New Age Cowboy sparked some additional thoughts through his comments in my previous post, thoughts that I think merit a post all their own.  Or rather a series of three.  This one as foundational, another will follow on the Sacred Feminine, and another on Nature.

In an earlier discussion many of us wrote at length about the strengths and weaknesses of the Christian emphasis on spiritual equality, their failure to really practice this for almost two thousand years, and the crucial role Quakers and some other Christians played when slavery was finally abolished.  I would add that John Locke’s liberal form of Christianity underlay his theory of human rights, which has had a powerful impact on the world, and for the better.

I think this very mixed bag was the result of several factors.  First there was the genuine spiritual insight that people are in a very important sense, equal.   This insight was not unique to Christianity by any means, but it was a central feature of its initial message.

Second, as Christianity became institutionalized it was deeply co-opted into existing power structures, and developed power structures of its own.  It emphasized those aspects of its beliefs that were most compatible with a society based on slavery and domination were accentuated, aspects that were more challenging were ignored.  Any idea of equality was rendered innocuous: it would happen after you’re dead.

Third, even so this liberating idea was preserved in its scriptures, retained as a possible influence once social institutions and events had developed so that this value might be adopted in society.  Christianity kept the idea of equality around long enough so that when economic and political developments had reached a certain point, this value could become powerful in many ways.

Fourth, as Christianity fragmented, some groups recognized the value of these egalitarian passages, and ran with them to our universal benefit, even as other Christian groups remained as implacably opposed to any equality that mattered as much as they had ever been.

I bring this Christian example up to see what it might teach us Pagans about the socially transformative impact we might have on our society, for in my opinion our core beliefs are as challenging to business as usual as the belief in spiritual equality was to Classical slave-based societies.  I think our emphasis on ritual and common practice masks for many of us just how far we are departing from the dominant Western worldview.

The difference between us and the Christian example, I think, is that if we grow either in numbers or influence we need not wait anything like 1700 years for our core insights to bear fruit.  I think the modern world has the potential of adapting our core insights far more easily than did the Classical world and human equality.  But many potentials are never realized.  There are no guarantees.

The book manuscript I have just completed makes the case that we are the leading edge of a spiritual transformation in the role women and feminine values play in American religion,  a transformation that is working its way through other faith traditions, only not as centrally.  As I researched my book I was fascinated by how often Starhawk’s and other BNP women’s examples and teachings were cited by feminist scholars within other traditions, particularly Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism, as important in shaping their own thinking.

The other religious dimension that most sets us apart from the dominant society is our recognition of the sacredness of the earth.   The spiritual revisioning of Nature, and sacred immanence has had a similar, but weaker, impact on other faith traditions.  But it is having an impact.  Most faiths other than the Sauronic ones are now emphasizing the importance of preserving nature.  In many cases this is still a small step, but it is an important one.

It is significant that the right wing and ‘conservative’ “spiritual’ movement that afflicts our country these days makes its most vehement and irrational attacks on precisely these two elements of society: feminism in all its forms, and environmentalism which they revealing attack as modern Paganism.  They recognize just how subversive these values are to a culture rooted in domination by the strong, and they have stopped at nothing, including many murders, to fight against them.

Whether we like it or not, and I don’t, we are in a low grade religious war unilaterally declared by these people.  But we have something to offer that they do not: a positive vision of the future.  While it is easy to sink into despair, and I admit I sometimes do, we offer a future sane people of many faiths, and those of  no faith at all, can look forward to. They offer a bogus ‘rapture,’ endless hypocrisy, and a politics of hate.

I think it is important, very important, that we as a community continue to push as hard as we can on how we can contribute to these two issues of the Sacred Feminine and the resacralization of Nature.  My next post on this topic will focus on Pagans and the Feminine.  Another will follow on Pagans and Nature.