Pagan Family Values: Childhood and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary American Paganism

5. A Room Full of FireFlies

114 > 115 Aisling sits down on the piano bench, picks up the child-sized violin lying on top of the piano, and begins sight-reading and playing a scratchy but determined version of “The Holly and the Ivy.” Erin helpfully suggests, “What if you stand up?” Aisling shakes her head and mumbles “No.” Erin says kindly, “Well, OK, you’re learning.” She lowers her voice and—somewhat apologetically—explains, “She just got the music for these yesterday.” Aisling suddenly stops playing, points an accusatory finger at the sheet music in front of her, and asks me, “Does that look like the right word to you?” Erin and I lean in over her shoulders and Erin smiles: “‘Choir’ is not one of the words Pagans use, it’s true.” Aisling considers the lyrics before her and suggests, “I could somehow change the word to ‘power.’” Erin nods in agreement —“power” is a much more common word in Pagan parlance than “choir”—but she reminds Aisling, “This is just for the music—we have the words on another sheet.” As Aisling turns her attention to the piano, she and her mother have this conversation: Erin: What do you think is the difference between Christians and Pagans? Aisling: Wait, are we Pagans or Christians? Erin: We’ve been practicing Paganism. Aisling: Yeah, because I think the Christians are the ones who sacrifice. Erin hesitates here, and I remember an earlier conversation in which she had mentioned Aisling’s belief that “only Christians sacrifice.” After reading a historical children’s book from the library that mentioned the Crusades, Aisling announced in the car one day, “Only Christians do sacrifices.” Erin describes her response to Aisling at the time: “You know, today it’s usually put by Christians in the other light: the Pagans are the ones that do the sacrifices. But I was reading her history, and I thought, ‘Wow, how did I get her to believe this?’ Because I didn’t mean to! I just kind of explained about how it’s not OK to kill people. But in this one story the pope said, ‘Whoever goes on this crusade and kills all these other people can be forgiven of all their past transgressions and the other murders they committed.’ So my goal . . . I wanted her to be exposed to every world religion . . . not to convert her over, but to study, and so that she would be prepared and then she could choose.” 116 > 117 of “religious outsiders” in the United States observes that alternative religious movements frequently employ a “language of dissent” to establish their “outsiderhood” against a posited established culture. Moore offers the example of Joseph Smith’s masterful self-promotion of Mormonism , which established an expectation of recognition and credibility for the religion on par with religions bearing significantly lengthier records. (Clearly, Aisling was not alone in wondering about the relationship of Mormonism to her own religion.) Moore explains that early Mormons employed a “rhetoric of deviance” to establish themselves as separate and radically different from the surrounding religious majority, highlighting their minimal differences (rather than their many similarities) to the larger culture. Joseph Smith’s foundational use of this rhetoric to invent a cohesive Mormon people out of a perceived or constructed sense of opposition marks the religion as quintessentially American. Moore describes the paradoxical relationship between this alternative religion and other contemporary American religions: “In defining themselves as being apart from the mainstream, Mormons were in fact laying their claim to it. By declaring themselves outsiders, they were moving to the center.”1 These assertions of difference and marginalization, Moore points out, were not based on concrete, significant differences between Mormons and the surrounding culture; in terms of family and gender relations , most Mormon values were not unlike those of the majority culture. This is not to say that genuine differences did not exist between Mormons and their contemporaries—Moore details the “peculiarities of the Mormon faith” that set them at odds against the larger culture—but, for the most part, these theological and ideological differences did not entirely alienate early Mormons: Mormonism’s enemies tried hard to validate a claim that Mormons were morally and ethically peculiar. Mormons, they charged, lied, stole, swore, and fornicated. No doubt they did, just like many other antebellum Americans. . . . Nevertheless, any case for Mormon difference that rests on a purported Mormon rejection of middle-class standards of virtue is...