We Pagans have made giant strides in public acceptance and in the numbers of Americans interested in our path.  This is wonderful.  But no good thing comes without at least a potential shadow.  Our current financial crisis  can help Pagan Americans become increasingly aware of one of the pitfalls of success.

In his book The Spiritual Quest, Robert Torrence shows how religious institutionalization has gradually substituted organizational well-being for spiritual experience.  As a group becomes more successful, it comes under pressure to become ‘better organized,’ with unpleasant long term consequences.

Successful organizations attract parasites seeking positions of influence, people who take much but give little in return. American businesses were built by mixes of entrepreneurial skill, creativity, and yes, luck.  Once built, successful companies became magnets for people who were neither particularly creative nor particularly entrepreneurial, but were very good at office politics.  They used these latter skills to prevail over competitors who had more creativity and entrepreneurial skill, but were not so organizationally adept.

The obscene bonuses and other perks ‘earned’ by corporate and financial elites who lost billions of other people’s money is evidence that many established businesses have become dominated by these losers.  Even now they argue that their inflated incomes are due to their creativity and risk taking.  That they take no risks and create nothing is left unsaid.  

When I look at religious history, in important respects I see a similar pattern.  Religions become popular, and then institutionalized.  Administrative hierarchies develop. These hierarchies attract those who care more about their status in the organization, than the values the organization was initially established to serve.  The Catholic Church’s Bishops’ record of supporting and hiding pedophile priests are well known, causing major crises for the Church in Ireland and the US in particular.  My point is not that most priests, or even very many, were pedophiles.  There is little evidence of that.  What is interesting is the organizational leadership covering for them and their actions.  

Now we see the same thing in American high finance.  Elites covering for one another.  Abject incompetence does not lead to unemployment.  Bizarrely, the people who lost so much money are the ones expected to handle taxpayer financed bailout funds.  

Superficially incompetent financial management and covering for pedophile priests have little in common.  Looking more deeply show similarities.  In both cases making the status quo look good became more important than dealing with underlying problems that would cause trouble among elites.  In both cases harmful people were kept on in positions of authority. They were harmful in terms of the organization’s stated goals and not just by some outside criteria.  

It is something we Pagans should think about as we grow in numbers.

Happily our present coven and grove structure keeps our own rascals confined to the small time. There is little status in being a High Priestess or High Priest of a coven of 13 although we know that even here there are cases of the misuse of trust and position.  At the same time, more than a solitary, a coven is resistant to identifying itself with some overarching organization.  People like to feel connected, and members of a successful coven connect with one another.

If we avoid creating large organizations with more power than member covens and the like, NeoPagans will probably prove highly resistant to infection by  parasites such as those who have done such damage in our economy and in mainline religion. We should learn from the current scandals in business as well as religion to remind ourselves of this ever-present problem.