[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]

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.