Sort of, but not really.
One of the biggest differences between Christianity/Islam and paganism is that the former two religions are orthodoxic while pagan religions are orthopraxic. In Christianity and Islam, what you personally believe about God matters a great deal. There’s only one God, so everyone else also has to worship that one God. There can’t be any other gods, because if there are, that means that your cosmology and your entire religion is wrong. Personal belief matters so much that a slight difference in theology or doctrine can make or break the religion. Christianity has splintered into ever-smaller sects over individual lines of the Bible, because the disagreement makes each sect incompatible, no matter how much they might have in common. It’s why Christians have historically persecuted entire demographics for heresy, the crime of having the “wrong” interpretation. (I’m less familiar with Islam, so I don’t want to give specific examples, but it seems to have many of the same problems.)
For Christians, proselytization does two things. Firstly, many Christians genuinely believe that they are telling you critical information that will save you from a terrible fate that is definitely coming. Some of them believe in Hell as an “objective” reality, and believe that in telling you how to avoid it, they are doing the equivalent of telling you not to walk off a cliff into a pit of spikes. Why would you do that, when you can see the spikes at the bottom and the mutilated bodies impaled on the spikes? Why would you step off the cliff anyway, when you could just walk in a different direction? Many Christians also sincerely want to share the “good news” with you, because their connection with Jesus makes them genuinely happy. They’re trying to share that joy with you by telling you about it, and it doesn’t occur to them that you have almost certainly heard of Jesus before. In their mind, if you’d really heard of Jesus, if you really understood, then you would have said yes.
And that’s the second reason: converting other people helps validate one’s own beliefs. You can’t let anyone else be right. If anyone else is right, about anything, then you must be wrong. It’s like a Jenga tower — remove the wrong piece, and the entire religion falls apart. Therefore, for some Christians, “live and let live” is not an option. Non-believers must be convinced of the “truth,” or else dismissed as evil/ignorant/deceived, because if you fail to convince them, then maybe you don’t have the truth. Hence, the self-righteousness. (That’s all without going into more actively malicious reasons for proselytizing, like using it as a means of oppression and control.)
Paganism doesn’t have these problems. Pagans don’t care what you personally believe about the gods. That means that there are no internal schisms over differing interpretations of myths — myths are inconsistent by nature, being the product of oral tradition, so the people in the next town over will probably tell a very different version of the same myths. That carries no earth-shattering implications. If they tell a different version of a myth, who cares? They have their version, you have yours. Most pagan religions do not have scripture, so the words used to tell the myths don’t carry that much weight. There’s no point in splitting hairs over them. So, I have no reason to try to convince you that my version is right.
Pagans also have no incentive to proselytize. Most pagan religions don’t place very much emphasis on the afterlife (outside of mystery cults), so, there’s no promise of Heaven or threat of Hell. There’s nothing to warn against, no “good news” to share. The existence of other faiths also isn’t threatening to paganism. If you have many gods, then there’s always room for more gods! Someone else’s gods existing doesn’t invalidate the existence of yours. This is why pagans mostly didn’t go to war with each other over religion (though, don’t get me wrong, they went to war for plenty of other reasons and still used religion to justify it). Pagan religions could peacefully exist alongside each other, through this lovely thing called syncretism. Syncretism happens when religions combine through being in proximity to each other. If you live in a multicultural community in which some people worship Greek gods and some people worship Egyptian gods, you can just… worship both. It’s that easy.
It’s also pretty easy (though not necessarily accurate) to interpret other people’s gods as variations of your own. The Greeks did this a lot, which is why it’s called interpretatio graeca. Hellenistic Egypt saw a lot of syncretic deities that were literally Greek-ified Egyptian gods, like Zeus-Ammon (Zeus + Amun), Osiris-Dionysus (Osiris + Dionysus), Hermanubis (Hermes + Anubis), Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes + Thoth), and Serapis (Zeus/Hades/Dionysus/Osiris/Apis). Rome took this a step further and literally adopted it as a political strategy. They allowed all of their conquered territories to maintain their local religious practices, by slapping the names of Greco-Roman gods on the nearest local equivalent. For example, they claimed that the Germanic tribes worshipped Mercury (Hermes) as their chief god, because Mercury has some things in common with Odin. So, why wasn’t Rome tolerant of Christianity? Because Christianity threatened the Roman state in a way that none of these other religions did. Christians worship only one god, so, you can’t claim that they worship the Roman gods under other names (and unlike Judaism, they were spreading fast, making them more of a threat). The Christian God would not be a problem in and of itself, except for the fact that Christians also refused to worship any of the other gods. That was more of a problem.
Pagans don’t care why you worship the gods. What pagans do care about is that you worship the gods, and how you do it. Pagans care that you participate in public religious functions like festivals and sacrifices, that you say your prayers and give your offerings, that you perform rituals properly. In paganism (or at least, in Greco-Roman paganism), “impiety” is defined by refusal to worship the gods correctly. Failure to worship the gods risks bringing their wrath down upon everybody.
