New Faiths, New Challenges

presented by Donald H. Frew
at the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions

Hello and welcome. My name is Donald H. Frew.

I am an Elder of the Covenant of the Goddess, the world’s largest religious organization for Neo-Pagan Witches, and I currently serve that organization as its National Public Information Officer. I have spent the last 8 years handling virtually all of CoG’s interfaith outreach. And in that capacity, I have served on the Board of Directors of the Berkeley Area Interfaith Council for last 7 years.

Yesterday, Dr. J. Gordon Melton spoke on the challenges for "mainstream" religious groups encountering what he called New Religious Movements. He spoke from the point of view of a minister in one of those "mainstream" faiths looking out at all the New Religious Movements all over America. I am here, as a Neo-Pagan priest, to offer some observations from the other side of the dialogue.

I will take questions at the end.

First, a little bit of background...

Although I was an avid student of the world’s mythologies as a child, I began formal study of the world’s religions as a Religious Studies major at the University of California at Berkeley. I remember well the very first class, Introduction to Religious Studies, taught by Prof. Mark Jurgensmeyer. Mark talked about the so-called "big five" religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

But, he said, lets take a closer look at these things all being called by the same name: "religions". The terms "Christianity" & "Buddhism" both refer to an individual who is considered the founder and whose teachings are followed. "Judaism" refers to a people and describes those of a particular ancestry. "Islam" literally means "to submit", and refers to the spiritual attitude of its followers. While "Hinduism" rather vaguely refers to "all those religions over there on the other side of the Indus river".

Immediately, we can see that these are five very different things, and in calling them all by the single term "religion" we assume some kind of uniformity of structure between them. Mark assigned a book, The Meaning and End of Religion by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, that would explore this further.

Smith argues that, as we have seen, the word "religion" implies a certain conformity of concept. It generates presuppositions about other "religions" that may not be true. As an alternative, he suggests the terms "faith" and "practice" as less loaded with presupposition.

I would encounter these concepts again, years later, when I first approached the Berkeley Area Interfaith Council as the elected representative from Covenant of the Goddess. Although I was greeted very warmly and accepted immediately, I was asked those same questions that, years later now as a BAIC Board member, I still hear some ask of other new "alternative" groups.

"Whom do you worship?" they would ask.

"Well, no one really."

"Well then, to whom do you pray?"

"Well, we don’t pray, as such."

"Well, what do you believe?"

"We don’t really have beliefs."

"What is your Bible?"

"We don’t have one."

"Where are your churches?"

"We don’t have any."

"Who is your prophet or leader?"

"We don’t have one of those, either."

"How can you achieve salvation, then?"

"We don’t even have the concept of salvation."

And so on, and so on...

All of which gives the impression that we are either not really a religion (the "pseudo-religion" that the Greek Orthodox host committee was so worried about), or at least a seriously inadequate one.

Half-baked, you might say.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

We live in a society in which information is communicated by the sound bite: the short, pithy, to the point, statement of fact. What makes the Jerry Falwells of the world so popular with the media is their ability to give short, scriptural answers to complex social questions. We here at the Parliament, as serious practitioners of our respective faiths, know that religion and spirituality are much more complex than that; that any spiritual path worth it’s salt is deeper than can be conveyed in a sound bite.

So it is with the questions asked by the BAIC and others.

Whom do we worship?

To us, the word "worship" implies submission to a higher authority. We do not submit to the Gods; rather we recognize Their greater power and wisdom and invite that power and wisdom to manifest through us in our lives. Our practices seek to make us one with the Divine. We find it in ourselves and each other. Under those, circumstances, we honor and venerate the Gods, but few Witches would feel comfortable with a word like "worship".

To whom do we pray?

