Rabbi David Wolpe’s pagans aren’t the ones I know
The distinguished rabbi characterizes a broad collection of small faiths as idolators of nature or money.
(RNS) — The rising sun is shining through my south-facing windows, just over a week after the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. As a scientifically minded person, I understand that this means that the amount of daylight minutes will be increasing until the summer solstice in June. As a modern Pagan (yes, with a capital “P”), I celebrate it as a return of the light after the dark half of the year, bringing clarity and illumination.
It’s clear that I’m not the kind of Pagan Rabbi David Wolpe wrote about last week in The Atlantic in his essay “The Return of the Pagans,” and I can’t say I know any who are. Wolpe, a distinguished rabbi in Los Angeles for most of his career and now a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, working from a monotheistic worldview — one specifically rooted in the Bible — describes Pagans as the arch embodiments of evil or simply idolaters.
“The worship of natural forces generally takes two forms: the deification of nature, and the deification of force,” Wolpe states at the outset of his essay, and concludes, “Hug a tree or a dollar bill, and the pagan in you shines through.”
Wealth is a particularly odd attraction to assign to Pagans (“Wealth is a cover for, or a means to, the ultimate object of worship in a pagan society,” he writes later, “which is power”), which shows his confusion about who modern Pagans are. His description of Pagans is so clearly a characterization he sets up in order to puncture some trends of our modern era. In itself, this is fine; I don’t agree with some of them either. But it was unfortunate that he chose to create a straw man of Paganism to knock around.
To do so, Wolpe abandons any nuance in describing cultures of antiquity. While there may be kernels of truth to biblical accounts, to land on them as one’s sole source for information about other religions, much less vast numbers of cultures in human civilization, is distressing. I would attribute it to a lack of intellectual curiosity, but Wolpe, a university lecturer, is known for questioning the historicity of the story of the Bible’s Book of Exodus. He can hardly plead ignorance.
Rabbi David Wolpe in a recent video about Hanukkah on social media. (Video screen grab)
Wolpe’s real point seems to be that people on the left have been promoting the primacy of nature, while those on the right award it to the individual. Both, to him, connote some form of what he calls Paganism.
But having used Paganism to call out the failings of the political left and right and to decry how our culture has ruptured along these lines, Wolpe wants us to believe that, if there is a way out, it’s through someone’s interpretation of the Bible. If only, in Wolpe’s view, we weren’t so focused on the beauty of creation, of the pleasures of the body or the acquisition of material wealth, we would be in a better alignment with what the deity of biblical monotheism intended.
What is Paganism, if not the brittle collection of stereotypes Wolpe has assembled? It’s a term that has historically included those moderns who follow pre-Christian religions from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa — think the beliefs of ancient Greece and Egypt, but also modern-day Druids and Heathens. Paganism in some places includes attempts at reconstructing these ancient religions or devising modern approaches and adaptations that stretch far beyond its history.
It includes practitioners of witchcraft; tree-hugging animists; close-knit, family based groups; and large magickal academies. It includes Indigenous peoples from parts of Europe and the Mediterranean. Most importantly, it includes people from any part of the world who simply decide that Paganism is the best description for what they practice.
In the United States and Europe the term Pagan has anecdotally been fading in recent years, as different individuals’ and groups’ practices have become more clearly defined — though Wolpe’s piece has given it new life. In the short time since it was published on Christmas Day, there has been an uproar from practitioners of this small collection of beliefs and religions who have overwhelmingly rejected his message.
What bothers me most, perhaps, is not that nearly everything Wolpe says about Paganism is simplistic or just plain wrong, or his laziness or even his political argument — it’s where his article appeared.
The Atlantic is read by people of a host of different religious and spiritual worldviews — Christians and Jews, of course, but also Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, followers of African traditional religions, Indigenous North American religions and yes, people who have claimed or inherited the descriptor of Pagan as part of their background. Its readers also include atheists, agnostics and so many more.
There was certainly a way of calling out the behaviors of the people Wolpe wants to blame for our culture’s dysfunction without demonizing those who believe differently than he does. It speaks to a lack of empathy and ability at a time when we have seen a record number of hateful incidents directed at members of minority faiths, not least antisemitic hate.
That the magazine’s editors didn’t challenge Wolpe’s article for being too myopic is troubling. Pieces like his can commonly be found in publications that skew toward more religiously or politically tailored points of view, where Paganism is used as a stand-in for a collection of traits to be mourned or avoided. I can’t entirely fault a monotheist like Wolpe for seeing his path as the only true and correct way of interacting with the world or divinity, but The Atlantic should have considered the harm of allowing the term “Pagan” to be used as a dog whistle.
(Nathan M. Hall is a freelance journalist and author who lives in Florida. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
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