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The second place where neopaganism shows up in Christian churches is in the attempt to get rid of the inescapably masculine imagery for God in the Bible. God is spirit, transcending gender, so it seems such a harmless and healing step to refer to God as she instead of he, as Mother instead of Father, or as Goddess instead of God. This opens a door to that confusion of creation and Creator which is paganism's great mistake: to worship the earth itself as the great immanent divinity that continually gives birth out of its own fertile mystery. To equate God (or Goddess) and earth in this way is to deny the distinct and transcendent personality of the God revealed in Scripture.

These are very real dangers that evangelicals need to oppose strongly. But if we merely focus on the dangers, we will miss another, more hopeful strand of neopaganism, an attribute of the movement that provides the key to our evangelism.

At home here
One of my first close contacts with neopaganism took place a few years ago when my wife, daughter, and I were involved in a blockade protesting the logging of the last large areas of old forest on the west coast of Vancouver Island. We were persuaded to participate by a new Christian who was impressed by the spiritual seriousness of the protest and the complete lack of any Christian presence there.

We too were impressed—and bemused—by the spiritual intensity of the event. Though most of the participants were younger than us, we were coached in nonviolent resistance techniques by a grandmotherly, white-haired woman who said she was a Wicca priestess—a witch. We were given song sheets that included hymns to "the earth goddess," and sat in the big Circle (the name denoted not only a shape but an event and an attitude) in a meeting conducted, we were told, under feminist principles of "consensus and nonviolence." And there we planned the next morning's blockade.

After the dawn arrests—by this time arrests had become almost a ritual—we returned from our brief time in jail to the bright, late-morning light of "The Circle." We decided to teach the group a song of our own, the words from Isaiah 55: "You will go out with joy, and be led forth in peace, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands."

Many of the protesters seemed surprised that the words were in the Bible—as they seemed surprised at the Scripture texts we had posted: "The Earth is the Lord's," "Creation groans," and "in Christ … a new creation." But the biggest surprise—always a pleased response—for this earnest group of protesters was that Christians were even present at the protest. "Do Christians care about the earth?" was a common inquiry.

A common tenet of neopagan religion is the belief that neither Christians nor the Christian God are concerned or connected with the earth. To neopagans, "Christian culture" seems to act as though the earth were merely raw material to be used up in getting somewhere else (either to heaven or to a golden future). Neopagans respond: We are at home here. Hence, the passionate protests to save forests or to celebrate rituals that attempt to connect participants with the cycles of nature.

For many people today, neopaganism is the result of a first, tentative response to the word about God that is broadcast nonverbally through the whole creation. Many neopagans are genuinely seeking God, and Christians need to see how the neopagan thirst for spirituality and the sacred can be filled—not from the stagnant pools of our own inwardness, but from the water of life that only Jesus gives.

Continued on next page | Putting the "neo" in pagan

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November 15 1999, Vol. 43, No. 13