Integrating Critical Lenses into Spirituality as a Naturalistic Pagan Goal

Let’s face it. I am a very young pagan, both in terms of my own age (26) and the number of years I have self-consciously identified as such (one, very eventful, year).

Needless to say, I’ve spent this last year soaking up any and all things pagan. I’ve gone to Pagan Pride, participated in and led rituals throughout the Wheel of the Year with my ADF Grove, read dozens of articles and books, set up altars, made offerings, meditated, carved and burned my own set of runes, collected knick-knacks and paraphernalia, and let my normally skeptical mind entertain some truly unfamiliar ideas.

But as a full year rounds and I return to the season wherein I began – late spring – I find that my path forward looks very different than I expected it to. It was after I attended my first formal ADF ritual at Imbolc in 2015 that I started to entertain pagan notions. Up to that point, I had spent years focused more on talking about belief than figuring out what I believed for myself. I often joked, “I study religion; I don’t do it.” That, too, was after giving up the Christian label out of a long and utterly uneventful turn away from the religion of my youth.

After Imbolc, I dove into pagan thought and practice with enthusiasm. I officially joined ADF and my Grove at our Mid-Summer ritual in 2015, an anniversary I just marked with my Grove by co-leading our early Mid-Summer rite at the beach.

During this past year, I’ve waded into the modern pagan ocean with both the excitement and sincerity of an insider, and the critical tools, healthy skepticism, and moderation of a scholarly outsider. This latter approach has not been well received by all with whom I have come into contact. Some of my questions may have been too bluntly stated. I have not, perhaps, managed to equally balance both of my approaches as I’ve sought to probe some of the depths I am so keen to encounter. (Even if I’ve only just made it out of the shallows.) While it may seem strange to others, for me, full encounter with any “depth” requires all my faculties – intuitive, emotive, critical, analytical, etc. In all honesty, I’ve never really separated these, or seen them as anything other than complementary. While others might exclude their critical lenses from their spiritual paths, perhaps out of a desire to preserve mystery, I cannot. Nor can I accept criticisms from others who suggest that my pagan path is less valid, or less sincere, as a consequence.  

It might be the academic in me, but my first and most powerful impulse is to understand. Lots of problems – including the miscommunications that tend to land me in hot water – seem to be caused by a lack of shared terms, a difference in framework, or a mismatch between fundamental assumptions. And while I wouldn’t argue that “everything will be better if we all just got on the same page” (since that smacks of orthodoxy), I’ve found that assuming commonality where there is none can cause a great deal of frustration.

My year of pagan searching has been full of miscommunications, unfortunate assumptions, and misread intentions – on my part and on others’. Alongside the discomfort and frustration, however, I’ve learned a great deal about myself, and about the enormous variety of perspectives and approaches that fall under the label “pagan” – some of which are, quite frankly, inherently contradictory. This has pushed me to be ever more careful when using the term “pagan,” and to be aware of settings where critical conversations – pushing for clarity, examining implications, challenging assumptions – are inappropriate or untimely. I’ve also learned that just understanding a disagreement, “framing the terms” correctly, does not inevitably lead to reconciliation or soothed feelings. This is my own bias, one I am trying to overcome.

I do see the critical lens as essential to my own Humanistic pagan path. I am encouraged to find that the many authors at Humanistic Paganism, and within Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans, seem to agree. Questioning, challenging, deconstructing, and engaging good scholarship will always be essential tools for those, like myself, who cannot accept a spiritual path that marginalizes our critical lenses. My own scholarship is predicated on the notion that such a division is unnecessary and even harmful.

The Late-Spring theme at Humanistic Paganism is “Challenges.” One of my challenges, going forward, is to clarify for myself and others how important it is to put our critical discourses – the natural sciences, social sciences, history, logic, anthropology, etc. – into a dynamic and mutually transforming relationship with our spirituality, our sense of call, our deepest feelings of encounter and kinship with the World and Others. This relationship, this integration, cannot only be for the good of the individual, in order to guide her personal spiritual journey. It must also offer up a way of seeing, of navigating both our deepest and most mundane life experiences, that leads to more just communities and a healthier world. It must transform our ways of thinking about ourselves, the world, and the role of religion for we Humanists who seek to cultivate a relationship with the world and all its Beings.

