Paganism is largely a religion of converts, and those converts generally come from some sect of Christianity. While it’s true that Wicca and other Pagan paths are now old enough that it’s possible for children and grandchildren to have been raised in the religion or to have come to Paganism from strong folk-religious backgrounds, that isn’t the experience of most people. New Pagans often find their place in the movement through books, internet searches, connecting with people in communities that have a large overlap with Paganism, or knowing someone who is Pagan. Often these converts report feeling like they’ve “come home” to a belief system that mirrors their values. But with that feeling comes a tension with what came before. For me, this tension was a mix of awkwardness, shame, and anger toward Christianity and its institutions.
My struggle to deal with those feelings and the unwanted beliefs that were at their foundation was a years-long process that is still continuing and will probably continue for years to come. Beliefs are the mental and emotional state of knowing that something is real or true, and beliefs do not require that the thing believed is historically or factually true. Beliefs are programmed into every person from birth and can become such a part of us that it’s difficult to identify the belief or the reasons for it. As people differentiate into their own identities, they can reject some beliefs with ease, but others, particularly religious beliefs for which there is little to no tangible evidence, are more difficult to change.
When I first began to practice Wicca, I was convinced that God was going to strike me down. I was convinced enough that it was months of reading before I dared cast a circle. It took doing a ritual from start to finish and not being smote by lightning that gave me some bit of confidence that I wasn’t in immediate danger of death by divine wrath. That was the beginning of my deprogramming.
There were times when I consciously rejected the idea of the Christian God. I went through periods of hating him and periods of just not being that into him and periods of ignoring his existence, but emotionally I know he was real. It was a battle I fought for years before I finally gave up and admitted that the Christian God was just as real as any of the other gods I was building relationships with. I came to accept that my belief in him wasn’t going away. So I resolved to change the nature of my belief. I reasoned with myself that if I were in fact a polytheist, then I couldn’t deny the existence of a god, and if I were in fact an animist, then I couldn’t deny the power of holy things associated with him. But I resolved that my interactions with him would be at my choice, not his.
Later in my practice, I considered the possibility of having a dual faith. It was such a serious consideration that I went back to the Episcopal Church with the intent of undergoing the sacrament of Confirmation, or consciously renewing my baptismal covenant and becoming a full-fledged member of the church. I felt incomplete having not undergone that ritual, as all of my siblings were confirmed and I regarded it as a rite of passage into adulthood that I’d skipped over in becoming a witch. I took the required religious education classes and attended the Eucharist where the bishop would perform the confirmation. I reaffirmed my renunciation of evil and recited a creed that I no longer fully believed in. And when the laying on of hands came, what I felt at the moment was extraordinary: I felt the power of the Holy Spirit hit a shield around my aura that I had not erected myself and break over it like water poured over an umbrella, leaving me untouched. I’m pretty sure the bishop felt it too because he lingered over me for a lot longer than he did the other three confirmands. I knew at that moment that I was no longer a Christian even in name and that I had been marked by other deities as their servant. That experience changed something in me and released the tension I’d been feeling with regard to my relationship with Christianity. I wasn’t a bad Christian. It wasn’t a Christian at all. And that was okay. That was in 2015, and I haven’t had reason to step into a church since.
Not all resolutions of challenging beliefs are as clear-cut as my experience. Many take conscious identification, acceptance, and modification over a period of years, combined with experiences that validate the chosen belief system, before they are no longer bothersome. Some Pagans may wish to approach this systematically, performing rituals that help to empower the beliefs they want to have and disempower the beliefs they don’t want to have. Others may wish to approach the process organically, changing habits and thought patterns as they become aware of them to gradually steer themselves away from their old belief structure. In my case, I chose a mixture of both processes, doing inner work and changing habits to reflect what I wanted to believe and strengthening my resolve through ritual.
