This post fulfills a promise I made in the Solstice post below.
The extraordinary and disturbing entry of religion into American politics over the past few decades raises an important question for all people with a spiritual commitment: how should their spiritual practice most effectively and appropriately influence their lives as citizens. As citizens we are called upon to address the major issues of our time. As religious people our beliefs are foundational to many of our most fundamental ethical positions. But how do they go together? If we are historically informed, or are even minimally attentive today, we know religious beliefs can inject a spirit impervious to rational discussion and destructive to the requirements for a democratic society.
And so we wonder what we should do.

At least when integrated into politics, religions in the past have been as often involved in horrible crimes against others as they have been sources of peace and compassion, maybe more so. Mixing religion into hotly contested political issues means combining two human activities likely to cause their adherents to confuse feelings of powerful self-righteousness with possessing truth or virtue. When that happens it becomes difficult to see those who disagree as well-meaning. Those who are not with us are against us. And those who are against us are not simply our opponents; they are our enemies.
But many of us, and I among them, find our deepest ethical commitments rooted in our spirituality, and motivating our political action. Were it not so we would likely be neither as focused or committed as we are.
How do we find balance here? Especially for we who emphasize the sacredness and goodness of this world rather than focusing on the rewards of the next
I will start with a basic truth. Religion deals with our relationship to the More Than Human in community with others. By ‘human’ I include ourselves in our mundane awareness of and focus on our personal hopes, wishes, fears, and desires. I do not use “mundane” negatively. Those spiritual traditions that seek to remove a person from concern with mundane things resort to monasticism. If everyone became a monk or nun the human adventure would end in a generation.
So, whatever the virtues of monasticism, and there are virtues, they are not easily assimilated into a spiritual perspective emphasizing embodied life as more blessing than problem. When monks can change diapers and raise toddlers and teenagers on a large scale, I will reconsider this conclusion.
But along with and connected to its blessings, the mundane brings a problem spirituality addresses. As unavoidably partial beings who deeply need others, food, clothing, and the like, we are prone towards seeing all issues in terms of how they relate to our needy self, a self that necessarily manifests with embodiment. We are prone towards weighing the needs we feel more heavily than needs we do not feel, even though others might feel them. We therefore tend to privilege even relatively trivial personal needs over other larger needs reportedly felt by strangers.
To a point this is not a problem. We are also limited in our knowledge, and I am more likely to know how to address my own felt needs than I am the probable needs of strangers. In a reasonably good society most of the time most people and their immediate friends and associates will be able to manage their personal needs without needing to rely on strangers. So to a point this mundane attitude is in keeping with the kind of world in which we live.
But our society is often not reasonably good, and we often go past this point. Too often.
Religions at their best expand the self through growing compassion and love. Our circle of care grows to encompass others, potentially indefinitely. This is in perfect harmony with a Pagan position emphasizing the world as sacred and its existence a blessing.
What expands the self to encompass others caringly is in harmony with religion. What does not may not be. What shrinks the self, and so reduces our circle of care, is always in disharmony with genuine spirituality, although it frequently masquerades as such.

On Self-Righteousness
Self-righteousness is the most malignant shrinking of the self because it justifies itself by referring to allegedly universal moral principles. The needy ego justifies its own self-righteousness by hiding behind grand abstractions such as Humanity, God, the Goddess, the Earth, Justice, Peace, Love, and so on. A small ego takes considerable pleasure in speaking and acting in the name of something large and grand. I’ve done it and probably you’ve also done it. Afterwards we usually wish we had acted more wisely and compassionately, and much less judgmentally.
The spirit of self-righteousness loves dualisms and dichotomies. They give it energy, the energy of passionate outrage. This energy often feels good to us because it gives us a sense we are connected to and empowered by something bigger than we are, something good by definition. It may also release dopamine and other chemicals enabling the self-righteous to feel good, a kind of self-induced addiction.
If so, self-righteousness is spiritual meth.