Now, does that make paganism necessarily better? No, it doesn’t. To be honest, I have just as many problems with orthopraxy. I don’t like people telling me how I should worship the gods, any more than I like people telling me what I should believe. For example, I’m very uncomfortable with sacrifice (of any kind — most modern pagans are uncomfortable with animal sacrifice), which would have been the cornerstone of one’s relationship with the gods in the Ancient World. Some modern Hellenic pagans would say that my refusal to give back to the gods for their blessings is extremely impious, since giving back to them is the entire point of worshipping them. In pagan spaces online, I’ve seen many of the same kinds of petty interpretive arguments, but over praxis: Witchcraft is hubristic, offerings of blood or bodily fluids are miasmic, etc. And, since we have to reconstruct these religions from what little scraps of material have survived, that means a lot of… arguing over specific language in old texts. I mostly don’t make any effort at reconstructing Hellenic paganism, because I took one look at the praxis and rolled my eyes: sprinkle khernips before and after every ritual, always dedicate offerings to Hestia first, scatter barley before the altar, yada yada. These rituals felt pointless and like a chore to me. If I won’t perform rituals correctly because I don’t personally like them, or because it’s too inconvenient, or because I’m lazy, then I must not really love my gods.
Had I lived in Ancient Rome, I would probably be Christian for all of the same reasons that I’m pagan now. I’d have a whole list of criticisms of established religion and want to try something new that promises a more personal and direct experience of the divine. Roman religion would be a social obligation, like jury duty. It would be like if the government made you go to church on Sunday and listen to the sermon, regardless of how you personally feel about it. No matter how much I loved the gods, going through the motions of worship for the sake of fulfilling those obligations would be a pain in the ass, instead of a transformative religious experience. It would feel impersonal, chore-like, and meaningless. Christianity, by contrast, is basically a public mystery cult. Not only can you tell other people about the transformative experiences that it’s based around, but you are actively encouraged to do so! How awesome is that!
Of course, I live in the twenty-first century, so, to say that it’s the other way around now would be an understatement. Christianity is the dominant religion in the West. It abuses its power in all kinds of ways on both individual and institutional scales, it places an absurd amount of emphasis on things that shouldn’t matter, and everything that was good about it has long-since been overtaken by its myriad of internal problems. It tries to crush everything that isn’t like it, and mandate what everyone should believe and experience regarding the divine. (Syncretism is actually just as common in Christianity, but Christianity will either try to force it into its doctrine or pretend it doesn’t exist.) When you look at religions around the world, Christianity is an outlier — it’s mostly an exception to the rules of how religions work. But most Americans are so inundated with it that they end up using it as a baseline for understanding religion, and assume that all religions work like Christianity. That’s like assuming that all languages work like English (which, granted, a lot of Americans also do). Christianity lost its status as an underdog religion a long time ago.
Paganism is now in the underdog position. Many pagan religions are all but dead, and have to be reconstructed from scratch. The public community worship that would have been the cornerstone of our religions in the ancient world is not an option for most modern worshippers, so we’re limited in our ability to properly practice our religions at all. (Today’s the first day of the Dionysia-ta-astika, and I’m going to have to come up with something I can do alone in my home to celebrate what should be an enormous public parade and theatrical competition.) With so little power, there’s not a lot that pagans could do to pass laws, anyway. All of the problems that paganism would have if it were in power are underemphasized because pagan religions have very little institutional authority. That all makes paganism… sympathetic, in a way. It’s an enticing alternative to everything Christianity has pushed on us for two millennia. It’s a return to our roots, a completely different way of relating to God, an antidote to all of those issues with orthodoxy. And, because there’s no authority that demands I worship the gods in a particular way, I can worship them any way I want! The worst I’ll suffer is a few mean comments on the internet! I realized that, if all those rituals still feel chore-like even when they concern gods that I genuinely care about and want to worship, then what bothers me is the “religion” part of religion — the prayers, the hymns, the offerings, etc. If all of that doesn’t work for me, modern paganism gives me the freedom to find some method of worship that does work for me.
Is it perfect? Hell no. Paganism still has plenty of internal problems. It’s just as vulnerable to misinformation, conspiracy theories, grifters, and cult leaders (that’s “cult” in the modern sense, as in the BITE model). A lot of modern paganism is based in nineteenth-century ideas about ancient or indigenous cultures that are extremely problematic for reasons I won’t go into here, and those that aren’t are dealing with very limited sources. The intersect between paganism, occultism, and the New Age movement is sticky and results in superficial or distorted approaches towards all three. There’s still a lot of community infighting over minor things. The biggest and most insidious problem is racism. Norse and Hellenic paganism are especially likely to be co-opted by white supremacists, and a lot of European nations’ local pagan movements are actually ethnonationalist fronts that corrupt paganism’s “return-to-your-roots”-ness into “blood and soil.” We call these people “folkists,” after the Volkisch movement, and they’re awful. Frequently, they use language that’s intended to promote inclusion and respect for others’ cultures, like, “if you call yourself a Hellenic pagan without being Greek, you’re guilty of cultural appropriation.” When these are some of the loudest voices, paganism can be downright dangerous. So yes, there’s plenty that’s wrong with paganism. But on the other hand, humans are human, so these problems would probably exist within any religious movement.
I still find paganism preferable to Christianity. I like having multiple gods! I especially like worshipping Greek gods, because they have been an important and wonderful part of my life since I was a child. Honestly, the one-god policy is the only issue I have with Christianity on principle, and I’m perfectly willing to get along with Christians provided that they are also willing to get along with me. I won’t go around telling people that paganism is inherently better than Christianity. But, I hope that paganism gains a little more social ground in my lifetime. I also hope that everyone finds the path to the Divine that works best for them, on both a doctrinal and a practical level.
Comments