Non-Overlapping Magisteria? – With apologies to Stephen J. Gould

I don’t believe in Non-Overlapping Magisteria. NOMA is the view that science and religion speak about fundamentally different questions. In this view, “Bad Religion” tries to comment on what is within the scientific “magisterium,” and "Bad Science" does the opposite. This view follows the culturally-accepted paradigm that constructs religion as a “Not of this world” discourse; religion is devoted to a set of concerns about which science cannot speak. NOMA serves to neatly separate the two, to put them each in their own sandboxes and let them play by themselves, without interfering with each other’s operations, or claiming authority over each other’s sandboxes.

At first blush, NOMA seems to be a useful, perhaps even necessary, way of framing the situation. It certainly sets up safe-guards to prevent the kind of “boundary crossing” that we find objectionable; whether that’s Christians pushing the inherently oxymoronic "Creation Science," and trying to get Intelligent Design into classrooms, or evolutionary biologists claiming that religions are irrational relics of a pre-scientific age and belong in museums (Dawkins).

But as I’ve taught the study of religion for undergraduates, I’ve found that this sharp division does more than prevent unfortunate and misguided crossovers; it can help crystallize a view of religion as inherently disconnected from scientific insights and approaches. It assumes a definition of religion that really describes the main monotheisms. This limits the way we are able to think and speak about religion in public and in private. It reinforces an ideological distinction between “nature” (the domain of science), and “culture,” (the domain of religion and myth). It polarizes “subjectivity” and “objectivity,” as if these were two distinct domains.

“Religion” comes then to speak only about the “supernatural,” since the “Natural” is the domain of science. This division, David Abram reminds us in The Spell of the Sensuous, can be traced back “to the modern, civilized assumption that the natural world is largely determinate and mechanical, and that that which is regarded as mysterious, powerful, and beyond human ken must therefore be of some other, nonphysical realm above nature, ‘supernatural’” (Abram 8). Such a view precludes a kin-based, non-dualist understanding of non-human nature; a view which, I would argue, is widely held both among modern pagans and members of tribal cultures today.

French Anthropologist Philippe Descola’s foundational work, Beyond Nature and Culture, explores the way people from dozens of the world’s tribal cultures speak about and distinguish between what Western philosophy has deemed the separate realms of “nature” and “culture.” He finds, most importantly, that, overwhelmingly, they make no such distinction, at least not in the way we assume is “obvious” or “natural.”

Perhaps NOMA works for religions whose concerns are primarily “Not of this world.” But as a student of the history of religion and a humanistic pagan, my view is that religion, at its core, is fundamentally about this world. I've previously mentioned Graham Harvey’s book, Food, Sex, and Strangers: Redefining Religion as Everyday Life. In Harvey’s anthropological view, religion can be viewed as a kind of “inter-species etiquette,” a way of negotiating between and among the Beings alongside whom we experience daily life. If this, too, is religion, then certainly the natural and social sciences have insights to offer!

The goal, of course, is not to trample on or dismiss non-empirically verifiable beliefs, but rather to expand the conversation, include multiple voices, and speak more broadly and inclusively about human and non-human life, with all of their intricacies.

How can our spirituality help us?
I see Humanistic and Naturalistic Paganism as inherently integrative. Our spirituality integrates not only ways of seeing the world – critical and spiritual – but also integrates us into the world. It is a spirituality that builds deep connections between and among all the Beings with whom we share our breathing, dancing, changing planet, whirling through space. If there is a set of tools that offers us insight into those lives with whom we share a deep kinship, from our fellow primates and mammals all the way into the depths of the sea, then it is useful and essential to our spiritual path(s). We must heed what these tools teach us, whether the lesson is a humbling confirmation of the kinship of all life, or a startling reminder about the fragility of our ecosystems. 

By doing so, we also (re)claim religion as a fundamentally human endeavor, one that helps us speak to the depths and heights of our experiences. We refuse to act as if religion is irrelevant to the greater conversation about the future of our species and planet, about systems of injustice. And while the scientific method – for example – must continue to operate according to its own rules, we refuse the conventional yoking of scientific research with capitalist endeavors, as if science were justified only by its potential for profit. We lend our voices to those who argue for the inherent worth of understanding for its own sake, whether that understanding is scientific, humanistic, or philosophical.