121212 #1: Religion
Does not Wisdom cry out? She stands in the top of the high places; in the crossroads, she stands. Beside the gates, at the entry doors, she cries aloud.
– Proverbs 8:1-3
The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.
- Rosa Luxemburg
I greatly prefer being called religious to spiritual. An outside observer might call me spiritual—I own more than one tarot deck, I have a home altar with a deity statue, my practice is syncretic1—but “spiritual” doesn’t evoke the right images. When I think of religion, I think of organization. I think of potlucks and shared practices and regular gatherings. When someone says they’re “spiritual, but not religious,” it’s reasonable to assume they aren’t meeting in a sanctuary every week. I am not spiritual. I am religious. Through its organizing power, religion has run the world since the beginning of recorded human history. Despite its diverse manifestations, it is all recognizable as religion.
Philosopher of religion John Hick presented a religious theory of religion. He wanted to explain religion from the inside, as opposed to secular analyses which try to explain religion using irreligious language. To do so, he drew upon the language of philosopher Immanuel Kant. He proposed that the object of religion, whether you call it the Divine, the Source, the One, God, Brahman, Atman, or whatever other term is preferred, was comparable to Kant’s noumena, an underlying reality that is beyond cognition. To Kant, the noumena can only be encountered filtered through our consciousness, which has certain built-in categories. It must conceive of things as logical, it contains the categories of time and space, and so on. While Hick didn’t affirm or deny this theory of mind and epistemology, he did draw a comparison in saying that the Divine is always experienced exclusively through our encultured minds. He found a unity in modern religions in that they involved a connection of the human to the Larger Whole, and that this connection made people more open and connected and less selfish. To Hick, what differentiated a legitimate religion from a hollow one is that religion made people better.
Note that he found this unity in modern religions. Hick observes that there was a sea-change in religion’s function around 3000 years ago. The Great Religions of the world today (think Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, etc.) focus on individual salvation. The old religions did not. Their focus was on societal order. “If everyone performs their role properly, if you do the correct rituals at the correct times, if you worship the right gods in the right ways, then the weather will be fair, the harvest fruitful, and you will have many healthy children.” The salvation offered was often earthly and material; and typically demanded that each individual perform a specific role in society. Eventually, something snapped, and around the same time (“same time” used very loosely; this change took place over about a millennia), religion took a sharp turn towards individual liberation from some grand evil, and this liberation often had uniform demands for most adherents.
Was this shift for the best? Many of the Great Religions have elements of social harmony in them, but these often run downstream of individual perfection. What would a modern faith organized around social harmony look like? Mahāyāna Buddhism inches in that direction, with its devout taking vows to work for the liberation of all sentient beings. Personal nirvana can wait; we must work to liberate all sentient beings from suffering now. Unitarian Universalism also contains seeds of a social harmony faith, with its Second Principle declaring the need for justice, equity, and compassion in human relations, the Sixth Principle the goal of a world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all, and the Seventh Principle our obligation to respect the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are part. These seeds are probably why Unitarian Universalism has a large number of Unitarian Universalist pagans. The contemporary paganism new religious movement tries to revive old, pre-Christian religiosity, which provides it an opportunity to be a social harmony religion, but its adherents often fall to modern religious forms by being both substantially focused on individual- or household-level practice and startlingly apolitical. Many pagans see Julian the Philosopher, the last pagan Roman emperor, as a sort of saint, yet would balk at the idea of state religion today. This is, of course, not to endorse the concept of a state religion, but rather to observe that the function the old gods played was always social. Trying to dodge the political ramifications of paganism is a fool’s game, one that too many are playing.
I’ve always been religious. I was raised in a (read this with the intonation of an overly enthusiastic Southern preacher): “Bible-believing, Independent, Fundamentalist Baptist church!” Unlike many, this did not make me hate religion. I understand why many emerged from fundamentalist churches with a deep aversion to religion. It was not a good place—more a cult than a sanctuary. The lead pastor of the church I was raised in survived an aneurysm that nearly killed him about two decades back. He, and many of his congregants, took it as a sign from God that he was chosen for this role. To this day, he is proudly preaching hate from the pulpit.