Untangling the Web of Beliefs
What I learned in my own process of challenging unwanted beliefs was that often what we think we believe or what we’re comfortable admitting we believe and what we actually believe are different things. In order to examine and modify my own unwanted beliefs, I had to set aside what I thought I should believe or what I wanted to believe and listen to what I actually, childishly, fearfully, hopefully, foolishly believed. Beliefs are emotional things. They make perfect sense to our non-rational minds, even if our rational minds are angry or embarrassed by them. At first, I wasn’t prepared for those feelings — the hope, shame, anger, embarrassment, and even amusement. I felt that as a mature, responsible adult, I should be over these selfish, petulant feelings. But I came to understand that listening to those feelings was part of nurturing a healthy inner child, and since most beliefs are solidified in childhood, listening to my inner child was especially important in this process.
One of the ways that I embraced those feelings and identified the root of my unwanted beliefs was playing The Why Game with myself. Like a curious toddler, I kept asking myself why something was until I couldn’t ask why anymore. In one instance, my line of questioning led me from ‘I believe in Jesus’ through several rounds of ‘why’ before I finally got to ‘My family has believed in Jesus for hundreds of years and even if that path is wrong for me, I still want to honor that legacy.’ It wasn’t where I thought I was going to end up. I thought that my belief was going to be affirmed because I’d had some sort of brief mystical experience in church as a child that told me Jesus was real. It turned out that my belief in Jesus had less to do with history or personal experience and more to do with ancestral connection to something bigger than myself.
Another way I identified unwanted or unacknowledged beliefs was looking at my own actions and backtracking to the underlying assumptions I had about performing those actions. The big one for me was recycling. I have a difficult time with recycling. I consciously know that I should recycle as much as I can for the good of the planet as well as for my own practice of personal responsibility, and I’ve modified a lot of my consumer habits by choosing items mindfully and reusing packaging when I’m done using the product, but for the life of me I can’t seem to take my cardboard and aluminum cans and empty wine bottles to the recycle bin at my apartment complex. When I asked myself why, the thought popped into my head that it doesn’t really make a difference. That surprised me, so I asked myself why, and I answered myself that a bunch of cardboard isn’t going to make a lick of difference against the massive pollution done by powerful multinational corporations that I have no control over whatsoever. It was like bailing out the Titanic with a thimble, so unhelpful as to be laughable. That was my real belief, and it shamed me because, while the assumptions may have merit, the belief comes from a place of cynicism rather than hope and wasn’t in line with what I want to believe as a Pagan about valuing the Earth and participating as a personally responsible member of the vast system of life on Earth. Heavy stuff for someone who thought she was living the Pagan life pretty well.
Getting to Know Old Frenemies
As I became more and more aware of my beliefs, I really struggled with accepting the reality of them. I wanted to dismiss or reject them, thinking ‘I can’t possibly really believe that’ or ‘No, that’s not who I am.’ A lot of my beliefs were self-serving and petty, or they were in opposition to what I valued. The urge to skip over the part of accepting them and go straight on to changing them was strong. But previous experience had taught me that the secret of all inner work is that you must accept before you can modify, because there are lessons you learn in the process of acceptance that lay the groundwork for transformation. So I gave myself time to sit with my beliefs and figure out what it was that I was getting out of them before finding ways to modify them through action, ritual, and experience.
One meditation I did during this time was particularly powerful. I visualized that I was sitting in a circle with my beliefs, on the ground like we were all in kindergarten, and each belief was its own being. Some beliefs looked like perfectly normal children. Others were oddly grotesque. Still others weren’t even humanoid. Some were fearsome and some were alluring, but we sat together in this big circle on the carpet of a classroom and went around the circle and introduced ourselves. “My name’s Amy. I serve me by working with the old gods and helping what people I can because it makes me feel powerful and gives my life meaning.” “My name’s Worthless. I serve me by reminding myself how good it feels to be a martyr like all the saints and heroes.” “My name’s Jesus. I serve me by acting up and being a refuge from everyone who’s upset by the acting up because having it both ways is the way to go.” “My name’s Yahweh, and I serve me by scaring the shit out of anyone who steps out of line because stepping out of line is bad.” “My name’s Love, and I serve me by giving, giving, giving and not receiving because giving should be its own reward.” And around the circle we went, introducing ourselves and talking about how we worked and how we worked together and what it would take to get us to do something else. I found that my beliefs were perfectly honest and up-front with me. I just needed to be prepared for the bluntness of their answers because a lot of them were pretty damn petty or downright warped.
