I was raised Christian. My babysitter was a Mennonite, and the wife of the local pastor in the small suburban town in Pennsylvania where I grew up. She’d had twelve children and was now taking in kids for money. She got me when I was six months old and had me through my formative years for nine hours a day until I went to kindergarten. In addition, I went to church there on Sundays, and on Tuesday nights, until I was in 4th grade, after which I would stay overnight, and Anna’s daughter would drop me off at school which was right next to the kindergarten where she worked.
I don’t know what my mother paid Anna, but it wasn’t enough.
If you don’t know, Mennonites are like the Amish but they allow for some modern things, and carefully determine what each group will permit. The church was on the bottom floor of a three-story building, and twice a week, Ivan would preach fiery sermons. Most of his passion went over my head. But I loved the children’s classes. People who don’t watch TV can be very good storytellers and I grew up with Old Testament tales such as Daniel in the Lion’s Den and how young David killed Goliath.
Rousing stuff. [And they are still great stories.] But I was supposed to accept them as 100% true. In fact, the entirety of the Bible was - according to everyone in the church - literally true.
That was the first wedge in my childhood faith. In school, I learned about dinosaurs. What kid doesn’t love dinosaurs? I had a big book that I walked around with for a while. Anna was very upset about it and told me it was all a lie. I didn’t know what to believe. She’d told me Santa was a lie too, much to my mother’s chagrin. I hadn’t missed Santa [I lived in an apartment, so no chimney, and it seemed far-fetched anyway] but being told that fossils had been faked was too much.
Maybe I just found ancient dragons preferable.
The next breach was when I hit puberty. By then, I was attending my mother’s Presbyterian church. There was a new pastor. Jim had been called to the church. Previously an engineer, he had a crisis of meaning and ended up in seminary. When he was most struggling financially, he’d gotten anonymous checks in his mail. The man believed in God’s grace and he shared that with the youth group which he ran.
His faith wasn’t enough to give me the peace I longed for. By then, I was miserable. I was being picked on in Jr. High School, had monthly cramps that were unspeakable [link], and was anxious and depressed. There seemed to be no place for what I felt in the youth group. That was actually true. Most of the kids there had two parents, siblings, and were pretty stable and normal. I wasn’t. [I had been accused of being ‘weird,’ or ‘crazy,’ from first grade onward.]
The adults running the group didn’t know how to help me and I imagine they sometimes wondered if I’d come to a bad end. In 8th grade, we had Confirmation classes. I thought they’d be fun, sort of like the kids classes I’d attended as a child.
Nope. All the classes told me was that some people were destined for heaven and there was NOTHING that could change that. I was pretty sure I wasn’t on the list, and heaven didn’t sound great anyway. But I was supposed to commit to this idea and live my life accordingly. I did the Confirmation because it was expected, but I cried for an hour and a half before the ceremony and all the way through it without knowing why. [There was more concern expressed by the adults.]
Not long after that I went looking for a different religion and found Paganism.
For the average Christian, Paganism can look pretty bad. The term ‘pagan’ is used by many conservatives to equate with everything that’s bad about the current culture. Many Christians have been raised to think that Paganism is the same thing as worshiping the force opposing God.
No, we don’t worship that energy. Far from it. Although there is admittedly a significant proportion of Pagans who are liberal, there are plenty who are conservative. [I don’t know of any studies on the political views of Pagans and can only speak from my direct experience.] But Christians and Pagans should be able to get along. After all, Christians once hated Jews. But views have changed. Now even fundamentalist Christians can honor the Jewish roots of their religion. Christianity also has Pagan roots.
But what changed? What made Christianity become a popular idea from its initial position on the fringe? Monotheism wasn’t popular in the ancient world. One Egyptian Pharaoh tried it and was nearly erased from history. Even Christianity tends to fragment [Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, saints, and yes, even Satan is raised to a position of power.]
In Pagans and Christians in the City, the author, a professor of law, describes specific cultural changes that occurred between paganism and Christianity in the Roman Empire. Certainly, ancient pagans revered the gods and piety was a profound, elemental, and important aspect of pagan culture. The gods were evident in everything.
