Welcoming marginalized traditions, including contemporary Paganisms, to the table of interreligious engagement is happening in pockets around the U.S. However, non-Pagans like myself can still strive to be more welcoming. Part I of this three-part series focused on the need to welcome marginalized religions in general to the table of interreligious engagement. It made a special call to welcome those from indigenous and polytheist traditions. Part II moves from the general to the particular by focusing on one tradition: Heathenry in the United States.

Jennifer Snook, lecturer in sociology of religion at Grinnell College, specializes in American Heathenry as a new religious movement in the U.S. context. Karl E. H. Seigfried[1] serves as Pagan Chaplain at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he is an adjunct professor of humanities. Snook and Seigfried provide a sense of the Heathen experience in the context of interreligious encounter, especially on American college campuses. They both identify as Heathens and cite positive and negative experiences with interreligious encounter and dialogue.

Kinship can form between and among those from other marginalized traditions. Seigfried, as the former president of Interfaith Dialogue at the University of Chicago, says, “At the University of Chicago,[2] the individuals who have been most interested in engaging with truly diverse interfaith dialogue have been undergraduate and graduate students from embattled or marginalized minority faith backgrounds such as Hinduism, Judaism, Mormonism, and Unitarianism.”[3] Snook’s home institution has been remarkably welcoming. She reports that she “was immediately welcomed by the Chaplain [and] invited to participate in organizing a Pagan discussion group for students.”[4] Grinnell College approved her new course, Witches, Druids and Heathens: Exploring Paganisms in the United States, which “was the highest enrolled course for the semester and has received a lot of positive attention on campus.”[5] Further, the college continues to support her tradition by funding the travel of “Heathen speakers to campus for talks and rituals, and a field trip for students to attend a Heathen event.”[6] One Christian minister from the wider community even invited her to a clergy gathering despite her not being clergy.[7]

Prior to living in Iowa and teaching at Grinnell College, Snook lived for a decade in Mississippi, a region she recognizes as deeply embedded in a Christian tradition that demands religious participation. There, she was often met with confusion, misunderstanding, ignorance, and stereotyping.

Every time that I outed myself to students or others, the responses were always morbid curiosity, surprise, fear, and awe. Fear that I was not “saved,” or that I was Satanic. One student asked me if Heathens perform human sacrifice and others asked if any or all Heathens worship Satan. Others congratulated me for coming “out” and being “brave”—presumably because in this context, they understood the risk of ridicule and judgement, and had never met another Pagan.[8]

At the University of Chicago, Seigfried faced challenges as well. He remarks, “The group that has been consistently opposed to including minorities in the campus dialogue—both in-class and in the larger public space at the university—has been Christians in positions of authority as senior professors and administrators.” He cites instances of intimidation and silencing, such as instances of Christian faculty and administrators publically shutting down counter-narratives from minority-faith students and the tearing down of posters for an officially approved lecture by a member of a minority religion.[9] Seigfried finds this intolerable, especially on the campus of one of the most esteemed universities recognized for its inquiry into religious history, interpretation, and diversity.

Despite promising movements on the horizon, there remains work to do for those who own the tent of interfaith engagement. Seigfried calls on those with power and privilege at the table of interreligious dialogue and “those of good conscience from majority religious traditions … to stand up and actively promote their colleagues who belong to smaller faiths.”[10] In the interest of constructive interreligious learning, and in light of those who have “suggested a direct relationship between radical monotheism and intolerant, oppressive attitudes toward other religious faiths,” [11] I support my former colleague David Penchansky’s intuition that “perhaps a more open and complex view of divinity would promote a better understanding between religious faiths, particularly now, when we seem to be in each other’s faces so often.”[12]

Image: ©Hans Gustafson, 2006

Note: A version of part II of this series was published in adapted form under the title “Welcoming Marginalized Traditions” to www.theinterfaithobserver.org on June 15, 2018.

Endnotes

[1] Seigfried is also Seminar Faculty at Newberry Library and serves as goði (priest) of Thor’s Oak Kindred, an inclusive organization dedicated to the practice of the Ásatrú religion in Chicago. His work has appeared in Journal of the Oriental Institute (India), Herdfeuer (Germany), On Religion (UK), and many other international publications.

[2] Interfaith Dialogue at the University of Chicago is a Registered Student Organization that the University of Chicago Office of Spiritual Life asked Dr. Seigfried to revive. The organization was dormant for several years, and Seigfried’s goal was “to build it up into a force on campus and beyond that will actively work to create a new model of truly inclusive interfaith dialogue, as opposed to the largely inter-denominational or inter-Abrahamic model we see in the United States today” (Karl E. H. Seigfried, email message to author, October 5, 2016).

[3] Seigfried, email message to author, October 5, 2016.

[4] Jennifer Snook, email message to author, October 5, 2016.

[5] Snook, email message to author, October 5, 2016.

[6] Snook, email message to author, October 5, 2016.

[7] Snook noted, “this never actually happened” because a formal invitation was never extended (Snook, email message to author, October 5, 2018).

[8] Snook, email message to author, October 5, 2016.

[9] Seigfried, email message to author, October 5, 2016.

[10] Seigfried, email message to author, October 5, 2016.

[11] David Penchansky references Regina Schwartz’s 1997 book, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (pp. 33, 89-90, 114-17), in his own Twilight of the Gods: Polytheism in the Hebrew Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 91.

[12] Penchansky, Twilight of the Gods: Polytheism in the Hebrew Bible, 92.