Paganism as a Religion
The debate on whether or not the terms “Pagan” and “Neo-Pagan” represent all of us and whether or not they should be capitalized and considered as a religion has been raging for sometime across the blogsphere.
There are plenty of excellent places to go for more on this topic, but of course the Wild Hunt blog has two recent entries (with lots of additional links) located here and here.
My viewpoint is likely an older one but still rings true to me — I believe it is mostly that of Michael York who has a whole book entitled Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion. In it he argues that the basic tenets of our religions and spiritualities are similar enough that the whole umbrella term “Pagan” ought to be considered as a religion itself.
While I do firmly believe the above, there is a more important political reason (at least in the USA). The easiest way for the right-wing evangelicals to deny us civil rights is to simply label our movement/s “not a religion”. They side-step the whole issue of religious rights and put us outside the religious tent altogether.
Wicca MIGHT be able to fight its way into the religious tent of civil rights. Asatru and Druidism might eventually manage it also. But frankly our religions are small enough and disorganized enough that we don’t want to be doing this one small group at a time. If you happen to be a member of one of the many tiny religious groups (4 people?, 12 people?, etc.) who don’t quite subscribe to the tenets of the “larger” groups like Wicca, you can forget being treated equally in the eyes of the law if Paganism in general is not regarded as a religion.
I’m told that Hinduism is/was a British colonial construction. That each small village throughout India had its own local gods and goddesses and spirits and its own take on doing things. They were all vaguely related of course. In that case the British IMHO did them a favor in the sense of considering Hinduism all one religion — today that religion is able to speak as one very large entity when comes to asserting religious rights in the USA.
We need to fight for the term Pagan to be a religion and to represent all of us. We can figure out later amongst ourselves how to tolerate internal differences, how much generic Wiccan practices are the default at festival rituals, etc.
— Michael