November 15 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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On the west coast of Canada, where my wife and I live, the Halloween cover of a community newspaper pictured a smiling couple, both with long robes and flowing hair, holding a pumpkin. The headline announced, "Wiccan Priest and Priestess to Wed on All Hallow's Eve."

The lead story enthusiastically described the details of the wedding and narrated the couple's pilgrimage to an "ancient faith" away from Christianity. The bride said that after she became an atheist, "It seemed to me that creation was sacred, the earth was sacred, and in the greater scheme of things we were not outside of it, we were part of it."

The newspaper article reflects an undeniable aspect of contemporary life in North America: the rise of neopaganism. Supporters claim it is the fastest-growing religion in the United States, with nearly half a million adherents. On the rural British Columbia island where we live, solstice celebrations can be attended better than the local church. In the city yellow pages, Wiccan is listed with Baptist, Presbyterian, and Catholic churches. (Wicca comes from witch and means one who works with natural forces by shaping or bending them. Thus, the word is closely related to wicker, not wicked.)

The thousand-acre forest that surrounds the university where I teach is called "Pacific Spirit Park" and is described as "a ground for our becoming one with nature." In many bookstores, large sections deal with magic, paganism, and Wicca and are full of volumes by mainstream publishers with titles like The Pagan Path and Voices from the Circle.

Interest in paganism is not limited to the West Coast, where some religious flakiness is expected. The largest pagan group in North America ("The Circle Network") is based in Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin. Neopagan sites are among the most frequently visited on the Internet, and hundreds of seasonal festivals in Britain and North America draw pagan celebrants. Many people are willing—even proud—to be called pagans and witches.

How should Christians respond to this growth of neopaganism? The two most common responses are both wrong. The first response, with a long history in Christendom, is to regard all forms of paganism as thinly veiled Satanism, a worship of evil that Christians must oppose. This attitude led to what neopagans often call "the burning times," when many witches, mostly women, were killed. It is impossible to determine the numbers, but some neopagan claims reach into the millions.

The other response, consistent with a growing acceptance of religious pluralism, is to affirm the sincerity of neopagan spirituality. Since there are many "mansions of the spirit," as the current Anglican bishop in Vancouver put it, Christians should accept this form of spirituality as an authentic way to God, just like our own Christian faith.

There are very good reasons to be concerned about the rise of neopaganism: most fundamentally neopaganism, like all religions, is a dead end unless it leads to a knowledge of God through Jesus. Neopaganism is particularly troubling when it shows up in Christian churches, often as an accommodation to two closely related themes in contemporary culture. The first is the beguiling idea that the only God we need to pay any attention to is the god within, a thinly veiled way of worshiping the self under the guise of "my own spirituality." It is a short and fatal step from "finding God within" to an affirmation of the ancient lie that we can ourselves become "like gods."

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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