To most of us, prayer is seen either as a communing with an omnipotent being who will do what he wills regardless of the intent of the prayer or as a beseeching to that being to intercede on one’s behalf. In contrast, most Witches achieve the same ends by magick, but magick is seen as an interaction between the Gods and the magician. The magician through the use of natural powers focused by will, may well be able to achieve the desired ends on his or her own, (whether that is healing, a job, or whatever), but by opening to the Divine invites the appropriate Gods and/or Goddesses to lend their aid as well, accepting that the desired goal may be opposed by the Gods and the magical work come to naught.

What do we believe?

Neopagan Witchcraft may be one of the very few religious paths that does not require a leap of faith. The Craft never says "Believe, and then the miracles will happen." The Craft invites newcomers to learn and try traditional techniques for achieving a communion with the Divine. If you try them and they fail, you look elsewhere to fill your spiritual needs. But if you try them and they work, your experience of the Gods is a personal fact; no more a "belief" than is your knowledge that the sky is blue.

What is our Bible?

Many of our traditions (or denominations) have writings, called a Book of Shadows, that have been handed down to us. These writings do not contain the wisdom of the ancients, rather they are records of the practices that those before us used to communicate with deity. Sometimes our Elders have recorded what they experienced as a result. Each of us uses, changes, and adapts these practices to suit the needs of our times, and in turn records our insights for those who will come after. But the experience of the Divine is intimate, personal. While I may learn from another’s experience, mine will never be quite the same as theirs. And so, no matter how ancient the source or how honored the Elder, these writings do not carry the authority of scripture; they cannot carry such authority. To grant a traditional text such authority would be to say that this is it, the truth for all time. But we are a nature religion, and a fundamental truth of nature is that everything changes.

Where are our churches?

Someone asking this really means "Where is there a building that I can go see?" Once again, a nature religion has a somewhat different view. Tony Kelly of Wales wrote:

Where are the Pagan shrines? And where do the people gather? Where is the magic made? And where are the Goddess and the Old Ones? Our shrines are in the fields and on the mountains, in the stars and in the wind, deep in the greenwood and on the algal rocks where two streams meet.

The Craft may be reaching a stage in our development where we will soon have community centers, but our sacred spaces will always be out in nature, standing upon the body of our Mother, beneath Father Sky and Our Lady the Moon, and with the forces of the Elements arrayed about us. It has seemed that this Parliament has been focused on the Earth and the environment since Dr. Barney’s address in the opening plenary, and yet to my knowledge, the Native Americans and the Witches are the only groups that have actually gone outside to celebrate their spirituality in a natural setting.

Who are our prophets or leaders?

We are each our own prophet, our own teacher, in our communion with the Divine. To the extent that we are able to manifest that connection in our lives and teach the practices to others, we all have the capacity to be leaders. As such, we have many leaders, many Elders, all over the world. Many would say that anyone initiated as a Witch is a leader, or they would not be recognized by their peers as a Witch. But we have no hierarchy beyond that immediate and often fluid distinction between teacher and student. No Pope, no guru, no intermediary between the individual and the Divine. If the God and Goddess are truly within each of us, then we need only look within to find them. Indeed, a popular traditional text ascribed to the Goddess includes this passage:

"...if that which thou seekest thou findest not within thee, thou wilt never find it without thee. For behold, I have been with thee from the beginning; and I am that which is attained at the end of desire."

How can we achieve salvation, then?

We’re not even trying to.

We don’t understand what there is to be saved from.

The idea of salvation presupposes a Fall of some kind, a fundamental flaw in Creation as it exists today. Witches look at the world us and see wonder, we see mystery. The death and destruction that frighten some we see as a necessary part of the wheel of life, exaggerated and exacerbated when life is lived out of balance with Nature. And while many of us believe in reincarnation, we do not seek to escape the wheel of rebirth. We can’t imagine anything more wonderful than to come back to this bounteous and beautiful Earth, except perhaps to come back to an Earth freed from Man’s environmental depredations.

Even when these questions have been answered, and the presuppositions underlying them exposed and explained, Neo-Pagans still have to wrestle with problems arising from preconceptions. Many Interfaith groups impose a "hundred-year rule" on members, meaning that you cannot participate in the community of faiths unless you have been around at least 100 years.