I interacted with him briefly at my father’s third marriage. Despite growing up in a church which proclaimed the damnation of Catholics, my father decided to marry a devout Catholic, and for some reason she agreed to be married by that lead pastor. He looked at me with a barely veiled disappointment—most of my former church acquaintances there did—and kept a veneer of politeness, presumably out of respect for the fact that my father wanted me there. Of course, he still felt the need to strongly emphasize the heterosexuality of marriage during the ceremony.
It was either out of respect for the peace, or out of fear of my husband. My lovely husband took it upon himself to be my bulldog during this harrowing trip. He said little and kept a strong presence. I think it is only because of his intentional mean-muggedness that none of the former church acquaintances said anything about my relatively recent transition. I had been out about two years at that time; the hormones had only done so much, my makeup skills were nascent, and I hadn’t yet paid a professional to use the power of the sun on my face. I was not a perfect model of transfemininity, and these were people who spent a significant portion of their lives angry at LGBT people.
The church wasn’t exclusively focused on culture wars. It held the line on traditional and fundamentalist Baptist beliefs. You had to accept Jesus as your savior to not go to hell; the rapture would occur soon, all Christians will disappear and the unsaved will be left to seven years of hell-on-earth; it was essential to proselytize to save others from hell; a lot of stuff about hell. They were largely silent on if God picks who gets saved or if it’s an act of free will on the part of humans, although they leaned towards the latter earlier in my time and shifted to the former as I got closer to my final years there.
But if there is one defining theological belief it had, it was hell hell hell hell hell. Hell is real, a place of constant and unending suffering, a place where most people go, all people who don’t believe in Jesus or don’t believe in the right way. And they viewed this not only as the reality, but it is also as just and good. I’ll never forget one Sunday, the pastor going on a fire-and-brimstone rant, declaring the eternal torment of billions of humans, and a lady in the front row yelling aloud “Hallelujah! Amen! Praise the Lord!” Cruelty was never a thing to avoid. Jesus died on the cross; what’s our suffering to that? Those poor unfortunate souls are going to hell; you’re saved, so why are you upset that your husband is beating you?
Even though I no longer believe in hell, to this day I still have moments of hell-fear.
One day when I was about 10 years old, I and others around my age were taken up into a dark room. The lights were turned off, and they played a recording on a television. There were no visuals beyond white text on a black background. There was audio. The recording was a letter to a Christian from a friend who died unsaved. He tells how he is judged by angels, dragged away from the gates of heaven, and cast into a pit of eternal flames. He screams, asking why his friend didn’t evangelize to him. Why did his Christian friend condemn him to hell when all he had to do was to share the gospel? He was in agony burning alive eternally because of his friend’s failure. We sat there in that dark room listening to him scream. There was no discussion when it ended. We were led back downstairs.
Even though I no longer believe in hell, to this day I still have moments of hell-fear. They are brief and manageable, moments where I think “what if it is real? What if I don’t have the right beliefs and end up suffering forever?” My heart rate spikes, I perspire, my thoughts begin to race. And then the part of me that I’ve had to train to manage my hell-fear kicks in. It tells me there’s no reason to think that this is the case, and that there are many more concrete and evident things for me to be afraid of. I’m one of the lucky ones. Many of those I grew up with live with debilitating hell-fear.
Considering this, it is humorous that how to approach Halloween was very controversial in my church. There was a strong consensus that no good Christian should ever celebrate Halloween, as it has its roots in satanism and baby-sacrifice. (This is false, but facts never stopped the congregants of my childhood church.) However, there was one youth service prior to Halloween where my father tried to show how evil Halloween was by looking at the costumes advertised to children. He received flak for this because, according to some of the parents, their children had nightmares after seeing costumes of demons and skeletons. It’s morbidly amusing that the church will expend energy of making children terrified of experiencing unending torture, but seeing a cartoon bone is a complete no-go.
