Paganism and Devil Worship: A False Equation
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, October 27, 1996
There are any number of ways in which a Unitarian Universalist congregation can garner a little local publicity; but some of our fellow UUs in Beaumont, Texas got a bit more than they probably wanted this past summer. Beaumont is just outside of Houston, Texas. In late July the local papers around Houston carried the story of how their minister, Rev. Michael Thompson, got arrested for allegedly disrupting an "Occult Awareness Seminar" at a Beaumont Baptist Church. Rev. Thompson, for his part, maintained that he was at the Baptist church for the purpose of defending certain members of his UU congregation who were being falsely accused by the Baptist minister of "devil worship." The UUs in question, seven persons in all from the reports I've read of this incident, make up the membership of a small CUUPS chapter--Covenant of UU Pagans--within the Beaumont UU church. The total membership of the Beaumont church is a little over 100.
The larger story, as best I can determine it, goes like this: One evening last summer, the CUUPS group was clearing out some space in a wooded area behind the church, which the church owns, and which they were planning to use for some of their gatherings and ceremonies. Some neighborhood children who were on their way to play on an adjoining property happened by. The children, probably in more of a mischievous spirit than anything else, began throwing things--sticks and pebbles--at the CUUPS folk. Being good UUs the CUUPS people decided to do the proper UU thing, which was to start a "discussion" with the children. In the course of this discussion they told the kids about paganism, woodland fairies or sprites, animal spirits, and about how some of the store-bought glitter one the CUUPS people had was "magic dust." After awhile the children left and the CUUPS group went back to their work.
While this "discussion," in and of itself, was quite harmless in the sense that nothing at all was done to the children; from the perspective of 20/20 hindsight, it was not the wisest thing for the CUUPS people to have done. The kids went home and told their parents about these pagans in the woods behind the UU church who had magic dust and who could take on the forms of animals. One of these parents, who also happens to be a deputy sheriff and a member of large local fundamentalist Baptist church told his minister about it, and the proverbial you-know-what hit the fan.
The minister of this Baptist church, a Rev. Dennis Rozell, after hearing from the child's parents, figured he had all the proof he needed that occultism and devil worship were alive and well in Beaumont right down at the local UU church. So he put on an "Occult Awareness Seminar" at his church to warn both his members and the general populace of such a presence. Rev. Thompson, the UU minister, showed up at the seminar. When Rev. Rozell, in a manner reminiscent of the style of the late Sen. McCarthy, waved a paper he said contained the names of these UU pagans, and that Michael Thompson himself given him the list, Rev. Thompson interrupted the proceedings saying that Rev. Rozell never got any such list from him, and then went on the denounce Rev. Rozell for such an attack on members of his congregation. Rev. Thompson was then asked to leave, which he refused to do as he felt obligated to stay and defend these members of his congregation. He was then arrested for trespassing. A few days later some of the more moderate, mainline clergy, including the local rabbi, issued a statement in support of Rev. Thompson, saying that while they did not endorse paganism, they did support religious freedom and religious expression and considered the Baptist minister's actions toward the UUs as unwarranted and dangerous. The Texas ACLU has taken up Rev. Thompson's defense. The case, to the best of my knowledge, is still pending.
There are any number of lessons to be drawn from this episode, not the least of which is to be careful what you talk about with children you don't know. But that's not the only lesson. If it were I wouldn't be devoting a sermon to the topic. Another thing this incident did was to create an issue within the relatively small Beaumont UU congregation about the place of contemporary paganism, or neo-paganism, within the overall life of the congregation. Some of the members of that UU church, while appalled at the actions of the local Baptist pastor, were also not comfortable with the presence of a CUUPS chapter in their church. These concerns led to a congregational meeting which they had last month to deal with that issue. The congregation did vote by a large majority to support and endorse their CUUPS chapter, but there were a few dissenting votes. So, all in all, things have not exactly been dull for the Beaumont UUs over the past several months!
We have had a CUUPS chapter here as part of the larger program of our church for the past 2-3 years. Some of you may recall that they presented our Earth Day service last April. . As a part of that service I gave about a five minute "sermon-ette" on my take on the relationship of neo-paganism to contemporary UUism. I'm glad I wasn't doing any more than that on that Sunday back in April because I had a horrible case of the flu at the time. So today (and I'm feeling fine) I want to offer a more expanded version of what I had to say then, and include--as my title for today suggests--some thoughts on the confusion between "Satanism" and paganism. My UU ministerial colleague from Beaumont, Michael Thompson, calls himself as "pagan-friendly" but not a practicing pagan himself, and that describes my own stance quite well. After the service today I invite any of you who would like to join in for a follow-up discussion on this topic in the Fellowship Room of the Parish House. I've asked some of the members of our CUUPS group here to come and take part, and they can probably give you a better picture than I as to the "nature" (so to speak) of contemporary paganism.
