What Do Pagans Get from Interfaith Activities?

What does “ecumenism” mean when you don’t “all worship the same god”?

Elizabeth Scalia, a/k/a The Anchoress, a Roman Catholic blogger at Patheos, comments simultaneously on posts by another Patheos Catholic blogger and by Star Foster, who manages the site’s Pagan portal. Both of the latter, in Star’s words, hold that “My faith is not a matter of style. It’s not like shoes or purses. It’s not a matter of deciding if I want tacos or pasta for dinner. It’s not something I can change on a whim.”

Scalia’s verdict: “Ecumenism has not been able to say that [not all religions are the same]; it’s been too busy trying to be all things to all people and placing equal values to things that are not equal in anyone’s mind. It’s been a lie.”

She ends up admiring Star for her honesty, at least. But her commenters, many of them, are not convinced.  “I couldn’t call myself a Catholic and not tell you that the practice of Witchcraft is evil,” notes one.

Which is why I sometimes wonder why we — Pagans in particular — bother with ecumenical and interfaith activities.

It’s true that I do often feel that religious professionals have more in common with each other and are more able to relate to one another than their congregants and followers are.

We Pagans do not seek unity with the same fervor that the Christians do (even as they splinter more and more). “Ecumenicism” refers to a promotion of unity, of purpose if not of organization, between different Christian bodies.

“Interfaith” has a somewhat different meaning.  At times the two words are used interchangeably, but they should not be. Were it not for the American constitutional tradition of religious freedom (and similar traditions in some other Western nations), I do not think that the Pagans would get a seat at the interfaith luncheon table. (Resolutions passed by the United Nations have no effect that I have ever seen.)

So my title is an editorial rather than a rhetorical question.  I have just been going over some material related to the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group in the American Academy of Religion —  the 2012 call for papers has not yet been posted but soon will be. I don’t know if that topic would fit the “call” perfectly, but a creative person could make it fit. Or write an article for The Pomegranate.

 

The Maskers and the Money

Krampus parades, both from Austrian ski resort towns. To what extent they are underwritten by local tourism authorities I do not know. (Thanks to folk musician and writer Andy Letcher.)

When I was 16-17 years old, I lived part of each year in Mandeville, Jamaica, up in the hills, during breaks from school in the US.

One Christmas break I was getting a haircut at a second-floor establishment in the center of town when one of the staff glanced out a window and shouted, “John Canoe! John Canoe!”

Immediately everyone rushed to the windows and looked down on the street, where no more than half-a-dozen maskers were dancing down the street. Their appearance must not have been announced in advance, for no one seemed to be waiting to see them.

I wondered if I was seeing a dying tradition. Wikipedia says,

The parade and festivities probably arrived with African slaves. Although Jamaica is credited with the longest running tradition of Jonkanoo, today these mysterious bands with their gigantic costumes appear more as entertainment at cultural events than at random along the streets. Not as popular in the cities as it was 30 years ago, Jonkanoo is still a tradition in rural Jamaica.

This was certainly “at random along the streets.” There did not seem to be any organized civic or touristic organization behind it all. In a way, that was more cool.

When things get organized and promoted for touristic purposes, the rough edges are smoothed off. Watching the history of the May Day hobby horse processions in Padstow, Cornwall, you can see how the local antagonisms and occasional violence mixed in with the parade are pushed down as it becomes more of a tourist event.

Since these Krampus parades occur in ski resort towns, I wonder how much of them is controlled by the maskers themselves and  how much by the ski-tourism industry. Re-created or not, at least they speak to archaic understanding of the solstice season not just as fun and feasting but as cold, dark, hunger, and “cabin fever.”  Among other things.

Top Pagan New Stories of 2011

Do visit The Wild Hunt and read “Top Ten Pagan Stories of 2011, Part 1” and “Part 2.”

Asperger’s or Just Garage-Band Religion?

My friends who are scholars of new religious movements (NRMs)  theorize about how NRMs develop or do not, become accepted or do not, assimilate or do not. Some engage in a “scholarship of advocacy,” defending in various fora the human right to start one’s own religion without being labeled a dangerous cult.

But in many cases, I think that they also just enjoy the spectacle of religion, the sheer weirdness and variety of what comes down the road.

Rod Dreher, a cultural commentator who often touches on religion, but not a scholar of NRMS as such, put up a light-hearted post recently about “His Royal Highness Prince Rutherford Johnson of Etruria, who is also Rutherford Cardinal Johnson, the patriarch of the recently invented Anglican Rite Roman Catholic Church.”

Some of the comments are quite good and lead to other links about episcopi vagantes  — self-proclaimed or dubious bishops, archbishops, and anti-popes.

One commenter hypothesized an Asperger’s syndrome connection, only with hierarchies, vestments, and churchiness rather than computers, trains, or some of the other intense fascinations that Aspie kids often display.

It all reminded me of my wife’s step-brother. He had a fairly mainstream Roman Catholic childhood in upstate New York, but was always fascinated with orders of knighthood and coats of arms, which he designed for the family. He eventually found some decayed European aristocrat to make him a knight of the “Order of St. Constantine” or something, whereupon he put out a news release about himself, which appeared in his local newspaper.

“Do you think he was somewhere on that spectrum?” I asked her.

“He was always just weird,” she said.

