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Jason Pitzl-Waters on Jul 21st 2005 at 7:20 pm Neopaganism

Minority Faiths, Majoritarian Privilege

Chas Clifton discusses why Paganism meets with so much trouble. The answer is that the founders never dreamed of our future existence when writing the Constitution.

“The First Amendment was set up to prevent one Christian denomination discriminating against another. The framers of the Constitution remembered western Europe’s history of wars between Catholics and Protestants, of state-supported churches such as the Church of England, and of religiously based tests for employment. They tried to eliminate all those evils. To them, Jews were a tiny, odd but ancient minority, “Hindoos” lived on the other side of the world, Muslims likewise, and American Indian tribes did not have real religions worth mentioning.”

Now take a system built in an environment of unspoken Christian dominance and add the hundreds of minority faiths that exist today. It is hard for those who are included in the dominant (Christian) paradigm (left or right) to understand the motivations and viewpoints of a polytheist. Which is why we get issues like this and this and this and this, most of which wouldn’t even be issues if it involved monotheists.

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4 responses so far

  • Rae

    I find that hard to believe when I heard that some of the founding fathers were Freemasons (as far as I know, this is not a Christian sect), or am I undereducated in that respect?

  • Jason

    Rae,Freemasons and Deists, are still monotheists, and the atmosphere of America at the time meant dealing with several Christian sects that dominated different regions of America. The founders would never have anticipated something like the modern Paganism movement, it would have been too far from their ideas of the future.

  • branruadh

    Except for where Thomas Jefferson was quoted as saying he didn’t care if his neighbor worshipped one god or twenty. He, at least, had some idea polytheism existed.

  • Morgaine

    I know they never envisioned Wicce as it exists today, but they did have a concept of Pagan Religion. They all had a classical education. Franklin was an active member of the Hell Fire Club, which was involved in ritual magick as well as carousing; Jefferson mentioned polytheism; there was a theory I read once that the Adams’ could trace their lineage to a megalithic (sp?) dragon cult. (That’s what the source called it and all I know about it.) They demonstrably factored Islam into their vision, which we might perceive as another monotheistic religion, but they would have perceived as a radical sect.They certainly considered “radical” concepts like varying religions, ending the practice of slavery, and women’s rights – they based much of the design of our government on the Iroquois Confederation, which was matriarchal, matrilocal and polytheistic. They had to make compromises to get the colonies to agree to start. They fully expected that as education improved and people learned to live in a democracy, that these changes would follow. Several, like Patrick Henry, actively advocated a Christian theocracy and were resoundingly rejected. Jefferson and Adams in particular envisioned a multi-cultural evolution for America.