economy or has dangerous ideas about their children.
Then they begin to wonder. The older ones are unlikely to do more than send pamphlets in the mail and mutter behind your back at the tailgate market. It’s the younger ones who become active zealots and active zealots can be dangerous people. When they are fueled by their righteous anger, they become warriors clad in the whole armor of their vengeful god and his fervent prophets.

That’s when minority religions and spiritual expressions are seen—not as a bunch of loonies who believe those ancient gods are “actually real” (exact quote from a UU minister who dealt only in archetypes)—but as a real and present danger to a way of life that is sacrosanct but nonexistent. That’s when they protest at Pagan religious observances, slash the tires of cars with questionable bumper stickers, and bully new Pagans back underground. We have seen this happen many times in 2023 and I promise you there is more to come.

The op-ed piece that has stirred up so many feelings is hardly worth the bother of a reply—as we repeat once more the same things we’ve been saying for decades. The stakes are higher now because the world we live in is more volatile, more armed, and more unreasonable. We seem shocked that a conservative rabbi doesn’t seem to know about the modern Pagan movement. But the truth is we spend much of our time preaching to the choir, talking to our co-religionists. Interfaith work is one way to educate other people about who we are and what we do but that has severe limitations. The people who are likely to disagree or even hate you are rarely at an interfaith event because they don’t want more information about the Wheel of the Year. They know they are right and all those others who believe differently or worship on a different day or pray to a different god are wrong, misguided, a threat to their authority and to their god’s authority. A danger that must be controlled in whatever way is deemed expedient.

We as Pagan and Pagan-affiliated communities have some choices to make. Once we are past the outrage of this opinion piece, we would be wise to consider how we keep our events, our gathering places and our people as safe as possible and how we have the conversation about who we are and what we do—again and again.

Casmira Davie

Good morning lovies, I hope you are snug and happy and pleasantly full after your holiday shenanigans. I am up early to get myself ready to go out and people today, but I wanted to address something before I head out the door. Many of you have heard about the opinion piece that came out in the Atlantic this past week by Rabbi David Wolpe, a Conservative Rabbi who is a visiting scholar at Harvard this year. His opinion piece has created quite a little tempest in our Pagan community teapot as in his piece he appears to hold our community up as an example of all that is bad and wrong in society today. If you would like to read it for yourself and haven’t already, I will try to post it in the comments, although I don’t know how one could have avoided it at this stage. I am not going to refute his argument because frankly, I don’t think that is what is most important about this. Many more erudite than myself have begun to pick his poorly researched and understood take on Modern Paganism apart much better than I could. What I want to address is why he might have written this and to whom he is addressing it. He uses some pretty standard straw man arguments as well as the old Reducto ad Hitlerum argument device as he seeks to paint all modern pagan practice with the Nazi brush. His first sentence invokes Donald Trump and first paragraph mentions Elon Musk and seeks to pull them away from modern society and into his specious ideas of Paganism. His entire argument is seeking to redefine who actually deifies those two, Evangelical Christians and the “techbros”, the new power elite of our society, as pagan, and then compares and contrasts monotheism, in particular Judaism and Christianity, as holding the line for modern society against these ravening forces of destruction. He doesn’t mention Islam, the third Abrahamic monotheistic religion at all, nor does he think that Hinduism, Shinto, or any other of the myriad “pagan” religions are worth mentioning. So here is my take on this. This man is a well-known conservative rabbinic scholar who is respected and lauded in his community, even a bit of a rebel as he created a stir when he said that the Exodus as written probably didn’t happen. This article came out in the Atlantic, a publication known for its research and well-written and considered journalism, not some tabloid. Its audience is often college-educated and leans liberal. We are in a very fraught political time where the whiff of fascism is no longer a whiff but an actual stink in the air. Antisemitism is on the rise again, and has reared its head on college campuses and in the liberal communities over the War in Gaza. My gut feeling after reading this a few times, (you’re welcome, blecch),is he is holding up Paganism, an idea, a philosophy, as the boogeyman for what is wrong with society, and why it is increasingly hateful. It is deflection, nothing more. As a rationalist, he cannot understand how “right thinking people “ could do what they are clearly doing, so he must thrust someone else upon the battlements for them to shoot at, and that happens to be us. As I said to someone else, he wouldn’t know a “pagan” if one snuck up and bit him on the ass. So save your breath to cool your porridge as they say, arguments about this are useless. What I find interesting is his seeking to define who is “right thinking”, the Christians who don’t like Trump, and Jews, as the saviors of our society. I smell fear all over this piece, and in this he is not wrong. I don’t appreciate being used as a human shield, but I understand the impetus, and it would behoove us all to pay attention. If there is one thing I know and understand, it is how the average bible thumping church works, and what they are taught in the pews. This man is afraid, and honey, you should be as well. If he doesn’t think his money and degrees and standing will save him unless he tosses me to the wolves, then none of us are as safe as we think we are. I am no scholar, but I have a PHD in survival, and the hair on my ruff is standing up. I am reading the Omens for the coming year, and that this came out right at the beginning of them is not lost on me. It is setting the tone for the year to come, take heed and prepare yourself. As Byron Ballard says, ground and get your shields up, and as I say, practice good peasantry, cause the Cossacks are on the other side of the hill and they are getting ready to ride. Mama Juju loves you, stay safe and keep sniffing the wind, no telling when you may have to go to ground.

