Could neo-paganism be the new ‘religion’ of America?

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I had this article thrown at my via BigThink on Facebook. It's interesting to see them talking about it and I have my own take:

https://bigthink.com/the-present/modern ... 1691331777


My impression - we've been in a culture of increasing individualism, economy treating increasingly private areas of life as standing reserve (Paul Kingsnorth's concept of 'the machine'), there's a 'meaning crisis' that people are left to face alone, and it makes perfect sense that neopaganism would be on the rise because it's relatively non-sectarian, open-source (you can mix, match, and do what you want with it), and the self-cultivation it offers is an individualized approach to self-improvement. It both helps solve isolated individuals meaning problems as well as offering them some amount of loosely knit community - but the catch is that it doesn't, and likely can't, offer the robustness of community that you'd find in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam precisely because of that tradeoff.

I think the neopagan revival would only be temporary, in that the real purpose of 'religion' as it's existed is as a social contract among adherents, which means standardized creeds, regular attendance, social conformity, and the like. Spiritual self-actualization and religion really serve significantly different masters and I don't think the two overlap all that much, such that I think you'd have significant tension between the uber-geek mystics or the Terrence McKenna types who'd want to smoke DMT regularly vs. the average person trying to raise a family, keep the family functioning, and they need a place that's stable to the point of boredom for the sake of both grounding and raising their kids in an orderly manner.

So... if we head back from increased social atomization back to more community and collective values - I either don't see neopaganism being predominant or at a minimum it would either drift to the background (perhaps without persecution - just go out of style as the kinds of problems people faced changed) or it would have a lot of it's elements brought together into something like a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox type of structure (a bit like Mormonism without as many of the spicy elements).

That last thought also brings up something I heard Jason Reza Jorjani talk about in an interview - ie. his concern that the elites will, if we have further validation of the UAP/UFO phenomena, will try to throw us at perennialism / esoteric Traditionalism as a new religion to ground our place in the cosmos but which would be a reinstitution of Nietzsche's slave morality. I don't know but I can see how they'd be meeting a particular need (mentioned above) even if the mechanics of that need being met are based in realpolitik.

I think that is unlikely. The dominance of a new religion tends to follow a precedent. There is no precedent for neopaganism or Wicca anywhere in the world. Wicca, from which neopaganism is mostly derived, was a 20ᵗʰ-century invention. There is no connection to some old religion for which women died during the witch burnings. Those women were not witches. By and large, they were women sadly seen as uppity, by their husbands, in patriarchal societies.

Instead, Wicca is a combination, made by Gerald Gardner and others, of Irish mythology, Aleister Crowley's Thelema, Freemasonry, and Hindu Shaivism. Most, but not all, forms of neopaganism are modifications to Wicca. Aside from that, Matthew Fox's 20ᵗʰ-century creation spirituality is an unrelated form of neopaganism. There are also others. They are all new.

The ways people use the terminology is tricky because on one hand you do have the actual Gerald Gardner wicca as a creation which was largely ripped from Crowley's A.'.A.'. and is a post WWII concoction. You also have people using the term neopagan to refer to anything that's a bit like new age but a bit more committed than just crystals, sage, and The Secret, or some tarot cards they bought at Hot Topic.

Like I said though I think the trend will follow individuality, ie. cultural individualism goes up - neopaganism will as well as new age will go up, individualism goes down - more return to more traditional religions or perhaps further codification of neopagan and Hermetic concepts into some kind of institution (to a degree OTO tries to be that but I don't see that happening - too many aspects of it are stuck to Crowley, Book of the Law, it's not everyone's thing and most people won't take their kids to see a naked priestess on the altar or communion wafers with gamete or blood ash).

Sure. People can use terms however they like. However, there has been an ongoing conflict, in arcana, between the New Age Movement and Wicca or Neopaganism.

Sounds interesting, any particular details like whether it's formalism, politics, etc.?

