Troubled History Of Paganism And Christianity

If many contemporary Pagans see Hinduism as a closely related religion that they respect and appreciate, the same cannot be said of Christianity.

Christianity is frequently denounced as an antinatural, antifemale, sexually and culturally repressive, guilt-ridden, and authoritarian religion that has fostered intolerance, hypocrisy, and persecution throughout the world in the popular discourse of modern Paganism, as found in Pagan magazines, websites, and Internet discussion venues.

For these reasons, Christianity is seen as completely alien to the worldview of Pagan religions, both ancient and modern, in which nature, including human sexuality, is regarded as sacred rather than shameful, and a wide range of religious activities and affiliations is tolerated, as was the case in ancient Greece and Rome.

Though an educated Christian may disagree to Christianity being described as antinatural, antisexual, and dictatorial, this is the common view among modern Pagans.

As a result, there is a strong belief that Christianity and Paganism are essentially opposed value systems. In his book Pagans and Christians:

The Personal Spiritual Experience, Gus DiZerega presented a thorough examination of the historical history of Pagan and Christian enmity as well as some innovative ideas for developing mutual respect and tolerance.

Another problem that inflames Neopagan hatred against Christianity is the history of Christian repression of Pagan faiths in ancient and medieval periods, which has continued far into the contemporary day.

Many Christians in Europe and North America have grown accustomed to seeing Christianity as the source of morality, culture, and civilization, and the suppression and replacement of Pagan and Indigenous religions by the triumphant expansion of Christianity as a necessary, or at the very least forgivable, stage in cultural evolution.

Pagans today hold a nearly diametrically opposed view of Western history, seeing Christianity as the destroyer of peoples, cultures, and spiritual traditions, as well as the promoter of intolerance, zealotry, and persecution, including witch burning in Europe and North America.

The fate of Prussia, a medieval Baltic state that once existed on the Baltic Sea coast between modern Poland and Lithuania, will serve as an example of the type of historical situation that modern Pagans find particularly instructive and disturbing in regard to the role of Christianity in European history, raising suspicions and criticisms that are applicable to the impact of Christianity on Prussia is most recognized today as a military, Germanic kingdom established by Frederick I in 1701, which subsequently became Kaliningrad under Soviet control after WWII. Prussia has a pre-Germanic past, which is less widely recognized.

It was formerly home to Baltic tribes whose language, culture, and religion were closely linked to those of Baltic peoples in Lithuania and Latvia.

The Prussian language is now extinct, but scholars have little doubt that it was a part of the Baltic subgroup of the Indo-European language family based on the few surviving texts.

It is also documented that the Baltic Prussians followed a polytheistic Indo-European religion similar to that of the Lithuanian and Latvian pagan peoples.

In the thirteenth century, Germanic crusaders, sometimes known as Teutonic Knights, invaded Prussia, robbing the native Baltic Prussians of their land, culture, and religion.

They reduced the population to serfdom and imposed a dual policy of progressive Germanization in terms of language and culture, as well as Christianization in terms of religion.

The Prussians never recovered their independence from their German Christian rulers, and their language, culture, and religion wilted and died out.

What occurred in Prussia may be classified as cultural genocide by contemporary standards, the intentional elimination of an entire civilization via the use of military force and other methods.

Many Neopagans are irritated by the fact that Christian authorities have never expressed clear and unambiguous regret for their previous acts against Pagan religious groups in Europe.

The Catholic Church published "Reflections on the Shoah" in 1998, under the authority of Pope John Paul II, as an apology for previous damages done to Jewish people by the church throughout the centuries.

The Vatican issued “Memory and Reconciliation:

The Church and the Faults of the Past” in 2002, a more broad apology for “mistakes and failings,” including religious violence, committed in the past by the Church's "sons and daughters."

However, neither the pope nor other prominent Christians have ever expressed regret for the harm done to Pagan peoples and faiths by church operations in the past, much alone recognized the importance of Indigenous European religious traditions that were almost extinct due to the church's efforts.

The church's right to continue "proclaiming the revealed truth entrusted to her" was explicitly stated in the 2000 Vatican apology, a reference that is both instructive and disturbing in regard to the role of Christianity in European history, raising suspicions and criticisms that are also applicable to the impact of Christianity on other parts of the world.

Prussia is most recognized today as a military, Germanic kingdom established by Frederick I in 1701, which subsequently became Kaliningrad under Soviet control after WWII. Prussia has a pre-Germanic past, which is less widely recognized.

It was formerly home to Baltic tribes whose language, culture, and religion were closely linked to those of Baltic peoples in Lithuania and Latvia.

The negative perception of Christianity among modern Pagans is exacerbated by their awareness of Christian missionaries' ongoing efforts to replace native religious traditions with Christianity in every corner of the globe, a goal declared not only by the pope but also by many leaders of Evangelical churches and other Christian sects.

The statements made by Catholic Church officials and other Christian leaders about their ambitions for world Christianization, for Pagans keeping a critical eye on such developments, flatly contradict the calls for dialogue, tolerance, and religious understanding made by church leaders and theologians, and they add to contemporary Pagans' sense of distrust and disappointment.

The issue of Christian hostility toward Pagan religions is not only historical or academic for Pagans living in regions dominated by very conservative forms of Christianity, such as the Bible Belt region of the American South.

It is also a present-day social reality that they must be constantly aware of.

Because of her connection with a local Wicca organization, Shari Eicher, an English teacher at Scotland High School in Laurinburg, North Carolina, was ordered to leave the school premises and was permanently prohibited from teaching.