RESPONDING TO A VICIOUS ATTACK ON PAGAN RELIGION

On occasion, the Atlantic publishes excellent in-depth articles, and so, at one point I subscribed. Then, on Dec. 25, a piece of crap titled “The Return of the Pagans” appeared. It was by Rabbi David Wolpe.

Wolpe’s is the most ignorant and mean-spirited attack on Paganism I have encountered outside the worst fever swamps of degenerate Christian fundamentalists. And he is a Harvard Professor- (which helps answer why so many political authoritarians have Harvard degrees).

Wolpe attacks the worst of the American right as like the old violent Pagans of the Norse. It is true that for many decades some fascists have claimed to act in the spirit of the Norsemen, Romans, or other violent society (pick your fascist-they point to different ones). Wolpe also points to Roman moral degeneracy as somehow linked to their being Pagan. For him, today’s right wing degenerates, such as Donald Trump, represent the ‘return of paganism.’ For a competent analysis of the Pagan right, well, I recommend something by me.

Wolpe is so wrong at so many levels! A lengthy article is needed to cover them all. I don’t currently have the time to write it nor most of you the time to read if I did. But this garbage is currently getting some attention on FB, and so I will contribute some comments.

Pagans either worship nature or wealth according to Wolpe. One wonders whether he is aware of the society whose most fortunate children he misinstructs.
If we look about us today, Christians promoting “Prosperity Gospel Christianity,” and who mindlessly support Trump, constitute most of those he calls ‘modern Pagans.’ Megachurches with thousands of adherents are unlike anything Pagan now, or in antiquity, and their ministers sport mansions, jet planes, and very often engage in what they term in others ‘moral debauchery.’ And some truly is degenerate by any reasonable standard. The rabbi is seriously dishonest spiritually and factually to lie about these people and misidentify them.

Were there Pagan societies that did horrible things? Yes. But no more than Christian societies did horrible things. (And lest any atheists feel smug, Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia racked up their millions of deaths in the name of atheism.) I think my study of evil does the subject some justice, unlike Rabbi Wolpe.

More to the point, societies bring forth wonderful people, art, teachings, and more, and at the same time, some within them are truly horrible people. Wolpe teaches at Harvard, and so I suppose is ‘learned.’ But he never mentions the importance of Pagan thought to Christian thinking, especially Aristotle, Plato, and Plotinus. Just as there are wonderful Christians and those we would be tempted to call monsters, the same holds for Jews, whose sacred scriptures celebrate genocide against many people whose land Israel wanted.

His attack on Pagans of the ‘left’ is equally misguided if not as long. Again, the errors are spread deeply throughout the discussion. I will pick only a few of the biggest ones. The biggest of all is his ignorant equation of ‘left’ Pagans with secularists like Peter Singer. He uses Singer’s views as a means to attacking left Pagans. A secularist, Singer regards himself as a utilitarian and does not worship nature, but wants to abolish pain as always bad. The rabbi never heard of the Wheel of the Year or that Pagans, historically and today, take a far more complex view of life, suffering, and death.