To whatever extent Wiccans and other neo-Pagans join circles/covens/groves/whatever, they are joining an organized religion, albeit, in many cases, less formally organized than a typical Christian church.

There are also plenty of other Wiccans/neo-Pagans who are content to practice solo.

I was under the impression that the Pagan scene had been growing rapidly until around 2010 or so and then leveled off. So now it's apparently growing again?

Yeah, it sounds like stops and starts.

Perhaps "some amount of loosely knit community" is all that many people need by way of voluntary community? Perhaps "robustness of community" is not something most people have needed ever since the New Deal?


Religion serves different purposes in different societies, depending on the type of society. Agreed that self-actualization and religion are different things, but some kinds of religion can indeed be combined with self-actualization. And, for people who happen to value both, it's nice to be able to combine them.


There do exist "family-friendly" Pagan events.


Or perhaps just a revival of initiatory trads like Gardnerian Wicca? These are more structured and more tightly knit than other forms of neo-Paganism.

I'd disagree on these grounds - if's often cited that two thirds of the US are living paycheck to paycheck. If that's true we're really a bunch of isolated individuals hoping there's no bump in the road to change your life significantly for the next few months to a year and the sword of Damocles is always right there. Financial institutions can also play politics and freeze people's bank accounts. Isolated individuals are real easy to puppet on a string because of that and thus its really hard to keep our freedom under those conditions. I'm not saying that abusive community is better than no community, I'm saying it's worth our investment to do what we can to leverage same or similar technology to what started unraveling us in order to help regrow our social capital.


I mean in the long-run and helping to manage a child's development. I think of how with Catholicism I had a few years of prep for first communion and then was in PSR up through 8th grade for confirmation. I didn't go into Eagle Scouts but that's another thing along those lines. I can't imagine the boys from across a major city trying to get into Dionysus Pagan Academy because they have the best football program in the state or best wrestling or just about any college will accept you if you graduate from there with high marks. That's the kind of thing I mean, it's not deeply integrated.


Maybe, the extent of my understanding of Gardenarian Wicca (never been in it directly) is that Crowley and Gardener were hanging out in the 1940's, Crowley gave Gardener a bunch of A.'.A.'. titles (might have even promoted him to exempt adept) and Gardener largely aped, cloned, and modified the A.'.A.'. system to make his system. The thing I don't fully understand about that narrative though - A.'.A.'. is really deep by design, it's meant very much not be OTO where you get grades for just being there and in good standing but rather you can only promote if you're able to demonstrate mastery of various different forms of meditation and magical techniques. Admittedly I don't know a whole lot about Gardenarian Wicca (haven't had the interest) but I get the impression it's not a rigorous chain of teaching where each person has an instructor who has only one or two students and the whole thing initiates and develops that way. GW may not be a Fish concert or a Hookaville exactly but I get the impression it's more open than that.

I really see something more like this happening - a Hermetic Catholicism, something with a lot of the old fashion reverence to it, stone cathedrals and Latin / partial Latin, with ornate altar cloth and more solar or qabalistic focus on the host, that kind of thing, but it would have that kind of split where it's a wonderful place to be if you have a family you're raising and it 'feels' like that kind of environment (being a hippy isn't required and doesn't seem required) and you also have an initiatic order in that church but it's for the kinds of geeks and nerds who'd want to wear lamb skins (people like me for example). That would be a nice touch. Again, I think OTO has had that vision or something similar at times but I think they have a lot of roadblocks in the way (particularly that Crowley's as tricky as Andy Kaufmann, most people wouldn't find him relatable).

Even a loosely organized community can go a long way toward helping people find jobs, helping people find places to stay, and/or informing people about the right magic words to say to government bureaucrats, at least if the community has enabled one to find friends or acquaintances who are sufficiently well-connected and/or sufficiently knowledgeable.

