I was looking forward to writing a little tonight. Then I got busy and it got late and I figured I’d just go to bed. But now my mind is buzzing with a thousand thoughts. Writing for a while is the only thing that will give me any hope of a restful night, so here I am.

Ruby Sara of Pagan Godspell had an interesting post today in which she talked about religion as culture. Her words struck a chord in me.

Once upon a very distant time, Religion wasn’t. Religion wasn’t, because Religion was Culture instead. Then, civilization came along, and divided Religion from Culture, and Religion had a choice. It could either choose to support the dominant Culture, or it could be Countercultural.

This left me thinking about several things. First, I’ve mentioned before that I often think a lot of the traditions we attempt to build feel hollow. I think a big part of that is because they feel fundamentally created. They ring with a slightly dull tone, clearly something made in haste, and not yet tempered in the forge of time. I believe that a big part of this feeling has to do with how we create religion.

Reconstructionists spend their time trying to recreate a series of practices that had meaning rooted in their cultural heritage. By and large the body of that cultural heritage is either nonexistent, or vastly changed by time. We NeoPagans spend our efforts mixing pop-psychology, mytho-poetic archetypes, and a neo-mythological context together in a large pot, in an attempt to find some magic formula that results in a genuine, sustainable, deeply moving religious practice.

Understand I’m not insulting either Reconstructionists or NeoPagans here, but recognizing that we may be fighting a losing battle. If we accept that religion is fundamentally an outgrowth of culture, of the core question of who we are, then our religion must be based upon who we are as a people to take root.

I wonder if perhaps this is part of why the Brotherhood is not larger than it is (although it is very large for a gay-centric religious body). Could it be that our mysteries don’t speak deeply enough, or loudly enough to the gay culture? Are we speaking the wrong language?

It is part of our nature as spiritual experimenters, as rebels, and as spiritual leaders, to try and guide our communities and congregations towards what we believe to be a healthy relationship with themselves, their community, the world, and with the divine. As part of that nature, it is our habit to assume that the way we see/know/understand is better than a host of other ways to cultivate those relationships. I have often maintained that that habit is a dangerous one, and I work very hard not to display it.

But perhaps the habit is deeper than that. Perhaps the religious structure we’ve built with the Brotherhood, by nature of it’s emphases and the history it pays homage to, simply doesn’t speak to the community it was built to serve. Are we trying to change the personal mythology of members of our community in order to bring them into the fold and help them towards the Divine? If that is what we’re attempting, is it ethical?

Would we be perhaps more successful if we focused on building a tradition rooted in a deep understanding of our modern culture, not by trying to explain or interpret that culture, but simply by giving it meaning and learning to cultivate healthy relationships with the gods of that culture?

As Ruby Sara asks:

how does one go about working towards a “neoculturalism,” and what does this look like on the ground?

I don’t know yet, but I’m interested in finding out. I suspect it has to do with the oldest of things, and perhaps that is where we must head. As Ruby Sara points out, religion was once culture. By the rise of Christianity however, it was clearly something seperate. Christianity spread regardless of culture or historical tradition. It assimilated and absorbed the culture of countless peoples and places. And then it began to create culture. This is perhaps the movement that we are fighting against most fiercely today, the idea that a religious body or external body of any kind, has the authority to impose culture upon us.

The Christian Moral code has driven culture in the west, particularly in North America. It has forced our culture to grow along a series of turns, and it has attempted to prune, tie, and guide that culture over and over again. And this is where the counter-culture thrives. It rejects the pruning and guidance of the body it sees as an imposition towards it’s own creation. Unfortunately, a great deal of the counter-culture is little more than a radical faction of that same moralizing body trying to impose culture.

So if Culture is the imposed structure demanded by religion (or largely shaped by that imposed structure), and counter-culture is a reactionary effort attempting to overthrow or outwit the imposition, then neo-culturalism is the work of authentically allowing culture to develop without a directed hand. Accepting that the moralizing and anti-moralizing forces are both elements of control enforcing a lack of authenticity, and instead looking at ourselves, our lives, and our world, and behaving as we think best. Neo-Culturalism is taking responsibility for ourselves and refusing to abdicate the right to define our own existence, and most importantly it is adding meaning to what we do every day.

Culture is not the everyday actions of a people, it is the meaning, the value behind those actions. Creating authentic culture is the result of living consciously and investing our habits, our actions, with meaning and purpose. In some ways this is the core of what we do as we attempt to create new pagan traditions, only we often attempt to impose new behaviors along with meaning and value to old behaviors. Perhaps instead of manufacturing a reason, we need to look for the reasons we already have.

If we advocate a daily devotional ritual, what hole, what need are we filling in the person? Can that need be filled by adding meaning to something already done?

I’ve got much more, but I must call it quits for the night or I won’t sleep at all.