Aside from the fact that this is an arbitrary number, how do you figure it? How old are many of the contemporary Baptist groups, for example?

Are they 50 years old or so, dating from their incorporation as legal entities?

Are they 500 years old or so, dating from Martin Luther?

Are they 2000 years old or so, dating from the coming of Jesus Christ?

Or are they 4000 years old or so, dating from the times of Abraham and Moses?

And then how does reckon the age of something like the Covenant of the Goddess?

18 years, since its date of incorporation?

50 years or so, since Gerald Gardner and the beginning of the modern Witchcraft movement in Britain?

150 years or so, to the oldest identifiable individuals from whom our lineage can be traced?

Or do we look back into prehistory, when our ancestors danced in circles, honored the Earth and the Moon and The Horned God?

Some leaders at this conference have already addressed the extent to which it has been assumed that all faiths worship God in some form, sometimes even using the word "Buddha" synonymously with it.

The Parliament itself has focused on leaders, assuming that all groups have them. Not only Neo-Pagans, but most indigenous people’s religions have many rather than few or only one leader. But to participate as a partner in the community of faiths, we must come up with one, and only one.

The message that many alternative groups, whether new or old, have gotten is that "interfaith tolerance" means "The more you’re like us, the more we’ll tolerate you." I do not believe that this is either deliberate or malicious, only that many members of the interfaith community project the norms of their own faith onto the faiths of others, judging them thereby. This creates a pressure on alternative groups to be other than what they are.

"Well, if real religions have churches, then if we want to be taken seriously we had better get a building."

Or "If they want leaders, we had better give our Elders recognizable titles."

Or "We had better describe what we do in terms of worship and prayer."

And so on.

I have had to use such language here.

I have talked to media people about our desire to "pray in the park", because those are the words they would understand, even though that was just one more reinforcement of those presuppositions I have discussed.

This process of adopting "mainstream" language and concepts is abetted by most Neo-Pagans themselves. Most of us were raised Christian or Jewish in America. We have internalized our society’s norms regarding what constitutes a "real" religion.

There is a tendency to respond to the kind of questions and criticisms mentioned above by saying "Gee, I guess their right, we had better start moving towards having paid clergy, or churches, or holy books, or whatever." The intent is not to deceive, but to explain ourselves to others in terms that they will understand.

The danger is that in redefining ourselves for others, we redefine ourselves to ourselves.

The most blatant example of this for us is in the controversy over the word "Witch".

Witches are what we are, it is what our forebears called themselves, it is what they died for in staggering numbers, and yet because the culture that descends from those who tried to exterminate us finds the word scary, we are supposed to change.

To abandon the name would be disrespectful to those who have died for it.

How would you feel if you were told "Your name is offensive, please change it"?

Would you expect any other persecuted or oppressed group in the world today to change their name to please their oppressor? Jews? African Americans?

And yet many Witches do just that.

I do it to a certain extent.

We hide behind "Wicca", and "the Craft", and "Neo-Paganism", and "the Old Religion", in many ways hiding who we are, all to avoid using "the W word", all to avoid offending or scaring someone.

But there is nothing to be scared of.

Interfaith dialogue between the so-called "mainstream" churches and Pagans of all kinds, indigenous peoples to Neo-Pagans, is a tremendous opportunity to learn more about the many forms of spirituality on this earth, and the rich and diverse way that those spiritualities manifest. But to experience and benefit from such a dialogue it must be approached without the preconceptions that have colored much of the communication up to now.

I suggest that we all adopt Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s recommendation, at least in the interfaith sphere. Ask new and unknown groups about their faith and their practice. Do not ask questions that are loaded with preconceptions based on your own assumptions about religion; otherwise you will likely hear what they think you want to hear rather than what they want to say and what they are. Accept that the Divine can manifest for others in ways you may never have considered.

We can all only be enriched by such an exchange.

Thank You.

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