Somewhat closer to the mark, we left-Pagans believe in “a kind of pantheism.” The modifier “kind of” is crucial, Without exploring what it means, (which he does not), ‘pantheism’ could even include Orthodox Christians. They reject the Augustinian dogma of the Fall of everything when Adam and Eve sinned, and so regard God as present in everything in nature. That is called Panentheism and is a version of a belief in many Pagan cultures, then and now. Gardnerian Wicca is Panentheist.

For Wolpe, we “worship nature” instead of worshiping God. But “worship” means very different things in these contexts. Like the word “faith,” what it means for Christians is unlike what it means for Pagans. Speaking for myself, my ‘faith’ in the gods is the same kind of faith I have with an old friend- I might not experience either right now, but I experienced them in the past and have no doubt they exist. Monotheists by contrast have spent millennia trying to prove their God exists.

Regarding worship, I never think of my relationship with the Wiccan Goddess or Cernunnos as ‘worshipful.’ Respect, love, relating with deep humility to the more-than-human, yes. But thinking neither I nor anyone else has value beyond what God sees/recognizes/etc., no.

Wolpe wrote, “Most ancient pagan belief systems were built around ritual and magic, coercive practices intended to achieve a beneficial result.” Actually, that is a Christian concept of magick. Maybe Jewish as well, I dunno. Ancient Pagan practice was far more likely to be seeking respectful relationships with more-than-human powers and beings. Here is a piece on indigeneity I wrote for the Interfaith Observer: In general, the indigenous idea for living life was harmony, not control. That idea only came to dominate the West well after monotheists had convinced many the universe was a source of resources put there for our use.

I could go on, but will only make one last point.

David Wolpe is a rabbi and no modern religious group has suffered more from ignorant hate than have Jews. One would think he would take some pains to know what he is talking about before he attacks other religious perspectives. But hatred for those who are wrong in his view seems to triumph, as it has so often among monotheists back at least as far as stories of Israel’s genocide against its neighbors, at the command of their deity.

After this, I cancelled my Atlantic subscription. There is no excuse for this article, none at all.

Catherine Carr

For those unfamiliar, on Christmas, The Atlantic published an article from a rabbi at Harvard Divinity School who argued in one of the most historically confused and ideologically ignorant messes I have have ever seen in my life that all of the problems with the modern world are due to “paganism,” in which he apparently conflates environmentalist animists with capitalists who lack morality, because that makes total ideological sense?

Several excellent rebuttals have been written, but I wanted to write one for my target audience because the original Atlantic article is SO misinformed and ideologically nonsensical that I feel like people without any background in Paganism might still miss some things about how incoherent it is.

So, for starters: “Paganism” is the name that has historically been applied to non-Abrahamic, polytheistic and animistic religious movements. It has also been used widely around the world as a slur for immorality and unethical behavior in general based on the erroneous assumption, propagated by Abrahamic religious leaders, that only obedient followers of the God of Abraham are capable of being moral or ethical and everyone who does not share their theological beliefs and their religious rites must necessarily be violent, greedy savages with no moral compass at all.

This idea later became key to Christianity exterminating indigenous religions around the world based on the idea that, since people who don’t share Christian theology are incapable of being moral, all people who espouse animistic or polytheistic beliefs must necessarily be violent and immoral and it was the duty of good Christians to “civilize” such folks.

Strong arguments have been made by recent Pagan theologians to the effect that it is actually transcendent monotheism (the teaching that there is only one God, who is separate from and better than the material world) which has *led* to the current environmental crisis, since indigenous relationships with the natural world have been characterized as “idolatrous, and therefore by necessity immoral and destructive” and modern environmentalists have been characterized in exactly the same way by modern Christian leaders who have argued that environmentalism is fundamentally at odds with Christianity’s image of a single, transcendent God who is in control of all things and who elevated humanity above the rest of nature and gave us dominion over it.