Just a bit more on CUUPS before getting into the subject of paganism itself: The Covenant of UU Pagans, at the denominational level, was approved as an affiliate organization within our UU Association in 1987 by our Association's Board of Trustees. The Preamble and Statement of Purpose sections of their By-Laws are included in your Order of Service for today. CUUPS is actually the latest addition to a number of such affinity groups that have been created within our UU denomination over the years. They include: the UU Christian Fellowship, UUs for Jewish Awareness, the UU Buddhist Fellowship, and the UU Fellowship of Religious Humanists to name but a few. The purpose of these organizations is to provide a network or communications link among like-minded UUs around the country, to put on programs and workshops at General Assemblies and District Conferences, and to provide support and resource material for local chapters of such organizations in local UU churches wherever there is interest in having one. The addition of CUUPS, just 10 years ago, to this mix is indicative of a larger interest in earth centered religion and earth centered spirituality that has been present and growing in our UU movement over the past decade. It was this same interest that caused our Association, in even more recent years, to expand our Purposes and Principles statement to cite as one of the six sources of our Living Tradition: "Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature."
Stripped down to a bare bones definition, that is what paganism is: Earth-centered spirituality; that is to say, the affirmation that the primary location of the divine, the holy, the sacred, the depth and essence of existence itself (call it what you will) is found in the realm of nature. I am in "half-agreement" with this affirmation for reasons I'll explain later. For now, lets take a closer look at paganism--ancient and modern--itself.
This is an especially appropriate Sunday, I feel, to speak to this topic. What we call Halloween, which is this Thursday, most likely has its origins in the ancient Celtic festivals of Britain and Ireland which were called "Samhain", meaning the "end of summer." Samhain was also a New Years celebration for these cultures. The end of summer marked the end of their year, and fire festivals were held and great bonfires were lit to frighten away evil spirits so the new year could begin afresh. There was also the belief that the souls of the dead would revisit their earthly homes on this day, which gave it its more "spooky", if you will, dimension. This was also a time to give heed and homage to the powers and forces--represented as gods, goddesses and nature spirits--who were believed to control the processes of nature.
With the coming of the Christian era to Europe these ancient celebrations became "Christianized" as All Hallow's Eve, the day before the Church's commemoration of All Saints Day on November 1st. The Church did essentially the same thing with the pagan winter solstice and spring equinox celebrations by "re-baptizing" them, so to speak, as the Christian observances of Christmas and Easter. Because All Saints Day and All Hallows Eve are minor observances compared to Christmas and Easter, Halloween did not become Christianized in the way that those two holidays have, and does retain more of its pagan--or ancient religion--character. Taking a look at how the Church dealt with its encounters with pagan religions as its dominance spread over northern Europe and into the British Isles is important for an understanding of how in some minds devil worship and paganism have come to be equated--falsely equated in most instances. I'll say more on this in a few minutes.
The origin of the term "pagan" itself--which I briefly spoke to last April--is interesting in looking at what happened when Christianity encountered the ancient religions of Europe. Once Christianity and the Church were firmly established in southern Europe (more specifically, in Rome), it then concentrated on expanding its influence northward. It was most successful first of all in the cities. But it did not have near the same success in converting the more rural folk who were much more attached to their nature based religions than were the city folk. The Latin word for someone living out in the country or in a rural area is "paganus." The "pagans", therefore were those non-city people who were still beyond the reach of Christianity. In the British Isles, these country dwellers often lived out in rather desolate areas called (both then and now) "heaths" and so were came to be named "heathens"; again, rural folk beyond the reach of Christianity. So the terms pagan and heathen, as you can see, are more about geography than they are about religion, and they were both coined by the Church hierarchy to identity those people who were not yet "religiously correct." Neither term says anything about the actual religion of these allegedly "religiously incorrect" people.
