[Main Blog Post] Further Thoughts on Religious Authenticity

[jprussell]

This week's post comes mostly as a response to a question by causticus on last week's Magic Monday by JMG. It was spinning around in my thoughts all week, and I decided to share the expanded thoughts here. As always, your thoughts are welcome, and let me know if you'd like to be on the mailing list.

Comments

[causticus]

On the topic of Lodge/Guild rules, I came across the writings of the founder of a Folkish Heathen Kindred that had a lot of success finding and recruiting ordinary people as members. The founder himself is/was a police officer and you can see in his writing, his overall approach is very practical and pragmatic.
http://www.heathengods.com/learning/heathen_tribes.pdf

As you can see the governing structure is a lot like a Lodge. There's three main officers, (1) Chieftain, (2) Godhi, (3) Thyle. The first is the group's leader, the second is its spiritual expert, and the third is responsible for making sure members follow the rules (Thew) and keep their oaths. In practice, the Chieftain serves the role as both a Presiding Officer of a fraternal group and fulfills the function a Protestant pastor would in a church community. I think this type of Heathen organization is tapping into some elements that are deeply embeded in American culture. IMHO this sort of thing greatly helps in the area of personal authenticity.

This Kindred apparently went strong for at least five years; not sure if its still around today. The main web site looks like an artifact from 1999 (personally, I love the 90s D&D aesthetic). But still, at the end of the day, its growth was very much hampered by the limited appeal that is Germanic pagan reconstructionism, particularly this group's Viking/Asatru focus. Having said all of that, I think the group's organizational structure could be easily adapted to other types of groups. The "Holy Guild" just might be the way to go. I think after the lower astral finally clears up, it might be safe once again to form meatspace groups.

[jprussell]

Sorry for not responding to this for a bit, things came up, as they do.

Thanks for this link, I'll have to check it out - I'm always keen to learn about religious organizational structures, especially those with any track record of success at all. I've been especially interested in those that don't explicitly mimic American protestant churches, but now that you mention it, maybe that's a mistake - as you say, that may just be baked into our religious culture by now.

As for the limited appeal of Germanic polytheist reconstruction, yeah, that's a thing I've been thinking about for a while now, but it's had to languish on the back-burner while I pursue other projects: what might a fringe religious movement that starts with heathenry look like that is flexible and robust enough to last through the current cultural pendulum swing to politics (rather than spirituality), and hopefully beyond. Druidry is my explicit model here of what good looks like, but it has a few features that would be hard to emulate (focus on nature, which allows for a lot of religious agnosticism while still having a shared spiritual focus, a great name with lots of historical oomph, and so forth). I plan on developing more of this, but it's very much on the slow roll right now.

[causticus]

Oh no worries at all. It wasn't so long ago when these sort of correspondences would span months (or even years) rather than hours and days.

I have a hunch that the hard-reconstructionist approach might recede into the background as rationalism becomes less and less fashionable. To use some Nietzschean terminology here, the approach toward reviving the Way of Our Ancestors would shift from the Antiquarian to the Monumental (meaning: past, present, and future all play a role).

I think modern Druidry is great for an individual spiritual path, for those inclined toward nature spirituality, but in its current formulation there isn't really much of an emphasis on community-building or the formulation of the sort of shared beliefs and practices that are required for creating and sustaining cohesive communities. Without a least a solid set of common precepts and a Lindy ethical philosophy, Druid groups very easily sink into a morass of relativism and subjectivism, or simply become a sock-puppet of whatever pop culture fad happens to be all the rage this week (I realize I'm describing much of alt-spirituality here).

[jprussell]

Fair enough!

Yeah, that seems about right to me on reconstructionism losing some of its oomph. As I said in my post The Trouble with Authenticity, I think a lot of the appeal of grounding things in authenticity is that it feels like a justification that's consistent with our usual rational materialist ways of justifying things - something like "well, even if you don't buy that I'm getting something ineffable out of these spiritual experiences, you still have to respect my research and attention to detail!" As more and more people welcome spirituality back into a prominent place in their lives, as you say, there will be less need to justify it on "rational" grounds, to yourself or anyone else.

And that's a good point about Druidry as eminently well-suited to individual weirdos, but less strong for community-building. In a way, that's understandable - Druidry has a lot to say about how to relate to nature, but not much at all about how to relate to other men (except insofar as mankind is seen as part of nature, of course). I'm biased, of course, but I think Heathenry's built-in emphasis on oaths, troth, and social bonds sets it up to handle community-building much better. I'm in the middle of reading an interesting article on the subject by Arlie Stephens, which makes some of those points, but also includes some cogent critiques: Towards a Modern Heathen Ecclesiology. You might find it interesting.

[causticus]

Thank you for that link. I did indeed find it very thought-provoking. "Ecclesiology" is a very good word to sum up the interest I've had in these topics for quite some time now.