One of the things that surprised me about sitting with my beliefs was the fact that so many of what I considered to be psychological or characteristic in nature them had religious undertones. For example, my belief of worthlessness was deeply steeped in the idea that we’re all unworthy of the love of the Christian God. He gives it to us anyway, but we’re unworthy of it, and as a young child that complex theological concept took root in me literally and made me believe that I personally was worthless as a human being. My belief in love was connected to this idea of worthlessness, causing me to think that everyone else was worthy of love but I was not and so I should just be content with making other people feel happy that they’re loved because, like Jesus said, it’s better to give than to receive. My belief in Jesus was like an ace up my sleeve: I clung to him because he was my insurance policy against going to Hell. It amazed and alarmed me how much of my destructive or unwanted beliefs were held together by a subtle or overt web of Christianity.
Retiring Outdated Truths
After figuring out how my unwanted beliefs were supporting me, I began the process of modifying those beliefs to be more in line with my values as a Pagan. A lot of this process was purely psychological, involving affirmations and changing habits and processing traumatic childhood events, some of which I hadn’t previously recognized as traumatic. But a good portion of the work was religious in nature, involving ritual and spiritwork.
One ritual I performed involved renegotiating my baptism. After reflection, I decided not to reject my childhood baptism as a Christian because I didn’t wish to insult the Christian God, as the stories of him tell that he’s not the sort of deity you want to piss off, but I felt it necessary to clarify the terms under which I would operate. So I cast a Wiccan circle at the level typically reserved for initiations and other rites of passage and I invoked Jesus just like I would invoke any other deity I wanted to work with. He was a pretty chill guy, opinionated but patient and understanding. And I told him that I didn’t have a problem with any of his teachings, and in fact agreed with a lot of them, but I didn’t like his dad and I didn’t like his fan club and I didn’t agree with a lot of the politics involved in the institutions built up in his name, and that I believed in him but this whole thou-shalt-have-no-other-gods-before-me thing was going to be a problem because I was devoted to other deities and that wasn’t going to change. And his response was essentially this: “You’ve already experienced the Mystery, so you know the truth of divinity. As long as you love God and love your neighbor, you’re good with me and there’s a place for you in heaven. But both of those things are supremely important because you are the hands of God in the world and the people need you. The Kingdom of Heaven is in every moment of kindness and compassion.” There was no argument. There was perfect love, compassion, and acceptance. I feel like if I’d called upon God The Father, it might’ve been a different sort of situation, but I was satisfied with the experience. It gave me closure. It made me emotionally feel that I could stop adhering to beliefs that no longer applied to me. That’s what most beliefs need in order to release their hold on you.
Another working I performed involved soul healing. Having already identified the root causes of unwanted Christian beliefs, I set aside an evening devoted to journeywork, called upon my spirit allies to help me, and journeyed to my past, listening to my childlike soul tell me her worries and fears about things she’d heard in church or Sunday school or out in the world. I listened, then I explained to her a different perspective, a witchcraft perspective, and introduced her to my spirit allies who offered her protection and wisdom. The emotional release of this experience was incredible. All my childlike soul needed to know was that she wasn’t bound to this intimidating way of seeing the world and that she wasn’t alone on her journey. It healed pieces of her/my self that had been damaged by the old belief structure. As a result of this work, I felt many of the beliefs that had weighed me down dissolve into something much easier to brush off.
Continually Renewed
Changing unwanted beliefs is an ongoing process that takes years to achieve and may never be fully completed, but it is a worthwhile endeavor for anyone who is bothered by unresolved baggage from the faith tradition they were raised in. It is a rich landscape for inner work, values identification, and healing, and I believe it makes Pagan practitioners stronger in their chosen faith, whatever that may be. If this work is something you’re interested in undertaking, start asking yourself what it is that angers, upsets, aggravates, and scares you the most about the religious tradition you were raised in. Start asking yourself why. Listen to your knee-jerk responses. Your past is a vast repository of wisdom, but you have to do the Great Work of uncovering it. May your journey be fruitful.