Modern Paganism is a religious movement of millions of people who largely espouse animistic worldviews, including spiritual relationships with their local ecosystems and the Earth itself, and who largely strongly frown upon extractive capitalism which they see as a mass murder machine which is predicated on viewing divine living creatures as nothing but material fodder for sale.

As I argue in my book “World Soul: Healing Ourselves and the Earth Through Pagan Theology,” modern Pagans arguably espouse a *higher* standard for the treatment of human beings than the mainline churches of today, who often support openly fascist politicians on the grounds that these politicians share commonalities with their theology in their desire to force obedience on at least some groups of people, since in mainline Abrahamic theology humans are indeed supposed to be unconditionally obedient to and subject to God’s laws which, in the words of certain conservatives, “don’t care about your feelings.”

It is onto this scene that David Wolpe steps, and somehow manages to argue that Donald Trump – about whom Christians have made actual documentaries claiming that he is a prophesied religious leader, while claiming that Pagan witches are “hexing him 24/7” – is “pagan” because of his narcissism and obsession with money. Wolpe then goes on to argue that Elon Musk is *also* pagan, because he’s anti-semitic and wants to conquer space?

Already we must ask, “What the hell definition of ‘pagan’ is this man using? Does he hail from the early 20th century, leaving him genuinely unaware of the millions of modern Pagans who are hardcore anti-materialist environmentalists who overwhelmingly harbor intense anger toward Trump and Musk due to precisely the moral failings Wolpe has just described as “pagan” in them?

I am not actually joking here: to my knowledge, the use of “pagan” as a term to refer to immorality in general fell out of favor in the West decades ago, when it became obvious to anyone who did not get their news exclusively from conservative church pastors that there were enough Pagans around who actually had their own theology for that to basically count as a hate speech slur.

Wolpe *must* be aware of this modern Pagan movement, because his subtitle does reference Pagans as “tree huggers,” the famous derogatory descriptor of environmentalists who attempted to prevent the destruction of nature and the construction of nuclear facilities in the late 20th century. Sometimes literally by hugging or tying themselves to trees to act as human shields, making it impossible to cut down the trees without first cutting through the bodies of the human tree-huggers. But he somehow sees fit to put “tree huggers” and “dollar worshippers” like Trump and Musk in the same basket, presumably because he defines both groups as not being sufficiently pious Abrahamic monotheists?

Wolpe clarifies his meaning somewhat by proceeding to explain that, in his opinion, since paganism is the deification of natural forces, it is simply a deification of violence. I guess Wolpe is trying to take the stance that “civilization” is humanity’s resistance to the moral lawlessness of nature, which…again is an argument that I thought became outdated decades ago.

The ideas that beings in the natural world lack any sense of empathy and morality and that good behavior can only be created by external forces of discipline imposing rules hasn’t stood up for at least three decades in the face of improving zoological and archaeological science, but maybe Wolpe just missed all of that sitting up in his seminary. The problem is, if he did, then he probably also takes the view that the only way to make people behave morally is to force them to do so through discipline and that violence, essentially, is the road to morality.

Maybe I’m projecting too much onto Wolpe here, but this is the only way I can make his arguments make internal sense if he is arguing that tree-hugging anti-materialist hippies and the Donald Trumps and Elon Musks of the world are essentially governed by the same driving force, which is, in his mind, a lack of Abrahamic religion.

Ironically, at this point in the article you hit a paywall where the Atlantic informs you that you cannot finish reading the article unless you pay them at least $79 for an annual subscription. Which, again, ironic given that one of the authors’ main arguments in this hit piece seems to be that Pagans are unhealthily obsessed with accruing wealth.
Which…no, no we’re not. We’re demonstrably the lowest-income religious group in the United States other than historically Black Pentecostal churches. We have consistently had anti-materialist and anti-capitalist tendencies since at least the 1970s when a number of books began to be written by *highly influential Pagan authors* and published by major presses about Pagan concerns that Abrahamic theology focusing on a single obedience-obsessed transcendent God was contributing to social inequality and environmental destruction.

