Why We as Pagans Should Be More Religious (not just ‘spiritual’)
“I’m not religious, but I am spiritual” is a phrase we’re certainly all familiar with, regardless of the extent to which you do or don’t identify with it yourself. I, for my part, felt that way at one point in my past for many of the reasons that I think a lot of the people who still employ it do: profound distrust of and hurt towards formal religious institutions, anxiety towards authority, and a deep need to feel independent and without audit in my pursuit of understanding the world around me.
In present day online spaces, though, you don’t often necessarily see it said so plainly. Not because it isn’t the belief many hold, but because it’s become so pervasive that it no longer needs saying. It makes up instead a part of a web of similar language which avoids explicitly religious terminology.
You almost never hear the word “worship” said in many pagan spaces (or if it is said, only in the juxtaposition against the very modern concept of “working” with the gods), rarer even still is any discussion of “conversion” or being “a convert”, a typically very broad term now often reserved for only initiatory institutions. So too it isn’t entirely uncommon to hear people discuss how they feel uncomfortable with the idea of “prayer” but still engage in “petitioning” their gods.
Over the years I’ve come to see this phenomenon as both a sincere symptom of the effects of imperialized religion (especially but not limited to Evangelical Christianity) – but also as a perpetrator in its own right. This pull away from religiosity to spirituality, in my view, contributes directly to the rampant appropriation we often see in pagan spaces and is a major mechanism in why people so often find themselves falling out of and struggling to get back into their practice.
☀︎ How We Define Spirituality and Religion ☀︎
It would be disingenuous to try to approach this topic without acknowledging that the definitions of “Spiritual” and “Religious” are, at best, flimsy. This area of academics is rapidly evolving as many of the mainstays of earlier eras of sociology and anthropology are being overturned. At one point in the past, though, the concept of “spirituality” was largely defined by it being a personal, internal and independent search for meaning, understanding and immaterial identity, often apart from formal teaching or religious institution. While no longer treated as the formal definition of “spirituality” (which now in fact often includes ‘relating to or having care towards religious concepts and values’ among others1), I believe that this operative definition has largely shaped its current, non-academic use.
To be spiritual is, to many people, to be an independent truth seeker. To be religious is to be under a banner of authority, to be told what to believe. These are oversimplifications, of course, but are common threads that I see run through common explanations for why people choose not to adopt formal religious labels.
I don’t think we need to entertain any mystery about why people feel this way. It is, without question, in many ways a direct consequence of religious imperialism as it has gone hand in hand with colonization and white supremacy, a long-lasting chain of events that is still very much ongoing. Religio-cultural imperialism, like the white supremacy that has largely defined it in “the west” (a term I use loosely), demands sameness. It is explicitly violent towards indigenous cultures, faiths and ideologies in the name of that sameness. It demands authority, it demands sacrifice, but above all else it demands that you don’t think too hard. It’s not a surprise then that when this is the only “religion” many of us see growing up (though I feel the need to point out that no formal definition of religion requires it to possess hard authoritative structure at all), that it would lead to the natural conclusion that to be anti-colonial, anti-racist, and perhaps most vehemently anti-fascist, one should be anti-religion.
When, in fact, that attitude itself furthers the appropriation and cultural erasure that is the backbone of many of the atrocities attributed to “organized religion” as an ambiguated entity.
☀︎ The Power of the Word “Religion” ☀︎
White supremacy does not want you to call any surviving form of Hellenic Polytheism a religion. Neither does it want you to call any other form of European Paganism a religion, nor the many Native American faiths. Neither, in practice, the African Traditional Religions and their descendant faiths, despite the name. I could go on but won’t. White supremacy wants you to call these things spirituality, superstition, folk practice at most.
The ‘why’ is simple. The word religion, historically, carries an immense amount of power and political capital. It ascribes by its very nature a legitimacy found in the suggestion of cultural foundation, in-group codification, and internal description. It is for this reason that the academic approach to defining religion has, of late, moved away from trying ask simple questions about what religion is and what it does for the populations it belongs to, but include also “who gets to define what ‘religion’ is, how they define it, why they define it as they do, and what the consequences are in real world law and politics of defining it in one way and not another.”2
Because the who, the belonging, the ownership (that is, what broader cultural in-group status is affiliated innately) is truly the crux of the issue. Both the issue of defining religion as an anthropological entity, but also the issue of why we, as modern practitioners of minority faiths, have a responsibility to plant the flag of ‘religion’ in our communities and surrounding our beliefs. Because religion is culture. They are inseparable. Religion is not a branch off the tree of culture; it is as much culture itself as your hand is your body. There is no religion without culture, and there is no culture without people.
By insisting then on calling it religion, not spirituality that involves the belief in gods, not ambiguated “practice”, you are including in your language the fundamental fact that it is cultural, and belongs to an ongoing, living legacy of heritage and environmental context.
By extension you are acknowledging that there are people who possess the position and right to demand respect for that religion, to determine who has access to it and through what means, and to collectively codify and uphold beliefs, traditions and rules that exist outside of any individual practitioner. You are acknowledging, also if less explicitly, that this is not just a collection of thoughts, beings and spirits that are mythologically or regionally related together; it is instead a cohesive cosmology that is supported by and pivots around historic cultural exchange, ecological expressions and actively constructed precedent.
