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. 

A New Story

I'm moved by the need to tell a new story. Or maybe just tell our current story differently. The conflict of worldviews (or perceived conflict) seems to be my constant ideological companion as I traverse the realm of graduate literature. Even in my Inter-Religious dialogue class, our studies of conflict resolution and overcoming cultural differences seems to take on that old, familiar, stomach-sickening binary cast; individualist vs. communitarian, diffuse vs. specific, high-context vs. low-context. Individualists aren’t prone to service and are not concerned about their communities. The trend toward the specific is scientific and objective, while those who engage in a diffuse communication style are more holistic, more organic, and more in touch with spirituality.


These are generalizations, and to be fair, the author of this particular text continually reinforces the notion “that all individuals are multicultural, sharing identities and meanings with people from a range of other groups, and that cultural generalizations are not manifested evenly within groups or across times but change with specific context…”(1) Still, it is easy to see how this conceptual binary has infiltrated our shared cultural imagination. I take issue not only with the fact that these categories are never completely appropriate or applicable, but also with the underlying assumption that an individualist perspective is theoretically inseparable from its “origin,” the Newtonian scientific worldview, and that the underlying framework for all individualism is an atomistic, determined, objective reality.
I take issue with these binaries (individualism vs. collectivism, science vs. spirituality, specificity vs. diffuseness, mechanical efficiency vs. aesthetic quality), which are in my opinion simply symptoms of one all-encompassing, flawed super-binary, because I do not think that the problem lies in the fact that we see reality in many different ways, but in the fact that we think these views are incompatible, or even that they are two different ways to see the world.


A metaphor from LeBaron’s book might help. Akio Morita, a founder of Sony, provides an illustration of the difference between specificity and diffuseness (categories LeBaron is using to help explain sources of conflict in cross-cultural communication). He likens the specificity view to a bricklayer, and the diffuse to a stonemason. The bricklayer has a closed set of specific tools and materials, which he arranges according to a predetermined plan. The creation of the bricklayer emerges in a predictable, orderly way. The Stonemason, on the other hand, “chooses stones that approximate the general size and appearance desired and then chisels them until they fit together perfectly.”(2)


What are the two products of these approaches? A brick wall, or some other rigid, linear structure, and a beautiful cathedral, monument, or other more aesthetically pleasing construction.


The Bricklayer is mechanistic, determined, specific, and follows an orderly and predictable plan. What comes out of this? Nothing exciting, but at least something dependable.


The Stonemason is diffuse, artistic, visionary, non-linear, and aesthetically driven. What emerges? Something beautiful, awe-inspiring, and atypical, though usually through an inefficient and fairly unpredictable process.


It’s a great setup, but it’s ultimately misleading. Stonemasons are just as mathematically and scientifically informed, driven, and restricted as bricklayers. What differs in these two stories is the material, not the process. Bricks have predetermined shape, stones don’t. Realistically, the Stonemason and the Bricklayer follow very similar sets of physical and mathematical rules.


Here’s where the fun, symbolic stuff starts. And this is why I love Freemasonry.
The Stonemason’s craft can function as a symbol of the unity of physical/mathematical rules and the aesthetic drive to create something beautiful, unpredictable, and undetermined.


Here’s the kicker: following a set of rules and guidelines (“laws” if you will), whether physical, mathematical, or moral, does not produce a deterministic set of results.


Look at the physical laws of the universe (and forgive me, for my scientific literacy and fluency nominal at best), and then look at the universe. Does the product shaped by these “determined” forces look mechanical, at all? No, I don’t think so either. The universe is a beautiful, dangerous, chaotic, illogical, diverse, constantly changing place.


The Stonemason is bound by the determining rules of geometry and physics, and yet creates breathtakingly beautiful buildings. Even more importantly, the awe and power of these constructions, especially in their aesthetic appeal, would have been impossible to achieve without those rigid, determining rules.
Thesis: deterministic “laws” do not prevent the emergence of variety.
Back to the binaries. I stated above that the problem with the binaries was “the fact that we think these views are incompatible, or even that they are two different ways to see the world.” The premise that the Stonemason and the Bricklayer follow fundamentally different processes was flawed. Stonemasons are just as rigidly constrained by the same mathematical and physical rules as the bricklayer. The difference is in scale.


Building a wall is not that complicated. A brick house is higher up the scale, but there’s not much you can screw up there. Building a cathedral is enormously complex. There are multiple kinds of labor, materials, spaces, etc. to consider, but one still has to follow the same basic rules as the bricklayer. Proportion of height and weight, gravitational forces, wind resistance, stress factors – all of the mathematics are the same. Kicker #2: the farther up the scale of complexity you go, even operating with the same rules, the more variety, difference, and (dare I say it?) freedom you have.


The freedom of aesthetic expression is a high-level function of the determining laws that provide order, stability, balance, and a certain amount of predictability. Therefore, both “fundamental views” of reality, interpersonal/communal relationships are two sides of the same coin. You cannot understand one without the other, nor is one superior to the other. Both must be recognized and allowed to operate. Aesthetics and diffusion are not antithetical to determinism and specificity.
Here’s where the “new story” comes in.


I keep running into these two different ways of weaving the story of reality and it’s starting to bother me. I’m getting tired of it. So in a time honored Existentialist tradition, I’m going to re-tell the story. I’m going to weave the tapestry of reality as I see it and cast it like a net into the world. These aren’t just the mad ramblings of my own brain, of an isolated individual; all of my own thoughts are shaped by my interaction with other minds. Relationality is hugely important to me. I hardly know what I think until I have shared a few whispers of thought over a glass of wine or coffee and watched those whispers slowly gain form in the matrix of conversation.


The story is already taking shape and will likely take mythic form, as I feel that’s the best way to convey meaning in a non-linear, non-imposing way without making ultimate truth claims. This (I think) is the same principle behind the Freemasonic use of drama and ritual in their instructional ceremonies and degrees.


Stay tuned for the next installment!




1 Michelle LeBaron, “Bridging Cultural Conflicts,” p. 54.
2 Ibid. 67