“The cruelty is the point” is an oft-repeated phrase to explain conservativism, but it isn’t quite accurate in this case. It’s not that they all wanted cruelty. It’s that cruelty played an important role in their theological and moral ecosystem. Cruelty tested your faith. You aren’t supposed to have too much compassion. Jesus did the compassion work for you. If you have too much compassion, it may cause your faith to collapse. And when you suffer, sometimes you are supposed to let it continue. Sometimes, you suffer because it is God’s will. “Take up your cross and follow me;” if being abused by your husband is your cross, you take it up and continue to be abused. If being gay is your cross, you deny yourself and take it up. You suffer, and it is holy. There is no end and there is no compassion until you are dead, and maybe not even then.
It probably comes as no surprise that not everyone was expected to suffer. My church held a strict no-divorce line for the first 12 years of my life. They might have allowed for an exception if one partner (and by one partner, they meant the wife) was sexually unfaithful in marriage, but even that was discouraged. Otherwise, there was no escape. Whether it was verbal abuse, neglect, or sexual violence, there was no permissible reason to leave a marriage.
This was the line until my father wanted a divorce. He had no evidence my mom was unfaithful. In fact, he repeatedly betrayed my mom’s trust. Nevertheless, he decided he was done with the marriage. The church fell in line behind him. Within a few months, the anti-divorce narrative entirely dissipated. I never heard a word against divorce in that church again.
This was the beginning of my original crisis of faith. I was only 12, but I wasn’t stupid. On the contrary, from my recollection (which surely is biased, but suspend your disbelief for me please), I was one of the more intellectually promising youth in the congregation. I read The Answers Book like it was an addendum to the gospels. (For those unfamiliar, this book series was aimed at defending evangelical mistruths, providing detailed arguments for why evolution is false and the earth is 6000 years old.) I memorized dozens of key verses and could recite them on demand. I received AWANA (a program for conservative evangelical youth, an acronym for “Approved Workmen Are Not Ashamed”) awards for verse memorization. So, when my entire church changed its doctrine on the drop of a dime, I noticed, and was disoriented.
I understood what they said I was supposed to believe. I was never good at subtext, and it saved me. When the surface text contradicted the subtext, I simply didn’t see the subtext. Eventually, this chasm between what the church said and what it meant became plain to me. I realized that doctrine was never the first concern of this church. The supremacy of men always came first. One youth pastor had sex with a young girl in his group the moment she turned 18. She became pregnant. He left for Florida, where he became a minister at a church there. Nothing changed. The church hired a junior pastor. A part of the junior pastor’s pay was intended to be spent on healthcare. His wife got sick, and they didn’t have the money to get care for her. The junior pastor gambled away the money. Nothing changed. The only time something changed was when my father betrayed my mom: It changed to protect my father and hurt my mom.
When that happened, it clicked. They didn’t have principled doctrinal beliefs. They haven’t done thoughtful exegesis to arrive at their conclusions. They never have. And if they never have, I cannot take them at their word. My faith journey began.
Support for Israel was essential, as Israel is necessary to bring in the end times, where billions will suffer, which is good.
I was starting my journey from a semi-cult. In AWANA, we opened each session with the Pledge of Allegiance. Then we pledged allegiance to the Christian flag—a flag which is not even vaguely universally acknowledged as the Christian flag, but fundamentalists believe they are the only legitimate manifestation of the faith, so it was regarded as the Christian flag. And then we recited 2 Timothy 2:15 (in the King James Version, of course): “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” (They derive “AWANA” from this.) After that we memorized Bible verses. The largest set I ever memorized was 64 verses, although AWANA taught many more. Afterwards, we would do athletics, and the less-fit kids would be publicly disparaged by the adults. This necessarily meant that girls were at best passed over, and at worst actively denigrated, as they could only rarely compete with the boys who were in public school athletics. Again, always supporting male supremacy.
