Nimue Brown's Spirituality Without Structure

Nimue Brown's book Spirituality Without Structure is foremost a guide on how to establish your own religious/spiritual practice, but its inclusion in the Pagan Portal series is somewhat telling, because it gives a certain insight into the pagan community today.  While the book might be more concerned with the "how-to's" of practicing your own brand of (pagan inspired) religion, looking between the lines shows the reader how paganism is really practiced in 2014.

Once, Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon was the definitive guide to pagan practices in the United States and Britain, but as I mentioned in a previous post, things have changed significantly since then.  With the advent of the Internet and the wealth of information and rapid communication that it provides, the pagan community has changed.  More and more, people are branching out on their own, no longer subscribing to formal religious systems such as is found in British Traditional Wicca or any reconstructionist movement.  In a survey I recently conducted of a pagan audience, about 7% of participants claimed that a connection to deity was unimportant to them; 18% reported that rituals were unimportant in their practice; 33% felt that magick or spellwork was unimportant, and 41% felt that divination was unimportant to their spiritual lives.  These traditionally valued aspects of pagan religions are no longer important to a good chunk of pagan people.

Instead, the growing trend seems to be "if it works, it works," when it comes to acquiring religious practices and philosophy.  The difficulties here run the gamot from cultural appropriation (which the tumblr crowd is more likely to vocalize about) and the lack of a unified community, which concerns me more.  I have practiced a form of paganism since 2004; now, granted, the Internet was alive and well at the time, but the information on paganism and Wicca was both less plentiful and more bare bones introductory material.  When I decided to create a web presence in the past year or so, I saw the advent of godspouses and otherkin and all manner of beliefs, but what concerned me the most was the lack of an ethical system that some people seemed to have.  Brown addresses this concern in her book, but she does so with the assumption that her readers will automatically want to espouse some kind of ethical system.  From what I have seen, there are just as many who don't, and these are not the sort of people that I want to form a community bond with.

As it is, I often find physical and online communities troublesome, because no one is speaking the same language anymore.  In physical settings, the drive is to let everyone speak their piece, but in a large group where everyone walks down a unique path, this can take hours of valuable time.  Online, where connections need to be made through one's message alone, it becomes harder and harder to relate to anyone.  Online pagan communities tend to become circlejerks, where no one wants to offend anyone by calling out their beliefs as silly or vapid, making discussions almost impossible. 

Walking a unique path has its benefits: you remain true unto yourself, but it's lonely.  Part of why Catholicism and other Christian denominations work is not because everyone truly believes everything the Church espouses.  They work because people make compromises in order to be part of a group.  We are at a critical junction.  Do we go it alone, or do we capitulate to the majority? I've made my choice.  After working for the Church for so long, I refuse to compromise this part of who I am, even if it means I'll never have someone who really, truly understands me and my spirituality.  For others, community is what is important, and there's nothing wrong with that, either.