So what was this religiously incorrect religion all about? In terms of specific beliefs and ritual practices it varied greatly from place to place, but its underlying assumption was that all of nature is alive, and that the earth itself is a living organism and that we are each components of this living organism. Of course these ancient peoples did not use terms like "living organism" (anymore than they called themselves pagans); they spoke instead of gods, goddesses, and spirits which they believed inhabited all of matter. For some, like the Druids, these spirits were embodied in trees; for others the nature spirits were embodied in certain animals. Theirs was an animistic universe. In an animistic universe, all matter is regarded as being alive in some sense or other; and very little, if any, distinction is made between "living" matter and "dead" matter.
While most of today's pagans are not as literalistic about it as their ancient forebears, they still use the language of polytheism--of gods, goddesses and spirits--as a way of indicating that all of nature is alive. Pagan ritual, then, was based on the assumption that as part of this living organism we humans are to harmonize our own rhythms with the larger rhythms of the Earth or cosmos. By observing and celebrating such things as the phases of the moon, the passing of the seasons, and other such natural occurrences one comes into right relationship with the cosmos itself. The underlying assumption, again, was that you encounter and relate to the divine, the holy, the sacred in nature.
This, in an admittedly oversimplified nutshell, is what the Church found itself competing with as it sought to extend its dominion. Unlike the pagan deities, the Christian God was monotheistic. While He (and He was a He) had created all of nature, he was not a part of it. The Christian God instead was a God of History. That is to say, he revealed himself not in nature but in the workings of human history--to Moses and the Israelites in their exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land, and then finally and fully in the person of Jesus. One God, who revealed himself in human history to make his will known to human beings who were to worship him and obey his laws. Granted, that is pretty oversimplified as well--but that was the gist of these two clashing religious perspectives. The rituals directed at both the Christian God and the pagan deities or spirits were each and all meant to gain their favor, but the pagan rituals, for obvious reasons, had a much more "earthy" flavor to them. Some of the pagan fertility rites which were meant to assure the return the return of the crops each year--a life and death matter for rural people--often did have a sexual or sensual content to them, often with phallic symbols of one kind or another. This was, to put it mildly, a bit off-putting to those spreading a faith that basically distrusted the workings of the human body, and, drawing upon the teachings of St. Paul, came close to considering the body the root of evil itself. The Church, then, dealt with what it called paganism in two different ways. One was to co-op whenever it could by taking over certain pagan celebrations and giving them a Christian content. I've already noted that with respect to Christmas, Easter, and All Hallow's Eve.
But when co-option didn't work then the thing to do was to label paganism a flat out heresy--the work of the Devil or Satan. And this is how so-called "Satanism" still gets sometimes linked with today's paganism.
Follow along now: Paganism never had a single Devil or Satan figure-- mthere were bad or evil spirits along with the good spirits, but no one Being who supposedly embolied evil. Satan, as an "anti-deity" or adversary of God, is a figure from the Christian faith. Whether regarded as an actual Being, or as a metaphorical character representing the embodiment of evil, the figure of Satan is a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
To dip even further back into history for a moment, the figure of Satan or the Devil in the western world has its origins in an ancient Persian religion called Zoroastrianism. (Persia was located where Iran is today.) Some 600 years before the birth of Jesus the Jewish people came under Persian rule for a time and the Jewish theologians of that period incorporated some of the Zoroastrian religion into their own faith. Zoroastrianism taught that there is a God of Light-called Ahura Mazda--and his adversary, the "Prince of Darkness" called Arich Mann. While under Persian rule the Jewish theologians gave this Prince of Darkness their own spin as the enemy--but ultimately not the equal--of their God, Yahweh, and named him the Devil or Satan. This designation carried over into the Christian faith as well. In Hebrew scripture "Satan" means "adversary"--or "adversary of God." None of this had anything to do with the paganism of Europe. This Satan creature was not part of their worldview at all.
Satanism, and I've neither the time nor the inclination to do a discourse on it right now, is really a perverse form of anti-Christianity that does indeed date back to the Middle Ages of Europe. In more recent times its been given a boost by the writings of a British Author named Aleister Crowley, and even more recently in this country by the founding in San Francisco in 1966 of a "Church of Satan" by a man named Anton LeVey. While the Satanism may borrow from certain aspects of Paganism--just as Christianity itself has--it is really a bizarre kind of glorification of the Christian "anti-Deity". I don't know enough about the works of either Aleister Crowley or Anton LeVey (never having had any great desire to read either them) to make any kind of intelligent commentary here, but I do know a lot of what gets called "Satansim" today is really hooliganism with a psuedo-religious veneer--the Charles Manson gang being one of the more horrifying examples of this.