The main service wasn’t any better. Every Sunday we would sit down in the sanctuary and listen to the pastor. Behind him stood the Christian flag, the American flag, and the flag of Israel. (Support for Israel was essential, as Israel is necessary to bring in the end times, where billions will suffer, which is good.) His sermons often featured themes of damnation, reiterations of John 3:16, and rants about whatever liberal heresy he was mad about that week. He made sure that he was always in control; he gave nearly every Sunday sermon, and ran out others who gathered too much popularity. This jealousy and control reached the point where he capsized the church’s Spanish-language service, accusing the man who gave those sermons of undermining him. During the service there was time for “testimony,” where individuals could stand and proclaim how God helped them, an offertory, and a time for people to go kneel at the pulpit and pray. I never understood what effect kneeling at the pulpit was supposed to generate. Eventually I concluded that it was a public show of faith and a way to garner sympathy. My father did it consistently after he kicked out my mom from her own home. It made him look like he was the one suffering.
I can’t say I know what John Hick would say if he saw the environment I was raised in, but I feel doubtful he would be willing to conclude what I did: The church I grew up in did not encourage real religion. It did not make people better. It did not make them more open and loving. It encouraged some of their worst impulses, and on a good day did nothing to dissuade them.
Despite this, I carry with me some of the glimmers of light from this church. On the first Sunday of the month, we held a potluck. Families brought large amounts of food to share. Nobody had to bring any food, but many did. Nobody got any financial benefit from it. There were no name placards put in front of the dishes to indicate who made it. It was an act of sheer benevolence. There were few homeless people in that area, but some came by every month to eat the free food, and they were never shooed away. Similarly, some women of the church put together a food bank, and if anyone was in need, you could always count on copious amounts of casseroles to come your way. When my father realized that he’s incapable of running things on his own after he kicked my mom out, we received a lot of those. He described it as losing half of his mind, because he had been married for so long, their habits meshed. Things worked. It’s unfortunate he broke that.
My mom took me to other churches when she had custody of me. They were better, but not good. The people were cold. The environment was exclusive, always looking for a new group to cut out. The parking lot featured cars with “Trump That Bitch!” bumper stickers, and the notion that religion makes you a better person was nonexistent. In this environment, the function of religion was to create a controlled class of people. Inside these walls we have the saved, and they are measured and regulated; outside these walls are disorderly, unrestricted people. Of course, women were always regulated more than men.
I never lost religion, but fundamentalism failed me, in large part because of all the women it failed, again and again. The other part is that I realized I was not a straight boy. Around the age of 14 I stumbled upon—and I do genuinely mean stumbled upon, I was not looking for it—gay pornography where one of the participants was crossdressing. It hit on some feelings that were not erotic. It’s easy for conservatives to look at this and say that porn made me trans, but the feelings were already there, just confusedly. I felt bad playing boy characters in video games. And I didn’t just like playing the girl characters; I felt comfortable doing so, like I was getting an actual glimpse of myself. The pornography merely hit me with a much more explicit proposition: You can have this kind of body but look different than you have been. I began trying to figure out where to go from there. That night I kneeled at my bed and prayed. I made a promise to God: I will faithfully learn what the Bible has to say on gender and sexuality, and I will follow it. If it means the beliefs I was raised with were right, then I will go to my parents and ask for conversion therapy. If I find that they were wrong, then I will… deal with the consequences. In that moment, the latter outcome was far scarier.
And so I began. I delved deep into biblical interpretation and comparative theology. From there I ended up in philosophy. And from there it spiraled out of control.