But I guess Wolpe either knows none of that or don’t consider any of those authors or the religious movements they came from to be legitimate faces of paganism, because he goes on to rant about how Pagan religions allegedly prize selfishness.

This accusation is actually deeply unsettling coming from Wolpe, because a common argument of Christian religious leaders has been that concern for human rights = selfishness on the part of the oppressed. In the conservative Christian worldview, women are selfish for wanting control over whether and when they become pregnant; children are selfish for wanting the freedom to be themselves instead of being molded into whatever their parents, especially their fathers and religious leaders, want them to be. LGBTQ+ people are selfish for wanting the right to exist in public and enjoy equal legal protections, and immigrants are selfish for wanting a better future for their families.

So is Wolpe so totally ignorant here that he actually thinks Pagans are selfish in the greed-driven-materialism sort of way despite that being literally the exact opposite of 90%+ of Pagan rhetoric for the last century, or is he trying to suggest that the same kind of “selfishness” which demands greater rights and freedoms for all people finds its logical conclusion in the greed of Elon Musk and Donald Trump?

If Wolpe is confused, then he’s just so spectacularly ignorant of his subject matter that he’s accidentally recapitulating fascist arguments without realizing it. If he knows what he’s doing, then he’s making the same basic arguments as the fascists who believe in a “cultural Marxism” whereby basically all the civil rights movements of the last century are tied together by an immoral agenda of personal selfishness.

One can almost understand where Wolpe is coming from when he argues that morality most easily arises from the idea that the universe was created by some sort of benevolent moral being. That argument is at least comprehensible. Where it falls apart is his apparent insistence that only the monotheistic God of Abraham can possibly satisfy this description, whereas the polytheistic gods and animistic spirits of other cultures are apparently incapable of doing so.

Wolpe continues to treat polytheistic and animistic religions as though they simply aren’t capable of creating the same kind of morality as the Abrahamic faiths, which, I would argue he’s correct in that. But he also shows a total obliviousness to the many modern Pagan arguments that the morality of most of the Abrahamic faiths is in fact fatally flawed specifically because of their “my way is the only right way” exclusivity and their insistence on centralizing moral authority within a single being who, if we’re taking a real honest look at the scriptures, has not always exactly been a moral straight shooter.
Wolpe at one point argues that Pagans must all be arrogant to the point of narcissistic egoism because we don’t view our gods as beings to be blindly and unconditionally obeyed. Which, again, actually a pretty worrying thing to argue. That whole idea that you should obey your god, even if he’s commanding you to create suffering and destroy living beings. Or else you’re being arrogant and egotistical. Not the look I think Wolpe wanted to put out there, but it is the one he ended up with by choosing to take the argument into “plus you don’t even unconditionally obey your gods” territory.

Some of Wolpe’s arguments you can *almost* see being factual because he *does* cite some quotes from ancient Pagan philosophers. But even those he seems to misunderstand at such a deep and fundamental level that it’s obvious that he came into the whole endeavor expecting to find the worst of Pagans and interpreting all of their quotes in the worst possible lights. None of the “worshipping of wealth and beauty” he cites as alleged evidence of (ancient) Pagan selfishness and shallowness is really any worse than quotes that could be found from modern prosperity gospel Christian preachers. Which, if he tried to bring *them* into the group of alleged “pagans” alongside ecofeminists, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, that would at least make for a more entertaining read.

I just…why was this article accepted from this person? He is either so completely ignorant of the subject matter that he genuinely doesn’t know most of the background I’ve just referenced, or he *does* know and is making some deeply troubling moral arguments of his own about environmentalists and human rights activists sharing in the same kind of essential selfishness as Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Maybe I’m just reading way too much into a guy who doesn’t know what he’s talking about here, but my options are either A) he is legitimately unaware of almost all developments in these fields of culture and science since at least the 1970s, or B) he understands them but is still trying to argue that modern Pagans are selfish and egotistical, in which case he must also necessarily be arguing that environmentalism and civil rights activism are products of selfish egoism.

What do you think, readers? Am I being too hard on Wolpe here, or are his arguments really as unsettling as they sound once I sat down to analyze them?