What makes the targets of our outrage so loathsome is not so much what they did as what they symbolize. They too become markers for something bigger than they are, but they come to symbolize evil, corruption, degeneracy, Satan, and similar abstractions. Thus when immersed in self-righteousness we become dedicated fighters in Good vs. Evil.
It’s a big ego trip while it lasts.
Self-righteousness is the enemy of genuine spirituality and of religion as a means by which a community celebrates and expresses this spirituality. Genuine spirituality is rooted in concrete experience. Love and compassion, kindness and generosity, only have meaning when applied to concrete cases. The abstraction “God loves us” has probably never changed anyone’s life. A genuine encounter with Divine Love has changed many lives, including my own.
Self-righteousness is to spirituality as sodium is to water. It is to religion as termites are to wood.

Religion and Politics
Bringing religion into politics runs the real risk of our ending up hiding behind abstractions, demonizing those who see the world differently, and ultimately subverting the goodness of our own spiritual tradition. But this danger does not mean we should rigorously exclude religion from politics. We cannot.
What we can do is apply to the best of our ability the qualities of love, kindness, compassion, patience, and generosity our religion helps us develop to our political action. This seems to be one clear way of distinguishing the differences between, say, how Martin Luther King and Jerry Falwell apply their Christianity to politics. We can learn from them.
King said certain values (respect for people regardless of race) are worth following and while he spoke in their defense from within his own tradition, every decent tradition values them. In these very concrete instances of segregation and denial of voting rights they are being violated, and these violations should stop. King could defend these values by referring not only to his own tradition, but to the highest values of humanity in general. One did not have to agree with his theology to agree with his proposals.
Falwell said certain people are enemies of God/Morality/etc., and they must be fought. What is ‘moral’ in this case (subordination of women, anti-abortion, anti-gay) is moral because of his reading of scripture. No other arguments were offered and other traditions were attacked. All who disagree with him are enemies of God and lack the faith needed to see the error of their ways.
King strengthened democracy and Falwell subverted it. Those of us who find our own strongest convictions in our spiritual life are committed as citizens of a democracy to offer reasons others who have not had our religious experiences can find convincing. A free nation depends on its citizens in the last analysis privileging reason and persuasion over power and authority, on all sides. Given that people will always disagree it is the offering of reasons on both sides that provides grounds for coming together or agreeing to disagree. Abandon the requirement to justify a position by giving reasons and the grounds for toleration are undermined.
To take a personal example, my environmental work is rooted in my love of the earth and its life forms, and my personal experience that both the Earth (or at least major land forms) and many elements within it that our society deems inert are in fact sentient and aware, from mountains and oceans to trees and flowers. But I cannot reliably guarantee similar experiences to people who have not had encounters like mine. So I seek to discover arguments enabling us to agree on concrete outcomes even if their motivations will be as limited by their own experiences and individuality as mine are by mine. And of course doing so requires me to try and find commonalities between myself and others, bridges over which we can come to agreements.
Of Ritual and Politics
My earlier post had taken the strongest possible exception to injecting politics into a Solstice ritual. One reader defended this mixing by saying that minus the politics ritual was just escapism. I disagree. Good ritual reconnects us with the larger context within which we live our lives, including our political lives. It rejuvenates and re-empowers us regarding what our lives are about, including our political actions. By putting politics within a timeless and larger context it gives us the distance we need to think more clearly about the issues involved.
Let me give a simple and in some ways trivial example. When we play a board game we can become totally engrossed in the game. Winning becomes a Big Goal. Should a player suddenly decide that the game is a waist of time and begin playing erratically, we can get angry at him or her. Even though it is “only a game.”
What is true of games is even more true for the more serious activities of our lives, including for many of us, politics. We get so drawn in that we lose sight of the larger context. And, to mix metaphors, we come to want the ring of power for its own sake because all other contexts have disappeared.
Games end and we can then take stock of who we are and who our game opponents are. We get perspective. The passions of the game take in a very different intensity. But when embodied life ends we enter the great mystery of the afterlife. During life we do not have so easy an opportunity to stand back and put the “game of life” into a larger context.
