You're a druid and an ex-evangelical, right? What does being a druid mean to you? How did you get from evangelicalism to where you are now? And of course feel free to ignore this if it's nosy. (sincerely, a Christian who wants to leave but who doesn't know what to do)
this is going to make me sound ignorant as hell, lol, but i'm happy to share
under a cut because this got very long, sorry, lol.
my personal progression was: "vaguely christian -> VERY christian -> christian agnostic -> agnostic/atheist -> agnostic/druid -> some sorta druid-neopagan-animist thing." i guess i'll just go through what made me switch between each of those, and close out with some high-level thoughts that may be helpful for you?
okay, so when i was
VAGUELY CHRISTIAN,
i went to Sunday school every week because That's What You Do, and because my whole hometown was very southern Baptist, i never questioned the veracity of its teachings much... until they ran a whole weekly series on "why [x] is wrong," where [x] is some other group
e.g., we had a week on why Mormons are wrong, and i didn't bat an eye because i hadn't even known Mormons existed until that moment
then we had a week on why Muslims are wrong, and that... bothered me, because i had a friend who was Muslim, and she was just objectively a better person than me, and i was like "any universe where she goes to hell and i don't seems really fucked up"
then we had a week on why EVOLUTION was wrong, and that just absolutely threw me, because while i hadn't thought about evolution much (i think i was in fourth grade or so), it seemed common-sense? scientists thought highly of it? "adaptation over time" just seems logical?
so i went to the public library every day after school for like a week, read some Darwin and some science books, and came back to my Sunday school teacher with, like, an itemized list of objections to the whole "evolution is wrong" thing. and he came up with some standard Answers In Genesis rebuttals, and i did more research and came back the next week with more science, and we repeated this a few times until he was like "lua, you just gotta take some things on faith"
which. lmao. full existential crisis time, because no matter how hard i thought, i couldn't *not* believe in the science, but i also didn't want to go to hell, so i was like "maybe if i believe SUPER HARD i will SOMEDAY be able to unbelieve the condemn-me-to-hell bits"
so i decided to become
VERY CHRISTIAN
and my frantic googling for shit like "proof of god" and "god and evolution" *eventually* broke me out of the Answers In Genesis circles of the internet, and into some decent Christian apologia, like, think First Things and various Catholic bloggers. and there, i found some way to square my gut sense that evolution was right, with a spiritual worldview.
like, i remember finding some blogger who said:
"young earth creationists get tripped up when they try to explain stars that are millions of light-years away, and end up basically arguing that God's tricking us somehow, and—no! my God lets you believe in the evidence of your eyes, my God does not demand that you make yourself ignorant or stupid, my God expects you to use your brain"
and i just started crying at my computer, because no one had ever said "using your brain is Good and part of God's will," i was like *finally* here's someone who won't tell me i'm going to hell for just *thinking* about things
(st. augustine does a much better riff on a similar theme, fwiw, but i only found him later)
still, it was an uneasy fit, because, the more i learned and read about world history, the more it seemed... weird... that the One And Singular Path To Salvation was... the successor to some niche desert cult... which didn't even occur at the *beginning* of written history, like, it was all predated by that whole Mithraism thing, etc... and like, sure, i could trot out all the standard theological talking points for why Actually This Makes Perfect Sense, but gut-level-wise, the aesthetics just seemed kinda dumb! and no level of talking myself out of it made that feeling go away!
so at this point i started referring to myself as a
CHRISTIAN AGNOSTIC
i mean, not aloud. i still lived in southernbaptistopia and i didn't want, like, my hair stylist to tell me i was a horrible person. but in my *head* i called myself Christian agnostic and it felt right.
and i started church-hopping, which honestly was really fun, would recommend to anyone at any point. i visited the fire-and-brimstone baptist church, the methodist church, the episcopalians, the universal unitarians, etc.
unfortunately, while this gave me *some* new perspectives, each of the places either had the same shitty theology as my old megachurch (i remember the *acute* sense of despair i felt when i was starting to jive with a methodist church... only for the dumbass youth minister to start going on about evolution), or, they just lacked any sense of the *sacred*. like, the Church of Christ churches, with their a capella services, *definitely* had it; i felt more God there in one service than i did in a lifetime of shitty Christian rock at the megachurch. but their beliefs were even *more* batshit, so. big L on that one.
