As I sit down to write this, the United States is waiting in agony for the election returns from Florida to be recounted. We won't know who has won until after this issue of The Seeker Journal is at the printer, perhaps even after you read this.

We have one presidential candidate who, when asked about religious tolerance for Wiccans, has declared twice that Witchcraft isn't a valid religion. We have another who has been ominously silent on the subject of religious freedom, except to say that he believes in freedom for all religions. No comment as to whether ours are "real" religions, though. That's better, but it's hard to say how good it really is.

So, what does the onset of the 21st century portend for the pagan community? Well, my crystal ball is a little cloudy, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway.

If Governor Bush wins the Presidency, we have a big job to do in educating him and, more importantly, his people. It's pretty clear that Bush is not a detail man, and it's possible that he was responding off the cuff, knowing very, very little about our religion and reacting primarily to the semantic connection between Wicca and witchcraft. Perhaps, if he really knew us, he'd agree that ours are valid religions. Then again, perhaps not.

But if Gore wins, we're still not "home free". Gore is like the "man with two mistresses". He's torn three ways, and his career has been a juggling act amongst what he sees as the right thing to do, what the voters want, and what he sees as the pragmatic thing to do. When he was a young boy, he watched as his father was thrown summarily from Congressional office for doing "the right thing", so while I have little fear about what Gore might think is the right thing to do, I don't entirely trust him under pressure. Add to that the fact that Gore is a member of one of the more conservative Christian sects (Baptist) and that his wife is purported to be a member of the Christian coalition, and we could be facing some profound disinterest, if not outright hostility, to our message.

Last weekend I did a general reading about the outcome of this election and its meaning for the pagan community. The reading was very interesting. It showed a very, very tough time for us in the near future, with some very unexpected and profound change in the air -- but, it suggested, in the end, that we can prosper greatly if we handle this tough time well.

I spent the better part of a week thinking about that. What is the best way to handle the coming tough time?

We've made a whole lot of progress in institutional acceptance and, maybe, even some public acceptance in much of the Northern part of the country in the last few years. That frightens and alarms the people who fear us and would like to see us go away. We've already seeing the beginnings of the backlash...or maybe it's been this way all along and I just hadn't noticed. (I do, after all, live in one of the most pagan friendly towns in the country.)

In recent news, we've heard about the desecration of a public Wiccan altar in Killeen, Texas, greeted with a complete lack of interest by the local authorities. We've heard about a little girl in Oklahoma, in court defending herself against charges by her school's authorities of casting evil spells against her teacher and making him ill. (The poor kid isn't even pagan - she's Roman Catholic; she was reading a book about Wicca purely out of curiosity.) We've heard about a shop owner in Watertown, New York losing her shop's lease over her religion, and we've heard about Christian groups in Houma, Louisiana, and Smithfield, Virginia, trying their best to run pagan groups out of their towns.

I'd say, folks, that we have a tough row to hoe ahead of us.

According to corporate estimates by mainstream business that target us as a market -- primarily Barnes and Noble bookstores -- we number around 13 to14 million today. That makes Neo-Paganism the fourth largest faith group in America, right behind Islam. Now, folks, Barnes and Noble was making a purely fiscally-based estimate. They don't have an axe to grind. The closer to correct they are, the more money they make, so I think they're probably pretty close to accurate. Prognosticators have estimated that if our growth continues apace, we could well have 21 million practitioners of our various faiths by 2006 - making us the second largest faith group in the country. Clearly we have the numbers, as estimated by corporate America.

Now, we cherish our autonomy even more than the average citizen and organizing pagans -- or even one subgroup of us - is said to be akin to herding cats; it's not easy, but you can improve the odds if you're carrying something we want.

My questions to you: do we want religious freedom? Do we want to live in a country that acknowledges our right to live our lives and worship our Gods in the ways we see fit? Do we want them badly enough to put our admittedly important differences aside to work together in creating a demographic important enough to get the politicians' attention and to win explicit religious freedom for all of us?

I hope we do. It may be the best way to keep the burning times from re-igniting. Do I mean that literally? No, not really. Oh, it could happen. Even here in the United States. Look what happened to Jews in Germany a little over 50 years ago. Look at what happened to Japanese Americans right here during the same period. But our very own "cusp of the 21st century American" version is not far from reality -- look at what's happening to little Brandi Blackbear in Oklahoma. Look to the families who are being pulled apart as pagan parents lose custody, sometimes to a Christian parent and sometimes to the state, because their religion is seen as a threat to their children. Look at families who are chased out of town, people who lose their jobs and are raked over political and media coals when they're outed. If you've been following the news in this journal for any length of time, you've heard about them.

Some have said that this is the price we pay for coming out of the closet. I disagree. These things have happened all along, but before some of us came out into the open, we could only watch in horror - afraid to protest lest we, too, become victims of this same bigotry. Now, at least, we have people willing and prepared to come forth and defend those who are victimized in the press, in the courts, and in the streets.

Creating a pagan coalition, one large enough to be seen as a force to be considered, isn't going to be easy. We come from every possible political affiliation and many, many spiritual paths. We don't have a single voting block to offer up to any one candidate. We're up against a system where a group that contributes $7.5 million dollars per year to candidates of a single party is considered a relatively minor PAC.

This means that whatever our political affiliations, we have to work within them, en masse. It means that whatever our differences, political or religious, we have to set them aside and work together. It means setting aside other, lesser, priorities in making decisions at the ballot box. It means pulling out our wallets and making contributions to organizations, pagan and non-pagan, that support our religious freedoms, with a clear message enclosed about who we are and what we want. It means that, like a dear friend of mine has been doing for better than 10 years, we need to network with other religious leaders, particularly those who understand that once government begins to limit the rights of one religious group, every religious group is in danger.

It will not, as I say, be easy. But we've watched over the last 50 years or so as other, even less prosperous groups have fought for their own civil rights and have made great strides.

Those of us who are out of the broom closet are going to be called to activism of one sort or another in the next few years. We need to speak out not only for ourselves and our children, but for all of those who can't come out, for whatever reason. We must educate (not proselytize, just educate) our neighbors, our friends, the media, and the politicians both present and future.

But those of us who can't come out also have jobs to do. We must continue to send our energies to those working the front lines. We must do our best to protect our faiths so that, should the burning times return, the faiths will not die out. We can and should write letters to politicians and the media supporting, from within our closets, the principles of freedom of religion for all religions. We have a lot of work ahead of us, my friends. Let's get into the braces and pull together, for the benefit of all of us. Later, when we have the legal and political safety we need, we can sort out our own differences.


Misti Anslin Tucker
Managing Editor The Seeker Journal
Website: http://seekerjournal.org 

seeker@cyberspace.org
ICQ: 77313826

Copyright November 13th., 2000 c.e.