Religion and religious ritual help us grasp this larger context. We can enter more explicitly into a sacred space. But to do so the ritual must transcend politics, focusing on the eternal, the universal, on that which puts the mundane into an appropriate perspective. It must takes us as far from immersion in the political world as after the game life removes us from the world of gaming.
The consciousness shift that occurs in good ritual us essential to this. Starting with the grounding, we disengage ourselves from the cares of the day and the worries of our lives, to go .. .elsewhere for a time. In the case of the Solstice ritual that ultimately provoked this piece, I who am about as political as anyone I know (just read this blog…) had been really looking forward to a ritual for just that reason. And I was particularly disappointed when the opposite happened. Happily I got my needed distancing the next night, at a smaller Sabbat celebration on the real Solstice.
Had the ritual been billed as one for empowering community political work and the like, I would not have objected, but I probably would not have come. Had I come, even if I thought it could have been done differently or better, I would not have posted anything. It was because it was billed as a Solstice celebration that I came and because it was not in the sense I am describing that I was disappointed.
Witches Against Hitler and What It Means for Us
When Hitler planned to invade Great Britain many English Witches did rituals to prevent a Nazi invasion. Whether they worked or not will never be known. What we do know is that what was done was in harmony with a Wiccan view of the world that often works in a smaller scale, that the invasion never happened, and that the change in Hitler’s plans was unexpected by all involved on both sides. Successful or not, this was religious involvement in politics on a grand scale indeed.
It is also in harmony with the principles I have just elucidated.
Energy was raised, given great additional strength by the voluntary sacrifice of some participants’ lives, and a powerful “NO. YOU WILL NOT COME” was sent to Hitler. Philip Heselton’s book gives many of the details.
Note first that the working was very concrete and specific. It was a binding – and a very powerful one. Nothing was at all abstract about it. Second, there was universal agreement about the concrete specifics of what was desired by all involved. A powerful unity of will was achieved because of the very simplicity of the issue: stop an invasion. Third, it could be done, indeed it had to be done, from within a ritually specific consciousness far removed from the normal, and certainly removed from analytic thought.
This it seems to me is a good example of specifically Pagan political involvement. We can learn from it. (In fact I have learned of somewhat similar rituals more recently that also appear to have worked.) It is done entirely outside the political arena. It does not deal with making laws, convincing potential allies, or anything at all mundane. The moral issues are extraordinarily clear for those involved. It is oriented towards defense against aggression, not control of others in matters other than simply stopping them from doing harm.
Thus it had all the elements of a good magickal working.
Had the working’s goal been abstract, such as “Hitler will learn love” the unity of wills required would have been harder to achieve because “love” means different things to different people, even if all agree on the goal in the abstract. Had it been for “World Peace” the problems would have been harder still. What does that really mean concretely? What would it look like? There would be a number of interpretations. And the number of people required to be influenced by it would have been hopelessly disproportionate to the powers of those doing the working.
There is another dimension to consider here. I was asked some years ago to participate in a working against George Bush. I declined, but not because I thought such a working was in principle unwise. At the time literally everything that happened was working in the man’s favor. All ‘coincidences’ helped him. It seemed to me that larger patterns were at work, patterns so strong that facing them head-on was unwise.
I counseled waiting.
Of course it seemed in the Britain of the early ’40s that everything was also working in Hitler’s favor when the Witch-working against him occurred. But the difference was that the realm of relevant possible choices had become very small and very focused. Either he would invade, or he would not. And the message was not to undo Hitler or overthrow him, but to prevent a specific possible outcome, an outcome where the will of only one man was decisive.
Had the plan I was invited to participate in been similarly specific – say, to save the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge – I would have participated. And I suspect such working were in fact done…. ANWR is still not been drilled, against all odds. My point is not that effective ritual is invincible – only that it shifts the energetic probabilities, and in the absence of effective opposition can make a significant difference for the better.
So my message here is not to divorce spirituality and religion from politics, but to be very wise in how we mix them.