Mark Green's Atheopaganism Blog

Saturday night, I was dancing around a cauldron ablaze with candles, with drums thundering and voices lifted high in song, at the monthly Spark Collective gathering.

Sunday morning, I attended a Unitarian Universalist service.

Tellya, there are differences.

Paganism is fundamentally an ecstatic practice: it’s about living in the body, embracing physicality both of ourselves and of our existence as creatures of the Earth, cultivating joy and intensity of emotional and meaningful experience.

UU is more about a calm and gentle cultivation of wisdom on the personal level, and activism on the societal. The service I attended incorporated some quasi-Protestant elements such as singing (rather tepid) hymns with a five-minute silent meditation, a call-and-response poetry reading, a sermon and other contemplative elements. I appreciated that there was no usage of god-words.

Both provide community and fellowship, of course. And though I think both approaches have something of value to offer, I definitely have my preferences.

One issue I have with the UU service is that it’s organized in the Abrahamic-style “audience and performers” model: attendees are mostly “passive consumers” who sit in pews and absorb what is offered to them by designated providers. That’s not intentional on their part, so much as simply inherited from the Christian traditions which were the religious norms of the English-speaking world when Unitarian Universalism was created.

I prefer an egalitarian circle to the pews-and-pulpit model. Admittedly, you need a lot of space do a circle with 200 people, but smaller and more intimate spiritual gatherings are more appealing to me anyway.

The main thing that draws me to Paganism that is missing from UU, though, is passion. The UU seems so bloodless by comparison with Paganism, so denatured, so divorced from the fact that we are embodied animals. All the things we associate with white, middle-class Anglo-Saxon Protestantism.

Looking around the congregation this morning, not only was nearly every person there in their 60s or older, I noted exactly two people of color. I live in a pretty white area, but we have a large Latinx population and none of them were there.

When Pagans mourn, they keen. When we are joyous, our eyes fill with love and we embrace one another. We laugh from the belly. We throw our heads back and howl. We fight against injustice, party hard, and confront both our own and the world’s darkness with courage. On an emotional scale, what we do is just…more.

That said, Pagans are miserable at creating institutions. And maybe that intensity scares away people who might otherwise join us.

There are Unitarian Universalist congregations all over the place with active congregations and owned buildings; Pagans have nothing like that, and show no sign that we ever will. Of course, having buildings isn’t nearly the priority for us that it is for UUs. We can practice our religion anywhere–particularly outdoors.

They need walls and seats and a pulpit.

Quite a number of Atheopagans are also UUs. They participate in the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPs) and enjoy community and fellowship in UU congregations. Makes sense; UU congregations welcome atheists and agnostics and have a strong environmental and social justice orientation.

That’s why I checked the UU service out, and though it really isn’t for me, I plan to keep participating with the congregation’s CUUPs group.

I’m a Pagan, but not so much a Unitarian Universalist. I admire their principles and their activism and the hearts of those who gravitate towards UU: I suspect, in fact, that some of those folks might have become Pagan instead, but we are still so small and invisible that they never really bumped up against us.

It was quite a contrast, I tellya.