Setting aside the dynamics of her family, maybe some people are just weirdly creative. On a scale of 1 to 5, how much weirder is starting a church than starting a garage band? (Both might have a secondary goal of improving your social life.) Both are creative activities.

Archbishop . . . archdruid . . . arch-whatever. Here comes the parade!

Why is Saturn/Cronus in Saturnalia?

At this time of year, when the popular press runs articles on Christmas customs, a few rhetorical bases are always touched. The Christmas tree is a “Pagan survival,” that sort of thing. And that Christmas bears some relationship to the Roman celebration of Saturnalia.

At Religion Nerd, Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., goes more deeply into the origins of Saturnalia in a post titled, “A Further Note on Cronus and Chronos.”

Greek and Roman religions were religions without canonical scriptures; their mythology is notoriously complex and, to modern eyes, often contradictory.  It is important to add that this does not mean that there was no religious writing in the ancient world; just the opposite, in fact. There was an excess of religious writing.  And of religious images, as well. There is so much writing from the ancient world about the gods, in fact, spanning so many centuries, that it is well-nigh impossible to make systematic sense of it all.

I came away thinking that a lot of what we think we know came from a couple of well-known Roman writers, such as Virgil. As usual, first came the  festival and then came the religio-literary explanation of what it all meant.

Is ‘Urban Fantasy’ the new ‘Chick Lit’?

Clad in furs, Princess Tamara of the Realm of Snark rides in off the steppes, followed by her horde of sword-swinging commenters.

They come to plunder the genre-fiction shelves. And to denounce the “pussification of vampires.”

An Atheistic Critique of Wicca

Blogging atheist Eric Steinhart, writing at Daniel Fincke’s Camels with Hammers, turns his rhetorical guns on Wicca. He thinks that a “woo-free Wicca” might be tolerable.

There are a number of separate posts, and I have not read them all. But I get the impression that he is engaging with a very limited number of books, chosen more or less at random from the Llewellyn catalog, plus something by the late Stewart Farrar.

The irony is that there are indeed a huge number of books about Wicca, yet everyone calls it a religion of experience, “embodied religion,” and so forth. I am not sure that Steinhart gets that part. Has he been in circle? Has he experienced the fire and smoke and music of a large festival?

I don’t mean that either experience would “convert” him, nor should they. And he probably would respond that they merely activate different parts of the brain, which has nothing to do with all those imaginary gods, etc.

What interests me here too is that his postings provide another data point in the increasing role of contemporary Paganism — and Wicca (broadly defined) as its largest segment — as the new religious “other.”

What people like Steinhart have yet to work out is that the rhetorical starting points are different when talking about polytheism, animism, etc. than when talking about the scriptural religions.

 

World Religions versus the Blue Bra Revolution

Washington Post writer Sally Quinn looks at photos of Egyptian soldiers beating an abaya-shrouded Muslim woman, and a light bulb goes on for her about major religions:

Why would men, particularly under the guise of religious belief, want to keep women down? Because they understand that women’s sexuality is something that they cannot live without, it is something that renders them powerless. Women can have babies, women can breastfeed, women are the lifegivers.

Sounds like much of the Pagan discourse beginning in the 1970s, if not earlier! Read more about her hoped-for “blue bra revolution.”

In related news, Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority is nervous.

For decades Copts have suffered attacks by Islamists who view them as “kafir”—Arabic for nonbelievers. But there is now a sense among Middle East experts that they have become more vulnerable since the revolution.

This year, mobs have looted and attacked Coptic churches, homes and shops throughout Egypt. Churches have been burned down, and one Copt had his ear cut off by a Muslim cleric invoking Islamic law.

Strong gains by Islamist parties in the recent elections have further raised fears among the Christian minority that they won’t have a place in the new Egypt.

An acquaintance of mine is married to an Egyptian Christian woman. Her parents recently came for what he said is a month-long visit — I see them around town with their daughter now and then. I am starting to wonder if they actually plan to go home or to seek asylum. Maybe they are weighing their options.

Upcoming Gerald Gardner Documentary

A commenter asked about the documentary on Gerald Gardner in which Ronald Hutton is involved. Here is the announcement.

How long before it might be available outside Britain is a good question.

Last Yuletide News Bits

Re-purposed Santa figure, Pueblo, Colorado

• This is your brain. This is your brain on Christmas.

• “How the Lawyers Stole Winter”  — are we raising kids who can’t cope? No, it’s not Yule-related, directly. Indirectly, yes, I would argue. You have to embrace all of the wheel.

• No matter how “imagistic” it may be, Iraqi Christians are afraid to celebrate Midnight Mass. The current bunch of Islamists may succeed after 1,400 years of effort in chasing the last Arab Christians out of the Middle East. Expect them all in North America soon. (I have already met Egyptian Christians in a tiny town near me.)

• I was watching a re-run show hosted by travel writer Burt Wolf in which he reported that Christmas trees were promoted by 16th-century German Protestants who considered images of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the saints to be idolatrous and who wanted to replace them with something else. That is counter-intuitive enough that it might be right, and it matches what was going on elsewhere, such as England in the time of the boy king Edward VI. In that case, the Christmas tree does not qualify as a “Pagan survival,” at least not directly.

• And don’t forget Krampus coming to town.