having failed to find a satisfactory church, i was basically
AGNOSTIC/ATHEIST
by the time i went to college, but honestly pretty unhappy about it; while it was harder than ever for me to actually *connect* with the divine, i didn't like thinking that my previous experiences of the divine were total lies. because my shitty evangelical church, for all its faults, could not *completely* sabotage the sense of God's presence. there were real moments in that church where i do believe i experienced something divine. mostly mediated by one particular youth minister, who in hindsight was the only spiritual teacher in that church who didn't seem a bit rotten inside, but! it was something!
so when i happened upon a bunch of writings on the now-defunct shii.org (that's the bit that makes me look WILDLY ignorant, lol), i was utterly captivated.
said author was a previous archdruid of the Reformed Druids of North America, an organization that was formed in the 1960s to troll the administration of Carleton College (there was a religious-service-attendance requirement; they made their own religion; their religion had whiskey and #chilltimes for its services). however, this shii.org dude seemed to take it pretty seriously. he was studying history of religion and blogged a lot about his studies, both academic and otherwise. while RDNA had started out as a troll, that didn't mean they hadn't *discovered* something real in the process, he said.
this, already, was going to be innately appealing to me; i've got a soft spot for wow-we-were-doing-this-ironically-but-now-it's-kinda-real? stuff in general.
in particular, shii.org’s discussions on the separation of ritual from belief was really interesting to me: most religions/spiritualities have *both*, but like, you can do a ritual without having the Exact Right Beliefs (if there even is such a thing!), and it can still be useful to you, it can have real power. (he had a really lovely essay, speculating on the origins of religion as just a form of art, but that essay is now lost to the sands of time, alas.)
(note that i wouldn't really recommend seeking out *recent* writing by the shii.org guy; he kinda went full tedious neoreactionary-blowhard-who-reads-a-lot-of-Spengler at some point? sigh.)
the shii.org guy led me to checking out a bunch of books on the history of neopaganism & also books by scholars of religion in general, and the more i read, the more excited i became. and i started doing little ritual/meditation stuff here and there.
then i was fortunate enough to attend some events with Earthspirit (this was when i lived in Boston), which cemented my hippie dalliances into something more real. the folks there, being from Boston, were all ridiculously overeducated (a sensibility that appeals to me), but also, being the kind of folks who drive out to a mountain in the middle of nowhere for a spiritual retreat, they tolerated a full range of oddities (everyone from aging-70s-feminist-wiccans to living-on-a-farm-with-your-bros-Astaru to dude-who-started-having-weird-visions-and-is-just-trying-to-figure-out-the-deal to Nordic-spiritualist-with-two-phds-from-Scandanavian-universities-on-the-subject, etc), which gave me a lot of room to explore different types of rituals, ceremonies, "magic", etc.
(polytheism in general lends itself well to this sort of easy plurality! i can believe other people are experiencing something real with their gods, and i can be talking to a totally different set of gods, and that’s just all very compatible, etc)
anyway, i started calling myself
AGNOSTIC/DRUID
around then, because i knew i'd found *something*, something that felt like all the realest moments i'd ever had in nature, and all the realest moments i'd ever had in that shitty megachurch, but i wasn't quite ready to put a theology to it.
but, idk, you do the thing for a while, and you start encountering some things that you may as well call gods, and you realize you're in pretty deep, and you ditch the "agnostic" bit and just throw hands and start describing yourself as
SOME SORTA DRUID-NEOPAGAN-ANIMIST THING
because that's the most precise thing you can muster. in particular, the druid bit resonates because nature's still very much at the center of my practice; the neopagan bit resonates because i'm not especially interested in reconstructing older traditions or being faithful to any actual pre-Christian traditions, and animist resonates because what i sometimes call gods seem to be tied pretty tightly to the land itself. it's all very experiential; all this mostly means i'm some weird chick who sometimes grabs a car and drives out someplace very lonely and hikes for a while and does some hippie shit to try and talk with the land or the god or whatever is there. and sometimes i come back from it changed, or refocused, or what-have-you, and hopefully i'm better for it. i'm aware this makes me look a little ridiculous, and is an unsatisfying answer, sorry!