That’s a very abridged version of what happened, but it’s not inaccurate. I worked away from evangelical fundamentalist interpretations of the scripture first, followed by dropping literalist interpretation. Then I began to explore liberal Christianity. Marcus Borg became my lodestar; The First Paul and Reading the Bible Again for the First Time kept me Christian. I read Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate by Justin Lee, which convinced me that there was a genuine, Biblically-faithful path to being gay-affirming. I intermittently attended an Episcopal church, where I was tolerated but clearly viewed as quite queer, in the bad way. But eventually I found liberal Christianity to be precisely what many have accused it of being: weak. Lacking. It didn’t offer me a truly compelling vision of the world. Not to say that others are wrong in finding it fulfilling and valuable, just that it wasn’t for me. It ran out of juice, fast. I quickly tried on every other variant of Christianity you’ve heard of, and then some you haven’t. Apostolic Christianity, through Anglicanism, High-Church Episcopalianism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and liberal Catholicism; postmodern Christianity, including the work of Peter Rollins (weird man; not worth it), John D. Caputo (good philosopher, but he really was right to name his theology “weak”), and the death-of-God theologians; Quakers, or as they’re better called, Friends (they have done a lot of valuable work and have the cutest name of all Christian groups, but for no fault of their own it didn’t catch me); traditional Protestantism, including Lutheranism and Calvinism (I hated Calvinism at the time for its strident defense of predestination but, hilariously, came around to it after I no longer identified as Christian); existentialist Christianity a la Kierkegaard (who I still regard with fondness); Gnosticism (an old Christian heresy with a distressing amount of antisemitism); and bizarre freakshow theologies like that of Leibniz (who tried to bridge Catholicism and Protestantism, valiantly, but to no avail). I learned a lot about theology, and more about myself. My Christianity was strained to the breaking point, and eventually snapped when I began learning about paganism.
He compared religion to light coming through stained-glass cathedral windows. There’s one light, but we are inside the cathedral, so we can only see it through the stained glass. We will never know its true color or character, but we are still affected by it.
I was introduced to paganism through the concept of Christopaganism, which tries to combine Christianity and paganism. This does not work very well, because “pagan” generally refers to non-Christian religions that were suppressed or extinguished by Christian imperialism. Definitely very hard to make Christianity and paganism play nice together, but it was my bridge into paganism. Paganism is both very religiously and philosophically diverse. It’s a very difficult religious group to navigate alone, but I had already explored virtually the full breadth of Christianity, so it didn’t daunt me. And in it, I found permission not just to find a practice and faith that works for me, but also one that encourages me to be a better person. That was the kicker. Liberal Christianity didn’t push me. Paganism, and especially the tradition I fell into, did.
In my tradition, the gods are perfect individuals, perfectly individual, perfected individuality. They are uniques. The goal of religion is to become godly, and the gods are very challenging to emulate. They challenge me less in terms of looking at their historical worship and seeing some disturbing things (what religion doesn’t have some baggage?), but more in that as perfect individuals, they exemplify a unified Will. What makes a god a god is that they are undivided, undistracted, wholly focused. To become godly is to find your cause and never stray. There are nuances to this; there are arguments that certain acts are simply impossible to stray from without violating one’s Will, and there are acts which encourage consistency, and these form a generally applicable code of ethics. But at the end of the day, it is a commitment to the self that is daunting even in a highly individualistic society.
And it is daunting in part because this commitment to self demands a commitment to others beyond what highly individualistic societies would prefer. In addition to being a pagan, I am a Unitarian Universalist. I attend a UU church regularly; I read UU materials; I have a chalice (the symbol of Unitarian Universalism) at home that I light as part of my practice. And in Unitarian Universalism, there’s a commonly cited analogy from the late Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church. He compared religion to light coming through stained-glass cathedral windows. There’s one light, but we are inside the cathedral, so we can only see it through the stained glass. We will never know its true color or character, but we are still affected by it. (This bears a striking resemblance to John Hick’s argument, yet to my surprise I’ve yet to see a single Unitarian Universalist source mention Hick.)
I go a step further. There is no light behind the stained glass. At least, not one we can meaningfully talk about. Every single manifestation of the Divine is an equally proper representation of the Divine. It is not that there is a noumena behind the phenomena; it is One, and it is Many. It is both. The only thing that makes one more relevant than the other is if it sanctifies you, makes you a better person. This reflects the nature of the gods in my pagan tradition: Polycentric. Many centers. Each god is the center for itself, and for the universe; each god contains everything, including other gods. You can look at any god and it is the center of it all. The center is One; the center is Many. And so—this is the key point—when you try to be godly, you must be responsible for the world. You must include the world in you. You must love the world, because it is yourself, and to hate yourself is to stray from your own Will. (As a side-note, this strictly rules out the kind of self-hate my childhood church tried to instill.) And so, while this paganism screams virulent individuality at first blush, it is also violently universal. Through this, it encourages both perfect compassion and benevolence as well as a strong Will and sense of self. It is demanding, it is hard, and it encourages me to be better.