This also requires by necessity reinforcing the boundaries between individual faiths, in direct opposition to pan-continental umbrella terms which white supremacy has intentionally supplanted that individuality with. You would never say that the religion you practice is “European Paganism” – that would be immediately identifiable as bizarre and nonsensical. You would instead say that you’re a Hellenic Polytheist, an Irish Pagan, and so on. Because as religion is culture, it requires at the bare minimum regional specificity. This is also the issue with the neo-spiritual tendency to identify oneself as simply “pagan” with no qualifiers at all, or “eclectic pagan” which openly and intentionally removes those divisions.
Boundaries, divisions and ownership are the antithesis of appropriation, and the antithesis of cultural homogenization. If your goal is to push back against colonial violence, Christian imperialism or fascism at large, shirking formal and specified religious labels should never be the answer.
☀︎ But Also, It Shoots You in the Foot ☀︎
I want to pivot now from why you should don overt, proud religiosity for the sake of ethics and focus for a minute on why you should take it on yourself for your own spiritual health, success and longevity.
For many, the structure provided by religion seems stifling, as much of this conversation has to circle back to that dichotomy between free-thinking and authority that many people, consciously or subconsciously, place on spirituality and religion. This social phenomenon is well described in a 2010 Harvard Divinity bulletin with the following:
“At the heart of the distinction between religion and spirituality, then, lies the presumption that to think and act within an existing tradition—to practice religion—risks making one less spiritual. To be religious is to bow to the authority of another, to believe in doctrines determined for one in advance, to read ancient texts only as they are handed down through existing interpretative traditions, and blindly to perform formalized rituals. For the spiritual, religion is inert, arid, and dead; the practitioner of religion, whether consciously or not, is at best without feeling, at worst insincere”3
But this deep suspicion that too stringent tradition (as opposed to employing only individual figures, mythos and loose framework), that authority and precedent will limit personal experience, revelation and spiritual awakening often doesn’t factor in the other side of what structure means.
Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in online pagan or “witchy” spaces knows that there are a lot of people who only really participate in them because they have questions and don’t know where to find answers. This isn’t a bad thing, of course, but the answers that are provided are often very stand-alone. There’s little emphasis on teaching people how to find these answers for themselves, not by pointing them towards Google, but by providing the building blocks of holistic, self-guided learning. The reason for this is, in my experience, simple: because in order to provide those holistic building blocks, the answer almost always has to be “what does the precedent of your religion or its culture of origin say?”. This isn’t for no reason, but relates back to religions position as a deeply interwoven cultural entity, which can only truly exist when it maintains its historic, geographical and societal context.
When we look at religion this way, many questions from “is it okay if I give this thing as an offering?” to “will the gods be mad at me if I do this?” to “can I blend these two beliefs together?” become immediately, substantially easier to answer. Because these things aren’t often found in myths, in song, in surviving explicitly religious oral tradition. They’re often instead found in ecoregional factors, in surviving local superstition, in (yes often Christianity-based!) modern regional folk practices. Even for those among us who have moved past those basic questions, far more esoteric and conceptual problems can likewise only really be approached when you’re willing to zoom out, root down, and acknowledge the whole context of your belief system.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting to foster independent thought and personal exploration of your own spiritual experience. I believe strongly that ones religious experience should be highly embodied, sensual and inspiration based in order to be truly sincere and productive. But our collective hesitation to point towards tradition, towards precedent, towards religion leaves people coming back over and over again with questions they truly don’t know how to answer on their own but absolutely could if they were operating off of an integrated regional religious cosmology.
Which brings me to one of the other most common questions I see in these spaces, “how do I get back into my practice when I fell out of it?” or many similar variations thereof. It brings to mind, for me, the way someone might talk about falling off a work-out routine or an ideal bedtime schedule. It carries all the hallmarks of the downside of independence, the idea that you have sole responsibility to find ways to make yourself stick with something, to make it keep existing.
Because, after all, if it’s just your practice, it functionally stops existing when you stop partaking in it, or at least it’s very easy to feel that way. Of course, in reality, you have the ability to resume at any point with no real fanfare necessary, but that’s often not the emotional experience. Instead, this thing you’ve built now feels dissolved, out of reach, in need of being repaired.
But religion doesn’t falter when we do. It isn’t an institution upheld by us as individuals. Its traditions do not depend on any personal participation; its precedents do not buckle or waiver when our self-discipline does. In the same way that the sun doesn’t stop rising if you fail to get up too early to see the dawn, you don’t cease to belong to your religion when you, for whatever length of time, fall out of practice with it.
I could go on for a long time about the benefits of religiosity, the psychological benefits of ritual, the naturalness of the desire for labels and why that impulse should be directed to more culturally protective identifiers, the power of setting the sacred apart from the daily through symbolic signifiers.
But the note that I would rather end on is this:
In my experience, the tighter you weave your net of cultural-religious context, the more confident you will feel that it will catch you when you fall.
1. Merriam Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spiritual
2. Wilson, E. K. (2021). Discourse Research and Religion .
3. Hollywood, A. (n.d.). Retrieved from Harvard Divinity Bulletin : https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/spiritual-but-not-religious/#Notes
