{"id":261,"date":"2004-09-12T19:47:00","date_gmt":"2004-09-12T19:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=261"},"modified":"2004-09-12T19:47:00","modified_gmt":"2004-09-12T19:47:00","slug":"261","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=261","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

‘Spiritual, not religious’<\/strong><\/p>\n

Articles like this one<\/a> from the Denver Post<\/span> illustrate the difficulty in censusing non-mainstream religions. How many Pagans might answer “none” when our traditions don’t appear in the menu of choices?<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a friend is working on a sociological piece on the growth of Wicca and other Paganisms in English-speaking countries. He might end up reinvigorating the “Wicca is the fastest-growing religion” meme after all, which I had at one point<\/a> lost faith in.<\/p>\n

If you look at the map at the botton of the Post<\/span> article, you will see that my county is one of those with the lowest percentage of “nones.” It’s not that we mirror northern New Mexico, but rather, as someone here said, the place is “too rich, too religious, too Republican.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Spiritual, not religious’ Articles like this one from the Denver Post illustrate the difficulty in censusing non-mainstream religions. How many Pagans might answer “none” when our traditions don’t appear in the menu of choices? Meanwhile, a friend is working on a sociological piece on the growth of Wicca and other Paganisms in English-speaking countries. He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-261","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3644,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3644","url_meta":{"origin":261,"position":0},"title":"An Atheistic Critique of Wicca","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 30, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7100,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7100","url_meta":{"origin":261,"position":1},"title":"Wicca Again as the “Designated Other”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 3, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Pasque flowers blooming in a thin layer of pine duff atop a boulder. I love them for their precarious and improbably habitat. Spring is slowly coming to the forest, and within it the offer of new chances, a feeling that you might get it right this time. Travel and editorial\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"pasque flowers","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/pasque-flowers-206x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":704,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=704","url_meta":{"origin":261,"position":2},"title":"Morwics and Mormon magic","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 16, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"John Morehead (of Sacred Tribes, mentioned earlier) blogs about his discovery of \"Morwics,\" Mormons who have adopted Wicca. (He lives in Salt Lake City, it should be noted.)It seems that ex-Mormons not only gravitate toward evangelicalism and atheism as their religious choice options, but also toward Paganism. This makes sense\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":168,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=168","url_meta":{"origin":261,"position":3},"title":"The fastest-growing religion? The notion\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 21, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"The fastest-growing religion? The notion that Wicca is America's fastest-growing religion has achieved meme status. Everyone says it, but who started it? Thanks to Jim Lewis, I have been looking at some of the data collected by the American Religious Identification Survey, conducted at CUNY, and comparing sociological changes in\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5032,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5032","url_meta":{"origin":261,"position":4},"title":"Mouse’s Way: Philip Heselton’s Biographies of Gerald Gardner","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 12, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"A serious scholarly biography of Gerald Gardner, the effective founder of the Wiccan religion, remains to be written. Philip Heselton has now written four books on Gardner's life, but his vision is near-sighted and close to the ground, like a mouse seeking food in the grass, unaware that there are\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"England\"","block_context":{"text":"England","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=england"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2165,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2165","url_meta":{"origin":261,"position":5},"title":"Why We Do Pagan Studies – 2","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 16, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"(Part 1 here) Just to continue the previous discussion, let's look at a Pagan scholar's (in both senses of the term) book, Niki Bado's Coming to the Edge of the Circle (Oxford University Press, 2005). Its subtitle is\u00a0 \"A Wiccan Initiation Ritual.\"\u00a0 But is that all that it is about?\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 4 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 4 comments","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2165#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/41FdQcxfVoL._SL160_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-dp%2CTopRight%2C12%2C-18_SH30_OU01_AA160_.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}