WRT YOUR SITUATION
i don't know you or your situation, obviously, but if i wanted to give former-me some advice to save her some angst, i'd say
-> Christendom itself is far wilder and more diverse than many churches lead you to believe. if you still want to be Christian on some level, and it's just a shitty church that's convinced you the whole project is fucked, i'd honestly explore, i dunno, your nearest Quaker meeting. they're invoking the Holy Spirit with regularity but they're not raging douchenozzles about it.
-> if you're specifically interested in druidism, i found John Michael Greer's "A World Full of Gods" really nice. (caveat: Greer has *also* gone full right-wing nutjob these days, sigh, so like. would not recommend a great swath of his writing. but that one's good)
-> deciding that a just God wouldn't give me a brain and then ask me not to use it was hugely comforting to me. like, that was the start of the whole process, that was what made me feel ok searching for other churches and trying to find something that fit. obviously you should take this with 800 grains of salt, because obviously i'm no longer Christian, and thus maybe i'm just some poor misguided fallen soul, but... i still kinda believe that! maybe if you can make yourself believe that, it'll seem less scary?
idk, happy to answer more questions, sorry for the long ramble, hope it helped~
Hey, Steve! What type of magic are the the best at so far and are you planning to learn how to use more types in the future?
Oh right I should probably explain how my magic works. So I do primal magic, it's the same type of magic fey and druids use, it has a matter and life essence. I like transformation and healing magic but I only started to get good at it recently but every time I turn into an animal I also turn into the pregnant version of that animal so it's fun is kind of limited. These days I mostly do magic in my mom's backyard to help the plants grow.
The Dead Scar bore no life. It was tainted by death and destruction; home only to sun bleached bones and dark magic. It was the war path of the Lich King’s army, a path that cleaved Quel'Thalas in half. There, life was scarce, and death was everywhere; those that wandered onto the blackened soil could feel just how unnatural the decay was. Plants that would normally flourish, withered instantly; animals dared not to cross, and would go great lengths to avoid traveling through it. It was a dark place, that very few went willingly; except for one young Tauren.
Onatah made her camp in the fields surrounding the Dawnspire, there she could find a taste of home. Waves of grasses surrounded her as far as the eye could see, and sunlight streamed down from the heavens, showering all in its glow. Fragrant smoke poured from the Druid’s tent, produced by a smoldering bundle of sacred herbs. She sat in quiet meditation, praying to the ancestors and wild gods to protect her while she works; to keep her safe from what may linger in the Dead Scar.
Rising to her feet, she finished her prayer, bowing and thanking the spirits that gave their blessing. Quickly, she gathered only what she would need to begin the day’s work; a bowl of salt, a feather, a large skein of water, and another bundle of pungent herbs. A small bag of intricately carved palm stones was affixed to her belt, and all other necessities were tucked away in a large traveling pack. Onatah took up her staff and gave the tent a quick glance, checking for anything she may have forgotten. Satisfied, the Tauren Druid emerged from her tent, ready to face the day.
Upon leaving the confines of her tent, Onatah was greeted by the bellow of her faithful Grove Warden. The tall moose stood proudly, shaking its antlers and pawing at the ground; itching to leave.
“Patience, Ahanu. We are leaving soon.” She spoke calmly, brushing the Warden’s snout.
Onatah threw a thick blanket over the beast’s back, then shakily hefted the saddle up as well.
“My legs are not what they used to be…” The Druid mumbled, rubbing the already sore muscles in her thighs.
With the aid of a stirrup and her staff, Onatah clambered up into the saddle and settled in for the lengthy ride to the Scar.
Why the fuck am i banished to the forest when younglings who don't even know powerd word: scrunch get sent to wizard war. "casting the ten thousand bear cyclone is a war crime" big deal, they're using white phosphorus in the smoke of wisdom firepit
