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The Foundations of a Modern Paganism

The Foundations of a Modern Paganism

Last updated on: September 8, 2025 at 3:00 am by John Beckett

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The Foundations of a Modern Paganism 2025-09-07T14:50:58-06:00 John Beckett

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

It’s hard to discuss religion in public – especially on social media – without ending up in an argument framed by the assumptions of the dominant religion. In this country, that’s Protestant Christianity, usually Evangelical, frequently Calvinist.

Calvinist Christianity is not the default religion by which all other religions are evaluated.

Pagans don’t proselytize. We understand the many different Gods call many different people to worship, work with, and work for them in many different ways. If you follow a different God, or if you follow the same God in a different way, that’s not a problem. We worship in the ways we’re called to worship, and we can work together to build a better world here and now. We have no need to “win souls” for our Gods like we were collecting metaphysical Pokémon cards.

At the same time, we want to discuss our religion(s) in public settings. We want to educate those who are unfamiliar with modern Paganism, and we want those who are called to this path – or who are simply interested in it – to know who we are and what we do.

But if you discuss Paganism in a public setting, it won’t be long before someone steps in making arguments loaded with Christian assumptions. Oftentimes they frame their argument as a debate. And sometimes that’s all it is – young men (and it’s almost always young men) attempting to demonstrate dominance over others.

Most times, though, their real debate isn’t with a Pagan, or an atheist, or a Muslim, or even with a more inclusive Christian. Most times their real debate is with themselves.

They’ve been told all their lives that only those who follow the right religion in the right way are going to heaven – everyone else is going to hell. How can they be sure they’re following the right religion in the right way? They can’t – religious questions are inherently uncertain. But if they can win a “debate” against someone on a different path – or if they can just repeat the talking points their preacher gave them over and over again – they can convince themselves that they really do believe what they’ve been told they’re supposed to believe.

It can be hard to ignore these people. I don’t like to block people on social media… although I will if they’re abusive or if they can’t take “this argument is over” for an answer. Plus, other people are watching – including people who are struggling to accept a path they find logically, ethically, and religiously offensive.

As Pagans, arguing from the Bible is counterproductive. Even if these people are clearly misinterpreting something, arguing from the Bible reinforces the idea that the Bible is a legitimate source of authority. It is not. The Bible was written by and for a particular group of people in a particular culture in a particular place and time. It is binding only on those who choose to be bound by it. And Pagans – along with the followers of every other religion in the world – choose otherwise.

If we’re going to discuss religion in public settings, we need to be able to present our religion on our own terms.

These are the foundations of my modern Pagan religion.

We begin in mystery

If we begin with the written word we limit ourselves to perhaps 5000 years. Meanwhile, humans have existed in our current form for maybe as long as 200,000 years, the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and the Universe is 13.8 billion years old. And despite tremendous advances in astrophysics in the 20th and 21st centuries, we don’t know what – if anything – came before that.

We begin in mystery.

The many myths of our ancestors are not history or even corrupted history. They’re the stories people told to help them contemplate the most basic human questions: where did we come from? Where are we going?

And the only honest answer is “we don’t know.” I suspect that the ultimate origins of the Universe are not only beyond our knowledge, they’re beyond our capacity to know as brilliant but still limited humans.

All we know for sure is that we’re here, now. And that’s enough.

We begin in mystery.

We live in an inspirited world

We are alive and we share this world with other living beings: other animals, plants, various microorganisms. Mountains and rivers, stars and planets that are also alive, although not in the same way we’re alive.

Even the dead aren’t truly dead. At the least, they live on in our dreams and in our memories. They live on in the stories we tell about them.

And perhaps, they live on beyond that.

The Universe is not simply a collection of dead matter, some of which is empowered by energy. The Universe is alive, ensouled, inspirited.

And we’re a part of it all.

We experience the Gods

You have a spirit… though I think it’s best to say that you are a spirit who has a body, temporarily. Some spirits have bodies and some do not.

Gods are the mightiest of spirits.

Whatever it is that makes us alive and conscious, the God are more. They have the perspective of the ages, the wisdom of an intelligence far beyond our own, the compassion of an interrelatedness we can only imagine. They are the personification of their functions and their virtues, but they are far more than that – they are whole persons.

