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

3. Parenting in Neverland

70 > 71 interact with fairies on a regular basis is less important to this discussion than the indication of the importance of retaining (or regaining) the childlike quality of conversing with fairy-folk as a sign of advanced spiritual growth. Community service at Fairy Mound is not terribly demanding. The volunteers’ duties largely consist of offering children water as they play in the hot Texas sun, ensuring that every child who leaves the fenced children’s area is signed out and accompanied by a parent or guardian (ideally an adult, but children are regularly released into the care of slightly older siblings), and watching children play on the swings, the slides, and the castle playhouse. During my shift, I was joined by another adult volunteer, a middle-aged man named Mike in a tie-dyed T-shirt, and we stood in the shade of a scrubby tree, idly chatting about the heat and the festival. One of the children approached us, wanting to talk to a grown-up about some playground altercation. Mike feigned surprise and playfully asked the boy, “Why are you looking at me? I’m not a grown-up. The grown-ups I’ve known are always tired and unhappy. That’s not me.” This resistance to being thought of as an “adult” arises often among Pagan adults, many of whom insist, like Mike, that they have no part in the sad, serious, conservative world of adults—that their place, instead, is in the magical world of childhood imagination, fantasy, and joy. But my fellow volunteer was charged with maintaining order and safety among the chronological children on the playground. If he was not a grown-up, if he situated himself in the world of the children he was meant to be attending, if the charge of adulthood is read as virtually an accusation, then one has to wonder: where in this religion do children learn to be adults? Because, despite messages like Mike’s to the child on the playground, children clearly do grow up in contemporary Paganism. They rely on the adults in their lives to act as guardians and responsible (if not always authoritative) caretakers, and the adults, for the most part, attempt to meet these expectations— despite their protestations of not being “grown-ups.” The Pagan parents I have met praise appropriate behavior, discipline children with time-outs when necessary, and explain consequences. With varying degrees of difficulty, Pagan children learn to share, to help with chores, to say “please” and “thank you,” and (always!) to recycle. In 72 > 73 If Pagans like to talk about their current religious beliefs, they love to talk about their religious backgrounds. Adult Pagans’ recollections and reconstructions of their childhoods often take the form of narratives that illuminate the early origins of their Pagan tendencies in a “complex and dynamic” relationship between “Neopagans ’ current identities and their remembered childhood.”3 The landscape of childhood, for many Pagans, provides the backdrop for adult Pagan religious worlds rife with wonder, fantasy, and imagination and shapes Pagan religious beliefs and practices. Firstgeneration adult Pagans recall childhoods characterized by communion with nature and the world of spirits, animals, and fairies. They often recall, as well, that these experiences were discouraged, if not demonized, by adults in their families and in their religious institutions. Adult Pagans very often “use the phrase ‘shoved down my throat’ to describe aggressive proselytizing by families and churches,”4 and this seems to be true among Pagans of all kinds throughout the United States. Many Pagan parents told me that they felt their children’s schools “shoved Christianity down their throats,” and adults from different parts of the country recounted similar stories of feeling oppressed, bored, or misunderstood by their families’ religious practices. Sarah Pike’s ethnography of Pagan festival culture suggests that these adults seek to recover a sense of wonder, magic, and connection to the spiritual and natural world by recreating these qualities in their adult lives and in their practice of Paganism. I suggest that, beyond these re-creations of their own childhoods, Pagan adults also seek to redeem their lost magical childhoods by shaping their own children’s religious worlds in such a way that these childhoods reflect (or surpass) the adults’ own childhood experiences of unencumbered spirituality; they reconstruct the religious worlds they wish they had inhabited. In much the same way that reconstructing and retelling multiple histories imbues contemporary...