But, and this is more my concern, however much reality there may be to something called "Satansim" or "Devil Worship", these terms are more often than not used as a means of fear-mongering in circumstances where they do not apply at all. And that is what the Baptist minister in Beaumont was doing with such language in attempting to target the UUs in his community, and why the UU minister there felt compelled to stand up for them, even if it meant getting arrested. I've never been to succumb to paranoia and I don't intend to start now, but when I see something like this happening to Unitarian Universalists anywhere I get a little concerned.
I want begin to draw this together now by taking up the question as to why there has been a resurgence of paganism, or neo-paganism, in both liberal religious circles and in the wider culture today. Starhawk, whose meditation we heard earlier, feels that we as a culture are now taking what she calls a "turn toward the intuitive" after so much time where the emphasis has been on scientific truth and on a scientific world view. In one place she writes, "Without discarding science, we can recognize its limitations. There are many modes of consciousness that have not been validated by Western rationalism, in particular what I call the intuitive mode of perception. As a culture we are experiencing a turn toward the intuitive.." Along with this turn toward the intuitive in the Western World is also the realization over the long run we human beings cannot have a life apart from the life of the earth itself. We know on some level that Starhawk is right when she says of and to the Earth, "May (we) all remember we are cells in your body and dance together." On some level we human beings have known all along that we are are an inter-related part of a larger organism, namely this planet and this universe which we inhabit. But with our emphasis on scientific progress and our human use of the planet we have abused that relationship; and so we look back, and take a second look at, people whom we may have offhandedly labeled as "primitive", but who also intuitively knew what that fundamental earth/human relationship was about, and how they celebrated it. Some of the ritualistic ways in which the ancient pagans celebrated or observed that relationship may not be appropriate now; but I see in contemporary paganism an attempt to re-established a relationship with the earth, with nature, that has been there all along, but has become seriously frayed over the course of the last of millennia or so in the West.
Recalling what I said earlier about the clash of world views between the older European pagan tradition and the Judeo-Christian tradition, with one locating the divine or the holy in nature and the other in human history--the thing is that each tradition contained, and contains, part of the truth. They just couldn't put it together. The reality is that we human beings are creatures with one foot in nature and one foot in human history or human civilization; we find can meaning, or truth, or something of the holy, in both places, if we will look for it or pursue it. This is why I consider myself to be "half a pagan." I have one foot in nature, and when I'm leading with that foot I resonate with Starhawk and find much meaning--if not something of the holy--for myself through her words, "Earth mother, star mother...you are the grain and the loaf that sustains (me) each day..." Her words become mine as well as when I sense that sustaining relationship with the Earth. Then there is my other foot which is in human history and human civilization and human community. And from that side I also find meaning--if not the holy--in searching for my place in that history, in that civilization, and in that community. And I walk best when I use both feet.
I'm "half a pagan" in another sense as well. While I do need that spiritual connection with the Earth or nature, I find I best pursue such spirituality in personal and largely private ways rather than through some of the rituals of contemporary paganism. And I hope you understand that this is much more of a statement about me, than about neo-pagan ritual itself. However much I may try to "loosen up" I guess I'm still just a little too much of a rational minded, up-in-my-head type of guy to meaningfully engage in chanting or drumming or dancing in circles. It just doesn't quite "float my boat". Like my colleague Michael Thompson, I will have to remain "pagan friendly" and hope my CUUPS friends will acknowledge that half a pagan is better than no pagan at all.
To conclude, I think contemporary paganism does make a positive contribution to the larger gestalt of today's Unitarian Universalism. When I hear about, and see, a renewed interest in and pursuit of spirituality in our liberal religious movement today I think what we are rightfully seeking right now in our liberal religious movement is the proper balance between the rational and the intuitive, between mind and spirit, between our being creatures of human history and creatures of the Earth. I think that each of the six sources we cite as making up our Living Tradition contribute to such balance. Unitarian Universalism is an ongoing work in progress. This is why I continue to be attracted to it, fascinated by it, informed by it, occasionally frustrated by it, and most of all privileged to be one of its ministers serving a diverse congregation like this one. Picking up on my "Big Tent" theme for this year, I want us to honor and value all those things about each of our lives that have brought us to this point in our congregational life as well as that which bids us to move forward. We are indeed creatures of mind and spirit, nature and history, and we know and feel the truth through both our intellectual and our intuitive capabilities. "The Living Tradition we share draws from many sources" so we say. It is important, I feel, that those many sources find expression in our UU congregations in ways that will make all of our lives richer for it.
Copyright © 1996 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