A Response to David Wolpe, “The Return of the Pagans,” The Atlantic 12/25/2023

To the Editor:

As a long-time reader of and subscriber to The Atlantic, I was dismayed that you chose to publish David Wolpe’s essay “The Return of the Pagans” (12/25/2023). The essay is misinformed and distorts both historical and contemporary understandings of paganisms in ways that are profoundly damaging to both Indigenous and revived religions.

Wolpe never defines the word “pagan.” Instead, he appears to construct a straw man, using it to mean something akin to “idolatrous” in his eyes. The problem is that the term “pagan” already has a meaning: one that refers to a number of religions. These include Classical paganism, as practiced in the ancient world; non-monotheistic Indigenous religions; and modern Paganisms, a collection of new religious movements that revive, reconstruct, and experiment with elements of ancient polytheistic worship. None of these embrace the values or ideologies Wolpe attributes to paganism.

It is shocking how ignorant Wolpe is about Classical paganism, a topic about which there is a vast academic literature usually well covered in rabbinical schools. For example, he says, “The Greeks taught the rich and powerful were favored by the gods.” Nope, sorry, that would be the Calvinists. Concern for the poor and less fortunate did not originate with Judaism and Christianity. Greek and Roman religion had built-in methods for ensuring, for example, the redistribution of food from temple sacrifices to the indigent; even informal practices such as the Hekate’s suppers left at crossroads were intended to feed the hungry.

Similarly, by attributing the “worship of the body” to paganism, Wolpe distorts the fact that non-monotheistic and Indigenous religions tend to see divinity as immanent as well as transcendent. In other words, all living beings hold a spark of the divine; the gods are manifest in each of us. This idea is intended to inspire respect for all life forms. Indigenous religions, in fact, place primacy not on the individual, as he asserts, but on relationality and community, broadly defined to include other-than-human persons.

Wolpe also seems oblivious to the existence of modern Pagan religions, a fast-growing movement now numbering in the several millions in North America alone. While diverse in their beliefs, modern Paganisms are inspired by ideals of divine immanence and relationality which are closer to those of ancient and Indigenous religions than they are to anything Wolpe describes as “pagan.”

In a time when minority religions, including Indigenous religions and alternative spiritualities, increasingly face bigotry and prejudice, it is disappointing that The Atlantic chose to publish this poorly informed and ill-thought-out piece.

Sincerely,
Sabina Magliocco, Ph.D.
Chair, Program in the Study of Religion
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver

Eddie McGuire

Seán Pádraig O’Donoghue

Linda Sager Kazalski

I am deeply disturbed, offended, disappointed, and yes, frightened by Rabbi David Wolpe’s editorial in the The Atlantic. Not only was the lack of scholarship and the bad information disturbing, especially in someone affiliated with such an august university, but he apparently has no understanding of what NeoPaganism is or all the religions that it encompasses. Classical philosophers have very little to do with modern NeoPaganism.

Equating bigots like Donald Trump and Elon Musk with pagans, which they are not, is utterly disgusting. Are there pagans who hold despicable opinions? Certainly. We call them out. There are a lot more Christian Nationalists.

Worse, he’s scapegoating already marginalized people. Most of the pagans I know are middle class or less, and many are struggling to get by. We are far from greedy or wealthy. Many are LGBTQ+. Others have been traumatized by their previous religious communities. Still others are members of other marginalized communities.

We are concerned with the environment. Everyone should be. It’s the only planet, the only environment, we have.

NeoPagans are a very small minority, but we are growing.

Me? I’m a druid. I believe in the Earth and appreciate all it’s denizens. I believe we are a part of nature, not separate from it. Meditation, prayer, and ritual are part of my daily life.

I cannot continue as an Atlantic subscriber after reading Rabbi David Wolpe’s article attacking and mischaracterizing Paganism, in a lazy and intellectually dishonest set of arguments which are utter bullshit. In my 30+ years as a Pagan, a Gardnerian Wiccan to be precise, I have not seen a more appalling attack on my community outside of fundamentalist Christianity. I am dumbfounded that the Atlantic would print such an article, and I won’t read the magazine ever again.