The author says the most pronounced difference between what he describes as immanent and transcendent worldviews was the Christian view of sexuality. Since sex is extremely primal, any changes that are instituted in this behavior are going to have a big effect on the human race. His logic feels sound to me. He uses law as an indicator of cultural attitudes. Since politics is a lagging indicator of cultural opinion, the institution of laws that contain sexuality would have followed the public’s opinion about what was good.
But he’s not a theologian.
Perhaps the biggest change was the idea that there was a god that not just cared about humanity in particular, but about individuals. The author talks about how the world didn’t regulate male sexuality. But that’s not accurate. There was a group of people who did. That would be the Jews. They pretty much went all in for monogamy and not committing adultery long before Christ taught. It’s written right into the 10 Commandments. [As is not murdering.] I would guess the Jews originated that as a concept.
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But then Christianity brought in the aspect of a personal deity. Something that was missing in Judaism, which does require a certain amount of philosophical and intellectual study to grasp the concept of transcendence. The idea of a personal deity is easier. But before Christianity, while humans might have personally related to some gods more than others, there really wasn’t any evidence in the ancient stories that the gods cared for humans in particular, except for Prometheus. Combining the personal and the transcendent was an innovation.
Then there’s the idea of faith. Not just for the greatness of empire, and the goodness of the world that resulted from it, but that life beyond death would be better. Neither Judaism nor Greco-Roman religion had these things. It was a big win for Christianity.
Modern culture with its focus on science - not to mention Marxism - has pushed people away from traditional Christian belief and faith. Some people think the religious are foolish if we believe in something we can’t see. I think people who rely solely on sensory input are deprived of something amazing, loving, and powerful. Christians would likely agree with me on that.
But that rejection of the transcendent is part of what has pushed us back into spiritual expression that is more focused on the body. Paganism is focused on the body and on the intuitive. That’s what makes it healing for those of us who are broken. Almost all of the Christian ways of knowing pushed me away from my intuitive self. My still, small voice wasn’t happy with sitting in church. Solace came with being in the woods, or out in a rain storm listening to the crack of thunder. In the church, I was the stranger, the one who didn’t fit. The child I was could not have killed that part of me so that I could fit in. The conformity of the church left no place for a creative.
The transcendent is a difficult reach for when you don’t have a strong ego in the first place. Before you can transcend the ego, you have to have one. I didn’t have good boundaries or a strong ego. It felt like everyone’s feelings and opinions pressed in on me and there was no ‘I.’ Jesus didn’t help. I couldn’t relate to him. He was so far away. How could someone who had done what he did understand a 14-year-old girl in a world that was so different? That was quite aside from my personal strangeness which would have been classified as evil and a pull toward temptation among the Mennonites and was seen as not quite sane by the Presbyterians.
Pagan/Wiccan ethics of the 80s and 90s were mostly libertarian [Pagans may argue about this. Bring it on.] That’s not much of a base, but it did allow me to feel my way forward into healing. Our culture has created a lot of broken people. Sometimes aligning one’s self with a well-trodden path will create healing. It’s well-known in the psychological literature that religion is about the only thing that works consistently for addiction.
But not for everyone. I’m working on a book called The Case for Paganism. To this end, I created a survey about why people left their former religion. One of the answers that most struck me was “I wanted to feel my body. I wanted to dance.” If we cannot believe in something better ahead, The simplicity of joy in our bodies, it’s very difficult to put off the urges in front of us. Transcendence is important. We need to reach for that which is better than ourselves. But if we’re broken, transcendence is out of reach.
We have to start from where we are.
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Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. She lives with her husband, and is Mother of Cats; three boyz. Selina has written The Young Woman’s Goodlife Guide: Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 20. Or… Learn From My Pain, and How to Train Your Cat: Using a Clicker and Leash to Keep Your Indoor Cat Happy and Healthy, the Goodlife Guide to Nutrition, and The Storytellers: a Journey of Discovery.