If you’re reading this post, there’s very good odds that you’re familiar already with Rabbi David Wolpe’s editorial, “The Return of the Pagans,” in The Atlantic this week (also available, mirrored without restriction, via MSN). If you’ve somehow ended up here with that foreknowledge, I invite you to read the piece; it’s about 2000 words, certainly longish but tackleable. I’ll get into some specifics, but Jason Mankey’s response title sums it up well: “The Return of the Pagan Scapegoats.” Pagan values are destroying society, unlike monotheism, which supports society; nothing to see here, let’s have dinner.
And I assure you, the last thing I want to do right now is write yet another blasted reaction/response/rebuttal to the piece: I started typing this at 12:15am, and I’m supposed to drive 4 hours tomorrow morning for a lunch appointment. But sometimes the writing bug bites hard, as it did tonight. If you just want the tired and slightly aggravated sound bite at the center of the writing bug it’s this: my fellow pagans, this is not about you.
And to be fair to my fellow pagans, we do know this. Mankey notes in his rebuttal, “It seems that it never occurred to Wolpe that there might be self-identifying Pagans living in the world today, and perhaps even some Pagans who might read his words.” I would say that that’s a fair summation of responses I’ve seen, which all say, in various ways, “this is not us and our religion!”
And Rabbi Wolpe knows this too. The Wild Hunt reports that Holli Emore, executive director of Cherry Hill Seminary and chair of Interfaith Partners of South Carolina, invited Wolpe to have a conversation with her to promote understanding; he cordially declined, noting “The article did not and does not address the current pagan communities nor was it intended to.”
Well, thanks for that clarification. I guess.
Most of the responses I’ve seen do an admirable job of pointing out Wolpe’s errors, gaps in knowledge, and misanalyses of ancient traditions when it comes to his characterization of ancient paganisms, and thus of the modern neopaganisms that are their inheritors. But in all the responses I’ve read, I don’t think I’ve seen one yet that grapples with the fact that Wolpe is writing from an apologetic tradition that uses the idea of ‘pagan’ in a very specific way, and that arguing for the merits or truths of either ancient or modern paganisms can’t gain ground here, because the term is already understood, a priori, to mean something on the order of “not conformant to our ideals.” We’re having a different conversation than Wolpe is having.
Don’t want to take my word for it? Here’s where a professional career that started in teaching freshman comp combines very nicely with a devout Catholic upbringing: let’s look at the text! After a little scene-setting (and, yes, some claims about the nature of the self in ancient paganisms that don’t actually have any supporting evidence), Wolpe states his thesis:
Although paganism is one of those catchall words applied to widely disparate views, the worship of natural forces generally takes two forms: the deification of nature, and the deification of force. In the modern world, each ideological wing has claimed a piece of paganism as its own. On the left, there are the world-worshippers, who elevate nature to the summit of sanctity. On the right, you see the worship of force in the forms of wealth, political power, and tribal solidarity. In other words, the paganism of the left is a kind of pantheism, and the paganism of the right is a kind of idolatry. Hug a tree or a dollar bill, and the pagan in you shines through.
Look at that second-to-last sentence: “the paganism of the right is a kind of idolatry.” There are plenty of little markers throughout the editorial that would take a lot more unpacking than I have time for in this space and at this hour, but ‘idolatry’ is easy, because the way Wolpe’s using it only makes sense in an Abrahamic context.
Divine images as loci of worship are very common in world religions — not quite universal in non-Abrahamic religions, but I’d go so far as to suggest that they’re pretty normal. But the god of the Israelites is unusual, and tells them at Mount Sinai, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:4-5 (NSRV)). That prohibition carries over into Christianity and into Islam. (I distinctly recall a 4th-grade [Protestant] classmate telling me that me and my family worshipped statues; failure to grok nuances of the function of sacred art is probably more forgivable in a 10-year-old than in an esteemed scholar.)
So for much of the world and its history, to describe a paganism as ‘idolatrous’ would be, well, accurate. There are certainly divine images, and they are often empowered and incarnated and worshipped; from an anthropological standpoint, sure sounds like idolatry! That’s not what Wolpe means, though. He doesn’t mean that the paganism of the right worships idols. He means the metaphorical definition: “excessive or blind adoration, reverence, devotion, etc.” (thanks for the wee-hours assist, Dictionary.com). And that metaphorical definition makes absolutely no sense except in the context of the Abrahamic proscription of idols.
That’s the key here. It’s not just this single word; Wolpe’s entire editorial is nonsensical when removed it from its religious context. He’s not talking about us, but we’re reacting as if he is. The truth of the matter, though, is that Wolpe isn’t pro-neopagan or anti-neopagan. We’re simply beneath the level of his notice.
So, what do we do with that? I’ll be honest: I’d love to just not do anything with it. Some guy in a different faith tradition wrote about moral issues according to the standards of his tradition, and he used a term with a long, complicated history in that tradition to do so.
Alas, that term also happens to be one of my primary religious identifiers, and Wolpe used it in collocation with Nazis and insurrectionists, and he did so while casually dropping in facts that, while distorted by their lack of context, are sadly true. To name just a few: ancient paganisms did often glorify values and practices that are inimical to our own (and we grapple with that fact in considered ways, including both revision and better understanding of the breadth of thought and practice in the ancient world); Norse paganisms do have a big white-supremacy problem, as do the many other European paganisms that he didn’t mention, not to mention many other non-pagan religions (and we talk about that problem and strategize ways to overcome it); many paganisms do decenter humanity in their cosomology and practice (but not in a way that lesseningly “considers human beings all synapse and no soul,” but rather in a way that radically expands the sphere of our care beyond ourselves).
Wolpe closes his piece by saying “But if we are all children of the same God, all kin, all convinced that there is a spark of eternity in each person but that none of us is superhuman, then maybe we can return to being human.” I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my mom just a couple days ago, when she asked me how I reconcile my previous Catholic devotion with my current practice. I told her, very honestly, that while I certainly have some disagreements about the exact boundaries and interpretations of right behavior, the only thing within Catholicism that feels entirely irreconcilable is monotheism itself. Everything else fits within a polytheistic framework, which is inherently accepting of difference.
In the same way, despite my vague annoyance with his editorial overall, I find myself agreeing with Wolpe here once I make a little edit to allow that maybe we’re all children of the same wild cosmos, all kin. And it’s hardly only there. If I reread the editorial and replace every instance of ‘pagan’ with something like ‘unenlightened’ or ‘anti-social’ or even ‘selfish’, I find a lot of commonality with my own beliefs: greed is a cancer, rugged individualism is a lazy lie, community-orientation is paramount.
Rabbi Wolpe wrote an editorial that failed to consider the diversity of understanding in his audience. I don’t know how it came to be published in The Atlantic rather than in a smaller, more in-group publication where the message would have been more clearly received, but along the way there was certainly some clumsy shortsightedness on the part of the author and/or the editors, and certainly that should be (and has been) noted. In the end, I don’t see much utility in continuing to rail against a man who doesn’t much care about my religion on the inaccuracies of an argument that he wasn’t trying to make. It was never about us.
But since we’re here anyway, since we’ve got more eyes on us that usual, I’d love to see us not simply reactively correcting, but rather taking the opportunity to build on and complicate the bits Wolpe got right, and the bits that — but for a spectacularly ill-considered adjective — we agree with. Neither Wolpe nor the majority of his readers know thing one about actual modern paganisms; sounds like it’s time to teach about the spark of eternity that shines in each one of us, as well.
Cardinal & Locust 