Why are so many Naturalistic Pagans “circling alone”?

I still consider myself a pantheist because Nature is for me equivalent to God. Nature, or more precisely our relationship with Nature, is at the center of my religious life. But what separates me from many other naturalistic pantheists is my belief in the central importance of a shared liturgical calendar of holy days for which the community comes together to celebrate with some type of ceremonial observation. To me this is what makes a shared belief and value system into a religion.

Like a lot of secular folks, many naturalistic pantheists just don’t see the point in religious ceremony. At best religious ritual is seen as a discretionary recreational activity and at worst a slippery slope to magical thinking and group coercion. I think the disinterest and sometimes disdain for ritual among many pantheists is a symptom of something much larger, a cultural bias toward individualism that ends up devaluing social connectedness.

According to Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, there has been a drastic decline in social connectedness in the U.S. since the 1950’s. People spend less face-to-face time with friends and family and participate far less in all kinds of social and civic organizations than they did 40 years ago. Social connectedness has declined in all segments of American society, but is largest among non-church attending secular Americans.

Some may argue that with Facebook, blogs, Twitter and texting that we are now becoming more not less connected, but there is a big difference between interacting through screens and interacting in person. The mind is engaged, but the body is alone. According to Barbara Fredrickson in Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection, when two people connect there is a literal syncing up of the brain waves and chemistry, and these micro-moments of “positive resonance”, as she calls it, can have a profound impact on our health and happiness, like a vitamin for the soul.

If more people are connecting virtually or not at all, it will be hard for developing a new religion centered on communal religious observations. One reason I am so keen on ritual is because of the way I think about religion. If you think about religion like William James, who defined religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine”(1),  then group ritual is superfluous. For James, religion is really about individual psychology, which I call “spirituality”. But if you look at religion more from the perspective of Emile Durkheim, as I do, then religion is all about community. Durkheim defines religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”(2)

According to Durkheim: “The very act of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation.”(3) He believed that the collective emotions generated by group ritual could pull humans up for a time from the realm of the profane, with its self-centered concerns, to the realm of the sacred, where the self disappears and collective interests predominate. In other words ritual, has the potential to create “positive resonance” on a communal scale.

From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, religion is in our genes, and it is there because our more religious ancestors had an advantage over our less religious kin. Religion helped our ancestors suppress selfishness and bond together into cohesive and cooperative teams. Even in modern times, religion still provides powerful and measurable benefits. According to Robert Putnam and David Campbell in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, religiosity in the U.S. is positively correlated with greater health, happiness, and generosity, including giving a greater portion of time and money to secular organizations compared to secular people. These positive attributes were not correlated with religious belief, but religious belonging, the social connectedness of religious people. Religious social connecting was a stronger predictor of these benefits than secular connecting. Putnam and Campbell describe religious relationships as being supercharged. There really is something special about religious community.

According to Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis, happiness cannot be grasped directly, but comes from “between”; it emerges like a blossom when we get our relationships with self, others, and that something larger-than-self right. I think the other benefits of religion are like this to. Most religious people don’t set out to create cohesive groups; they don’t go to church as a means to health and happiness. Rather, they seek to connect with and get right with that something higher-than-self within a tradition of collective worship, and from this the benefits of religion naturally flow.

I think part of the success of modern Paganism comes from its tradition of collective ritual. Pagans are very individualistic, maybe even more so than most people in our highly individualistic western culture, and there is often a lot of tensions between sticking together and splintering off. There is in fact a lot of splintering going on, and this I believe keeps Paganism at a low level on the order and structure hierarchy, inhibiting it from evolving into a multi-generational established religion. But still the desire to do rituals with others is strong in the Pagan movement and this brings people together. Pagans who leave one tradition are likely to seek or create new associations with people with whom they can do group rituals. In comparison, amongst pantheists, the most common religious practice is to take a solitary walk in nature. Despite the efforts of groups like the World Pantheist Movement, explicitly pantheist community remains almost exclusively an internet affair.

To me, collective religious ceremony and shared devotional practice is not something peripheral, but is the very center of religion. It is the core that holds everything together. I believe without such shared practices, religious community will fall apart, but there are still enormous challenges to developing religion centered on communal ceremony. As Haidt says: “You can’t just invent a good ritual through reasoning about symbolism. You need a tradition within which the symbols are embedded, and you need to invoke bodily feelings that have some appropriate associations. Then you need a community to endorse and practice it over time.”(4) This all takes time and attention. But I think it is more than necessary; it’s worth it.

For Conversation

In the comments below, say whether you would like to have more in person contact with other Naturalistic Pagans.  Why or why not?  What kind of in person interaction you would like to have?  Would you like to do ritual together?

Notes

(1) The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, as quoted in The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, note 11 from page 350.
(2) Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Emile Durkheim, as quoted in The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, page 248.
(3) Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Emile Durkheim, as as quoted in The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, page 226.
(4) The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, page 229.

The Author