Bible Study Made Me Pagan

Here's how I became a Pagan, if that's the correct way to put it. I prefer to think that I found my way back to my original, gut belief system. Anyway, it took a long detour through "official" spirituality and layers of cultural training to get there.

During my childhood, my parents and I attended three different Protestant churches. We left the first when I was a toddler, after its hierarchy tried to tell my father he couldn't vote for Kennedy because Kennedy was a Catholic. When the minister proclaimed this from the pulpit, Dad got up in the pew and took Mom's hand, Mom got up and followed, they collected me from the creche and we never darkened the doors of that denomination again. We left the second because we moved across the Atlantic. We left the third because we moved back to the U.S.

After we got back to America, my Dad, working seven days a week, stopped going to church at all. I sang religious songs in the various school choirs of which I was a member, but that was about it. Mom, who'd always considered her garden to be the core of her religion, was perfectly happy making it consummately beautiful.

In college I served as a paid singer at on-campus church services but couldn't take communion because I'd never been baptized in any denomination. I felt an ever stronger need for a spiritual practice. At that point, my imagination wasn't big enough to look outside the Christian/Jewish paradigm. Following my usual modus operandi, I did research in a thick tome which described the basic tenets of all the various Christian options. I soon realized it was down to Quaker or Lutheran. Since I'm not a pacifist -- at least not if you attack someone I love -- Lutheran remained.

When I got to graduate school, I proceeded to slog my way through confirmation class at a very progressive Lutheran church. I've been a feminist for so long I can't remember when I wasn't, so my first question to the minister was, "Do I have to think God is a man?" The minister, bless him, asked, "Why?" His inflection made it clear that what he was saying was, "Why would you have to think that?" This was enough for me at that juncture. So there I was, the only twenty-something among a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds getting ready to be confirmed. I stuck it out and, to the bemusement of my parents, was baptized and then confirmed at 25.

When I do something, I do it properly. Over the next ten years, at three different Lutheran churches, I taught youth group, was in several Bible study classes, sang in a choir, helped coordinate holiday celebrations, cooked for pot-lucks, became a deacon, etc. My churches were a very important part of my life. But again and again, more and more often, I ran into thinking and tenets I couldn't reconcile with my own beliefs in justice, fairness and feminism. I strained my brain trying to rationalize these discrepancies, and managed fairly well until my spouse and I moved to the Midwest in 1991.

There I made the rounds of every Lutheran church that ordained women within halfway reasonable driving distance, only to find that I couldn't fit into any of them. Men in suits being deacons, women in skirts making up the altar guild, highly traditional sermons: I felt like an alien, and was faced with losing my church home.

Then my husband brought home a brochure the local Baptist church had distributed to all new employees at his place of work. It offered two explicitly feminist Bible classes and a nursery run by two men! Nothing this progressive had ever come my way via a Baptist church. I had to check it out.

This brought me to the most progressive, accepting, and wonderful church in the world. I managed to get there an hour early, wandered into the first room in which I heard voices, and was immediately embraced by the feminist Sunday class. Two minutes in their presence and I knew I was where I was meant to be. I joined the church, stayed in the feminist Sunday class and also started attending the Wednesday lunch class, another feminist class centering on "Women in the Bible."

But reviving as all this was, part of my mind and spirit continued to stumble over the patriarchal language of the hymns (some bright mind called them "hims," so on target) and many other small (and not so small) instances that took me aback and made me wonder if I would ever feel fully accepted or included. And then some of my fellow Sunday class members invited me to a harvest celebration, which turned out to be my first Mabon, or Pagan Fall Equinox ritual.
The synergy of that gathering, the easy way in which it came together and flowed, the pure joyousness of it -- although I refused to see it clearly at the time, it all made a marked contrast to my experiences in church. I was having to twist myself into a pretzel to blind myself to the fact that hierarchy, of gender and in many other forms, is intrinsic to any Bible-based faith. And hierarchy is not meritocracy: it ranks one according to factors beyond one's control.

For a year, I was split between my study and exploration of feminist spirituality and my participation in "circle," and my continued activity in the church. And then, as the title of this blog post implies, Bible study made me Pagan.

It was the Wednesday class that forced the epiphany. Our study of women in the Bible confronted me with three stories I could not ignore or rationalize away. The stories of the Levite's concubine, Jephthah's daughter, and Dinah.

The incident of the Levite's concubine is very similar to the almost as horrific tale of Lot, Abraham's nephew, who lived in the city of Sodom. Both stories tell of violent male mobs threatening strangers who have been offered hospitality by their fellow city dwellers with gang rape. In the case of Lot, he welcomes two male guests (who turn out to be angels). The mob shows up and demands to have the guests handed over to them. Lot offers his two virgin daughters to be raped instead. The Lot story is only palliated by the fact that the girls are, in the end, not sacrificed in that way. The Levite is another traveler threatened in the same manner. He has been traveling with his concubine, and when the mob shows up, he and his host proceed to push the concubine outside, whereupon she is raped to death. Although this crime is eventually punished, that does nothing for the brutally murdered woman.

The story of Jephthah's daughter stands in sharp contrast to that of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to sacrifice his only legitimate son, but at the last moment God intervenes to stop the sacrifice, satisfied that Abraham would have been obedient to the divine will even to the point of child murder. That's bad enough, but in the parallel case of Jephthah, Jephthah makes a bargain with God that if he's granted victory in a battle, he'll sacrifice the first creature that comes to greet him when he returns home. This "creature" happens to be his daughter, and here no divine intervention saves the victim. The young girl is only allowed a brief respite to mourn her impending death with her friends, and is then slain. The inescapable subtext: females are expendable.

And then there is Dinah. I'll have to post the essay I wrote about her at the time when I took the final step out of the church. Dinah, daughter of Jacob, goes to visit the women of a non-Hebrew town and is supposedly raped by the son of the town's ruler. I say "supposedly" because the young man's family proceeds to negotiate a marriage, offering very generous inducements, something they would have been unlikely to do if, like the Hebrews, they considered a girl "devalued" by losing her virginity. Dinah's male relatives, her father and brothers, demand that the whole neighboring town adopt Hebrew customs, including male circumcision, before the marriage can be allowed. Amazingly, the town's ruler accepts these conditions. But when all the men of the town have been circumcised and are recovering from what is nasty surgery for adult males, Jacob and his clan take advantage of their weakened state, attack the town, kill all the men and take the women as slaves, while Dinah is shut away to suffer her "shame"for the rest of her life.

At the time I had to grapple with the Dinah story, the popular novel "The Red Tent," which deals with the same events, had not yet been published. My take on Dinah was different and less elaborate, but both the author of "The Red Tent" and I do not believe that Dinah was the victim of rape. She chose a husband from another culture and became the victim of her male relatives' greed and their insistence on revenge for the taking of what they considered their property: Dinah herself.

In any case, my study of these incidents brought me to the inescapable realization that I could not remain in a faith based upon a book saturated in patriarchy, hierarchy, discrimination and domination. Even the New Testament offered no real solace, given the misogynist bloviations of Paul and pseudo-Paul. In 1992, I formally left my church, although I continued to donate to its good work for quite a few more years. Since then, I've been an eclectic Pagan, celebrating the seasonal rituals and studying ancient cultures, modern revivals of various Pagan thought-systems, and many related subjects.

Must get back to regular old work for a while. More to come.