Blaming Pagans For Your Pride and Pleasure

A Response to David Wolpe’s Misdirected Screed Against Pagans in The Atlantic

On Christmas Day, 2023, The Atlantic published a purported “think piece” from Rabbi David Wolpe, “The Return of the Pagans.” Wolpe is currently serving as a visiting Rabbi at Harvard’s Divinity School. In it, Wolpe attempts to cast blame for a lot of the current ills in our public zeitgeist and discourse on the influence of paganism. Everyone from Donald Trump to Elon Musk to the wanna be finance bros he finds on Harvard’s campus is apparently (according to him) in the grip of a pagan mindset that will destroy us all.

It’s hard to know where to begin to unpack all the 32 flavors of wrong in this Baskin-Robbins sundae of invective. Wolpe skitters across the surface of a number of pre-Christian religions and philosophies and lumps them all together with modern practice under one philosophical worldview that he labels paganism, a convenient straw man for his frustration with modern humanity’s lack of humanity to man. He pulls quotes from Ancient Greek philosophers, makes a passing reference to Norse paganism that is largely reliant on ahistorical stereotypes, and then balls it up with his own declarations of what he says paganism is, and uses it to support his idea that without an all powerful and omniscient monotheistic idea of God at the center of our psyche, we are doomed to be unsatisfied egoists who always place might over right, outer beauty over spiritual beauty, and we will be a benighted society ruled by awful trash people.

Honestly, The Atlantic should be embarrassed to publish something so chaotically anti-historical and utterly bigoted.

I’ve read Wolpe’s piece four times now, and I have to admit, his argument is really hard to deal with, mostly because it’s circular, nonsensical and anti-historic, and fails to acknowledge that there is actually a growing movement of Modern Paganism whose practices and tenets cannot be credibly ignored just so he can have a villain for his screed.

What he seems to be saying is that selfishness, vaunting of the self and the building of wealth is an innately pagan thing, and if we want to blame the rise of selfish trash people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, we should look to creeping paganism. Because (he asserts) paganism is the deification of the natural world and the deification of force. This latter, he contends, is where all the world’s ills come from. Paganism is what encourages us to seek immortality and worship power and beauty, he says, and it discourages that most wonderful of all virtues, humility. Only by embracing the idea that our existence is presided over by a benevolent, all knowing Sky Daddy do humans have a decent chance of avoiding all the selfishness and horrific-ness that is happening in the world today.

First off, as a practicing Pagan and a leader in a modern witchcraft tradition who teaches this stuff to others, I am here to tell you that Wolpe’s straw man bears little resemblance to most modern mainstream  pagan traditions as they are practiced today. Wolpe confuses the fact that we don’t see our gods as beings that must be obeyed as being haughty and lacking in humility. Spend some time with our people, David. They are some of the most humble and service oriented people I know. We don’t fear our gods, but we do respect them and work to honor them.

Photo by Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps on Unsplash

Also, Wolpe’s obsession with the idea that pagans worship beauty and wealth is his ascribing Ancient Greek philosophy as being synonymous with Modern Pagan practice, as if modern paganism is somehow a resurrection of all those pre-Christian practices in whole cloth. Modern Paganism in fact recognizes that it is not a rote re-enactment of Acnicent Greek, Norse, or Celtic practices, but rather a synthesis of many ideas that we have priced together from VERY sketchy historical records. Moreover, there is actually quite a lot of theory and practice in Modern Paganism that recognizes that beauty is often a lie or not to be trusted, and that wealth, while something people aspire to, can often give one an inflated view of oneself. Humility is all over Modern Paganism — whether it’s one of the many Norse myths involving Loki, or Celtic mythology of the Dagda, or any of the myriad times when Greek goddesses made themselves ugly to teach a lesson to a prideful hero.

The core of his argument seems to be that because paganism refuses to vaunt humankind as being more than just an animal, as being part of nature as opposed to above it, that that makes us subject to the “laws of the jungle.”  It’s rather a convenient idea for him of course, that because humans are humbled before God that they earn the right to dominate the animal kingdom with their “elevated status.” The thing is, this perpetuation of a cycle of dominance is exactly the kind of “might makes right” ethos that he accuses paganism of being. Why do humans rule? Because God wants it that way? Why does god rule over humans? Because god wants it that way? “Because God wants it that way” is the source of so much violence and inequity and atrocity that to detail it here would take forever.

The inherent humility in paganism lies in the fact that we do not see ourselves as dominant rulers of nature, but rather nature’s student and partner. To walk a pagan path is to acknowledge that we are all part of the universe together, and we have neither the right to rule it or the need to abase ourselves before it. We have the right to ask for the good things we want for ourselves and not be ashamed to want nice things. But we also have to understand that how we roll in this Universe will come back to us, and that we have to own the consequences of what we do. The core of Modern Paganism is about harmony and community, not power and hierarchy.

Wolpe does not talk a lot about accountability, even though in the end, that is at the heart of the problems he is bemoaning and attempting to lay at paganism’s feet. People are behaving badly and not being held accountable for it. That is not paganism’s fault. Yes, as I have said in many essays, the fact that we don’t have some kind of big Sky Daddy who will keep us in line means that pagans do stand in power, not penitence. However, that in no way means that we do not expect to be held accountable for our actions and own the consequences of what we do. Quite the opposite in fact. Unlike Christians who can do all manner of horrible things and then claim sinlessness via the “grace” of their savior, Pagans have to live with what they do, and don’t get some magical do-over because we claim membership in Sky Daddy’s clan. More so than many modern monotheistic religions, pagans are expected by both their gods and their peers to “own their shit.”

Wolpe conveniently avoids talking about accountability because then maybe he would have to have some. Maybe he would have to deal with he fact that he’s demonizing a whole group of people who he does not demonstrate the least bit of tangible knowledge of. He calls all manner of public figures “pagan” who actually aren’t so he can talk of the ills of not worshipping his monotheistic god, without bothering to deal with even one of the millions of practicing pagans in America. Maybe he would have to actually do more than sprinkle a few quotes from Greek philosophers and make admittedly sketchy references to history in order to support his attacks on my community. Maybe he would show some humility to actually see all the ways in which his invective is going to become fodder for monotheists like him to continue to harass pagans for worshipping as they wish. As it is, pagans risk harassment at work, loss of custody of their children, and other types of very real persecution. And telling the world in a major publication we’re why everything’s wrong is going to make that worse, not better.

In the end, Wolpe’s lack of accountability, which is also in fact a lack of humility, is what leaps off the page of his piece. And says everything anyone needs to know about its actual worth as public discourse.