Eicher was disciplined not because she tried to promote Wicca in her courses, as one would assume, but because her parents were concerned about an Internet page supporting her local Wicca group.

Despite the complete absence of evidence to back such an accusation, the website was regarded as an attempt to entice and abuse local youngsters since it included some nudity.

Eicher had informed school officials of her religious membership many months before to the event, and she had seemed to be a good teacher up until the time of the issue, which ended her teaching career.

Despite the legal safeguards that are intended to protect a person from persecution or discrimination on the basis of religious affiliation in the United States and other nations, her story highlights the dangers of public Paganism.

Despite the fact that Shari Eicher's accusations of child corruption were never proved, the controversy surrounding her Wiccan identity was enough to put an end to her teaching career. Neopagan membership has ramifications that are not confined to the Bible Belt or even the United States as a whole.

Ralph Morse, a theatre teacher at Shenfield High School in Essex, was engaged in a similar affair in England in April 2000. He was fired from his job when a story in a major newspaper exposed his Wicca connection and his nomination to a senior role in the Pagan Federation, a Pagan support organization headquartered in the United Kingdom with branches in other nations.

Several participants and spectators expressed their suspicions about Morse's religious practices in their remarks. The school's head teacher, John Fairhurst, issued a statement saying the school was "appalled" to be connected with the Pagan Federation and that the school "wish[ed] it to be known that we totally and unequivocally reject their world of witchcraft and sorcery."

“Of course, a teacher's private actions are his private activities,” he added. There is no question, however, that this man's personal interests are interfering with the school... The employee in question has been placed on leave awaiting an inquiry into the scope of his activities and the potential conflicts of interest that may emerge from his extracurricular activities and his professional role.” According to Fairhurst, the school offered religious instruction in such a manner that “we want and expect our pupils to resist the deadly temptations of the occult.”

“We should be preaching Christianity, not things that lead into witchcraft and magic,” said Father Leslie Knight, the local Roman Catholic parish priest.

“Paganism puts you up to a supernatural force that cannot be controlled,” said Doug Harris, a spokesperson for the Fundamentalist Christian Reach Out Trust. It's risky to encourage teenagers” (The Independent April 9, 2000).

It's worth noting that Morse's particular damage was never mentioned.

The fact that Morse was associated with a Pagan group was enough for the headmaster and Morse's other critics to strip him of his livelihood and career.

Shari Eicher's and Ralph Morse's situations are far from uncommon.

Many more stories like these may be found in newspaper archives or on websites devoted to contemporary Paganism and Wicca, as well as religious freedom and tolerance.

It's not surprising, therefore, that many modern Pagans feel compelled to keep their religious connections and activities hidden in order to escape prejudice, persecution, and, if not death, at the very least, financial ruin, as occurred to Eicher and Morse.

With one significant exception, the tense connection that exists between Christianity and Paganism in North America and Europe is comparable to that which occurs between other minority faiths and Christianity.

As faiths of the Other, the Orient, and the East, Asian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, which were introduced to Europe or North America from beyond the physical and historical limits of the West, have an exotic allure.

These faiths are not implicated as major elements in Western history because they are rooted in remote places in terms of place, time, and culture, and therefore offer no challenge to the conventional understanding of the West as a Christian civilization, as implied in the name Christendom.

When it comes to Pagan faiths, things are a little different. As the forerunners and previous rivals of Christianity within Europe, they serve as a clear reminder—and maybe a painful one for some Christians—that Christianity was not the first nor the only religion on the continent.

There were once alternative religious faiths of great antiquity and popularity in Europe, rooted in local language, tradition, and culture, that were only dislodged from popular affection by centuries of effort on the part of the church and its allies, including the use of military force, coerced conversions, and brutal suppression of religious freedom.

The use of force and coercion against European Pagans by popes and crusaders, kings and emperors, and other active promoters of Christianization are not the proudest chapters of Christian history, and any discussion of the European past's Pagan religions automatically raises the specter of these morally dubious and even shameful historical episodes.

As a result, the history of pagan faiths in Europe is something of a skeleton in Christian memory that many would like to ignore. With their loud statements of anger over previous Christian persecution of Pagan faiths, the emergence of Neopagan religious groups threatens to pull this uncomfortable skeleton out of the closet and into broad public view—and not on the terms that church leaders would like.

Reborn and reconstructed Paganism is a thorn in the side of those modern Christians who like to think of Europe as an essentially Christian region, just as the original Pagan religions of Europe were an impediment to the plans of ancient and medieval church leaders for a completely Christianized Europe.

The same may be said about North America, especially the United States. Conservative Christian Americans are unlikely to rejoice at the development of Wicca and other pagan faiths in the country they see as a "Christian nation" or a "new Jerusalem," much better in quality and intensity of Christianity than the Old World of Europe.

In the past, Christian writers had little trouble justifying the tactics used to eradicate paganism in Europe using the “ends-justifies-the-means” argument.

Paganism was barbaric, false, and inferior; Christianity was civilized, truthful, and superior; and therefore, the replacement of the lesser religion by the greater was right, helpful, and entirely justified, if not necessary.

This triumphalist interpretation of global history, in which the gradual Christianization of the whole globe is seen as the right order of things, remains a comforting narrative for many Christians today, bolstering their religious faith and identity.

The development of Neopagan faiths shows that this worldview is not shared by everyone in North America, Europe, or other parts of the globe.

Given the profound divisions and historical grudges that exist between Pagans and Christians, it seems that there will be an increase in confrontations between Christians and the growing number of Neopagans in both Europe and North America.

The capacity of religious and political leaders to develop innovative solutions that respect the rights of both faith groups will determine how such disputes play out.

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