And we can experience them: in mediation, in prayer, in ritual, in worship, and whenever else they choose to make themselves known to us.

When we know them, when we form and maintain relationships with them, we become a little more God-like ourselves.

And that’s a very good thing.

We build on the foundations of our ancestors

While our ultimate origins are a mystery, we know where we came from – we came from our parents. They came from our grandparents, who came from our great grandparents, and so on going back generation after generation. These are our ancestors of blood.

We also came from those who came before us in our communities and our nations, our religions, our cultures, our arts and our professions. These are our ancestors of spirit.

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel – neither literally nor figuratively. We can build our lives on the foundations our ancestors left for us. And in doing so, we build a stronger, more robust, more compassionate foundation for those who come after us.

We honor our ancestors, and if we are wise we live our lives so as to be worthy of the honor of those who come after us.

We live according to our virtues and values

We do not require a list of rules to follow in order to live good lives and build a good society. While rules can be helpful, they are often used as an excuse for not thinking, or exploited for the benefit of those in power.

Instead, we do our best to live according to our highest values and to embody our virtues: qualities that time has shown to be helpful to individuals and in building a respectful, supportive, and successful society.

Hospitality and reciprocity are the highest values in many Pagan traditions, including my own.

Courage, compassion, honesty, kindness, and perseverance are other virtues held in high esteem by many Pagans. There are others. Sometimes virtues are in conflict, as anyone who’s ever tried to be honest and kind at the same time understands. We do the best we can with the knowledge we have, with the understanding that perfection is not possible.

Unlike what some in the dominant religion claim, perfection is not required.

What is required is doing the best we can, and doing better than we did in the past.

We enjoy life

Life is full of pain, suffering, and disappointment. And life is also full of joy, pleasure, and satisfaction. Could we appreciate one without the other?

If we are wise, we understand that the pleasures of food, drink, and sex are best enjoyed in moderation. But we also understand they are not “sinful” nor are they inferior to more spiritual pleasures. They are part of what it means to be human.

There is a place for asceticism, just as there’s a place for revelry. A few are called to a life of asceticism. That calling, that choice, is neither better nor worse than other callings. It’s simply different.

For most of us, we enjoy being alive while we are alive.

We build a better world here and now

Our ancient ancestors lived in caves, and before that, in trees. We live in modern houses where the temperature can be controlled to the precise degree. Our ancestors often died from ordinary diseases, from hunger and malnutrition. We have the benefits of modern medicine, and for many of us our biggest problem is too much food, not too little. Life is longer, easier, and more certain than ever before, because those who came before us built a better world.

We still struggle to ensure that everyone has enough. We still struggle to build a world where everyone can fully be who they are and who they want to be without persecution and without interference by those who wish to control them. Our wider society is moving in the wrong direction at the moment, but if we continue to work for freedom and justice, we will return to building a better world for all.

We end where we began – in mystery

For all our intelligence, all our wisdom, all our experiences, and all our learning, we still don’t know what – if anything – comes after death.

We are human – we can’t help wondering and speculating about an afterlife, an Otherworld, another try at this world. We have ideas and reasons for those ideas, but in the end, death remains a mystery.

We want justice. We want those who harmed others with impunity to be punished, and we want those whose lives were needlessly short and painful to be comforted. Perhaps they will. Or perhaps not. As with so much in life, that we wish something was true doesn’t mean that it is true.

I’m confident that whatever comes after death will be good – or at least, not bad – for everyone, eventually. I have my thoughts and speculations as to what that looks like. But the thing that would surprise me the most would be to die and discover the afterlife is exactly what I thought it was.

What comes after death is a mystery.

And that’s OK.

Modern Paganism is an honest religion. It does not ask us to believe things we can’t honestly believe. It provides a framework for forming and maintaining respectful, reciprocal relationships with our Gods, our ancestors, and with each other. It celebrates our humanity in all its glorious imperfection. And it gives us the resources we need to deal with the questions humans have struggled with for at least as long as we’ve been human.

These are the foundations of my modern Pagan religion.

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