This feels very abstract, but it is expressed in a way resonant with Unitarian Universalism. Unitarian Universalism holds not just that people are capable of participating in the “free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” but also that they have an obligation to do so. There is no free pass to waive your right to being responsible for your beliefs. You ultimately own your beliefs, whatever they may be. The gods are expressed in many ways; there are many beliefs that someone engaging in a free and responsible search may come to. Neither the precise beliefs, nor the practices, nor the path to reaching these beliefs or practices is the goal. The virtues inculcated by the persistent refining and self-criticism, both the taking-on and the putting-off of beliefs, are the end-game. It is about both radical openness and radical commitment.
I practice my faith in a few ways. I use prayer beads for meditation on a specific theme, topic, or mantra. I have been hand-making prayer beads and necklaces since my Episcopalian days. I attend church nearly every Sunday, and a few weekday services a month. I aim for one or two church-related activities every week. I burn incense and candles as offerings, as a reminder that all returns to the gods, in the end. I typically burn frankincense, as historically, that incense is associated with one of the deities my individual practice focuses on. These form the core of my most clearly religious practices. While less apparently religious, just as important to me are charitable giving (distributed across my church and a few organizations of value), volunteering, and actively engaging in the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. This last one takes the form of reading various books on religion, philosophy, and politics, as well as trying new practices; currently, my focus is on Zen Buddhism, learning its practices and insights with an open and critical mind.
I have said that my practice is syncretic. Like how I feel about the terms religious and spiritual, I use this term with intent. I am syncretic, but not eclectic. Practices that do not adhere to the core do not survive very long. Syncreticism is how faiths used to work. In the Roman Empire, they integrated new faiths into their (remarkably flexible) theological system. Julian the Philosopher even argued against Christianity by noting that Judaism, from his angle, was deeply amenable to traditional Roman religious beliefs, and that Christianity wasn’t. In Asia, there has been significant interplay between Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, among other religions. The boundaries have been substantially more porous than what Christianity or Islam generally tolerate. While there is certainly something to be said for a unique religious identity—while no longer Christian, and I have never been Muslim, I admire many of their doctrines and practices as beautiful and valuable—it is the historical exception, and not the norm. I follow this tradition of embracing deep interreligious exchange.
The effect on my life has been substantial. Compassion is growing where hate once rested. Depression, which I’ve struggled with since I was 12, has less of a hold on me when I engage in my religious practice consistently. I’m making community connections, being built up by others and building up others in return. I have not felt as well as I do now in a long time. And perhaps the icing on the top is that I do not feel any compulsion to force others to join me, because I know that others might not resonate with it as well as I do, and that’s okay. I do not fear that if I do not convince my friend to join me for Sunday service they will suffer endlessly. My faith is pluralist, so as long as others tolerate religious difference and are doing well, that’s all that matters to me.
John Hick was either very optimistic or being quite exclusionary when he said that religion is sanctifying. I remember once having a long conversation with an agnostic friend about religion, and she told me that she sees religion as being a net negative on the world. I have been learning about religion in some form or another all my life, yet I cannot form a counter-argument stronger than “there’s really no good way to quantify the sum total of all good and bad religion has brought into the world.” Hick wants to simply wave away the bad. I’m not entirely sure we can do that, because at minimum, sometimes the climb up to the peak first takes people down into valleys. But it’s a mistake of at least equal magnitude to dismiss the good religion can bring. I have been religious all my life, and it has been a constant upward climb. May it continue that way. Blessed be.
Mixing two or more religious traditions into one.