I experienced this in my late twenties and early thirties, in connection with three nonreligious oddball subcultures I was involved with at the time: the polyamory scene, the BDSM scene (then known as the S&M scene), and the small, newly-emerging organized bisexual community within what was then only beginning to be called the LGBT community (formerly just the "gay community" or the "lesbian and gay community").

For example, when I lost a job, a friend of mine who happened to work for the New York State Employment Service informed me about the unemployment office's best-kept secret, the 599 program, which, if a person has lost a job in a shrinking industry, allows the person to receive unemployment insurance for double the usual amount of time while attending school to acquire new skills, instead of job-hunting as is usually required. (The 599 program is horribly under-funded, which is why the unemployment office itself doesn't inform people about it as an option even if it is clear that they lost a job in a shrinking industry.)

Another friend of mine, back then, introduced me to a friend of hers who advised my mother on getting more home care for my father when he had a stroke.

These experiences are one of the reasons why I am so fanatical about the autistic community's need to get better organized, and about the need for autistic people to learn conflict resolution skills, to help us avoid what I call fragile friendship syndrome.


Or the government can demand that the bank freeze a person's bank account (because it MIGHT be "ill-gotten gains") when the person is accused of a crime. Yes, I know all too well.

When this happened to a married couple I knew when I was in my late twenties, I and a few friends in the BDSM scene held a BDSM toy auction to raise some money to help these people (while getting rid of excess toys), and we also convinced a local BDSM club to hold another fundraising event too. We didn't manage to raise more than a thousand dollars total if I remember correctly, but it certainly did help.


Churches (at least here in the U.S.A.) traditionally depend on people tithing, which is not something most people can afford these days. For that and other reasons I don't consider churches to be a realistic model going forward, at least for most of us.


If the Neo-Pagan community ever gets big enough to have schools, it would be more appropriate to name them after Athena, or perhaps Hephaestus (for a trade school), Hermes, Hestia, or Prometheus, rather than Dionysus. The schools probably wouldn't be like Catholic schools; they would more likely feature avant garde teaching methodologies.


It will be interesting to see if any part of the neo-Pagan/occult community ends up evolving in that direction. If this does happen, I suspect it would be only a small part of the community, while the rest remains more loosely organized.

There are many Wiccans who are well aware that the foundational myth of Wicca is only a myth. But there is, as far as I am aware, no aspect of Wicca that really depends on its foundational myth. It is a thriving religion it its own right.

Several good points here. I especially agree with the last one. In the event, likely or not, that neo-Paganism becomes a predominant religion AND people then decide to look for more structure, Gardnerian, Alexandrian, Reclaiming, etc. will be there to welcome them.

Don't know, but I hope not. I'd much rather people got their sense of community directly rather than just joining an exclusive club where everybody has to pay lip-service to a set of beliefs that aren't even evidence-based. That rules me out completely from joining any religion. There's always something they insist is true that I insist probably isn't. It seems odd to me that anybody should need to believe in a cosmic plan for the human race. What's wrong with having your own plans?

There do exist various "church for atheists"-type organizations that try to create a church-like sense of community without belief in any deities, e.g. the Ethical Culture movement, American Atheists, the Sunday Assembly, Scientific Pantheism, the American Humanist Association, and various other humanist groups.

However, the vast majority of atheists are not members of any such groups.

Belief in deities has served different purposes in different cultures and at different times in history. Here in the U.S.A. at least, it seems to be the most potent way of creating a sense of community in an otherwise extremely atomized society. For that reason, most theistic religions have not only believers but also lots of hangers-on who don't actually believe in the deity(ies), but who nevertheless value the sense of community and/or tradition.

Be that as it may, most of the more popular forms of neo-Paganism are much more compatible with today's emerging social values (e.g. acceptance of LGBT people) than the most popular forms of Christianity are.

AFAIK Islam is still the fastest-growing religion in the U.S., and is projected to be the second-largest religion in the U.S. by 2040.