The Grove Before the Name

Hello, Seeker. Come walk with me for a while into the grove. There is a word we use so easily that we rarely stop to ask what it actually means. Religion. We speak of Pagan religion, Polytheistic religion, ancient religion, organized religion, religious practice, and religious experience. We ask people what religion they belong to. We describe ourselves as religious or nonreligious. When we reconstruct traditions of the past, we often speak about reconstructing an ancient religion. But what exactly are we talking about? I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the word, not necessarily because it is wrong, but because I am not sure it describes what I am seeking.

What Is Religion?

Our English word religion ultimately comes from the Latin religiō, but even among ancient writers there was disagreement about where that word came from. Cicero connected religiō with relegere, a word carrying the idea of going over something again, reconsidering it, or attending to something carefully. In De Natura Deorum, Cicero associates the religious person with carefully attending to those things concerning the gods. Here religiō is not membership in a system of belief. It careful observance, attention, reverence, and obligation.

Several centuries later, the Christian writer Lactantius rejected Cicero’s explanation and instead connected religio with religare: to bind. Religion here is the bond binding the human being to god. Augustine would later discuss this understanding as well. This interpretation became enormously influential within Christian thought, and it is probably why we still sometimes hear people say that religion literally means “to bind again.” That explanation should be treated carefully. It is an ancient interpretation of the word rather than something we can simply declare to be its unquestioned original meaning.

Even very early in the history of the word, people were already trying to explain what religion actually was. And the word continued changing.

Today, when we say religion, we usually understand something much larger. Religion can mean an organized system of beliefs and practices. It can involve theology, rituals, sacred texts, institutions, moral teachings, priests, temples, churches, communities, and ideas about the divine or sacred. Someone can belong to a religion, convert to another religion, leave a religion, organize a religion, or identify as having no religion. It has has become a container. Inside that container we place gods, prayers, offerings, rituals, sacred places, ancestors, spirits, festivals, myths, priests, and theology. Outside the container is ordinary life. I am increasingly unsure whether that division describes what I am actually doing.

If I leave an offering for a god, we might call that religion. But what if I leave an offering because I have developed a relationship with that god? If I greet the spirit of a river, is that religion? If I sit beneath the same tree throughout the seasons and slowly develop a relationship with that place, is that religion? If I remember my ancestors, is that religion? If I maintain hospitality because reciprocity is important to the way I understand the world, is that religion, ethics, or culture? If I care for the land because I understand myself as participating within it rather than standing apart from it, where exactly does the religious part begin?

Maybe these things can be religious. But they can also be something else. They can simply be relationships. And once I begin there, the boundaries become much less important.

I don’t make an offering because I need to perform a religious activity. I make an offering because there is someone with whom I have a relationship. I don’t approach a river because rivers belong somewhere within my religious worldview. I approach because this river is a presence in the world. It has its own existence, history, movement, place, and agency. Through repeated encounters, recognition, and reciprocity, a relationship may develop between us. The same can be true of gods, ancestors, spirits, animals, trees, stones, mountains, springs, homes, and communities.

Instead of me asking, What does my religion require me to do? I can ask, What does this relationship ask of me?

Relationship Requires Reciprocity

You do not meet someone for the first time and immediately understand everything about them. You spend time together, learn how to communicate. Customs develop between you, memories accumulate, and trust may grow. Relationships with gods, ancestors, spirits, and places can develop in much the same way.

An offering becomes more than a religious obligation, it becomes hospitality. Prayer becomes a conversation. Ritual becomes an encounter. Sacred space becomes a meeting place.

Tradition becomes inherited knowledge about how relationships have been maintained. Reciprocity becomes the recognition that relationships involve giving as well as receiving. This is much closer to how I understand and live my praxis.

Praxis is the putting of ideas, values, and understandings into lived action, the way what we understand about the world becomes part of how we actually live within it.

The gods are not simply objects of religious belief. They are beings with whom we can form relationships. The land is not merely the stage for religious ceremonies. We are already participating within it. The ancestors are not theological concepts. They belong to relationships extending backward through families, communities, cultures, and places. My praxis is less about possessing the correct collection of beliefs and more about learning how to live in relationship with a world filled with other beings.

The Weight of Religion

There is another reason I find myself moving away from the word religion. It has become a heavy word. For many people it carries associations with institutions, doctrines, conversion, orthodoxy, authority, division, and the drawing of boundaries between those who belong and those who do not. Religious institutions and movements have also been used throughout history to justify domination, persecution, cultural destruction, political power, and control. Now that does not mean religion itself is inherently harmful. Nor does it mean everyone who calls themselves religious participates in those things. But the weight and histories are still there for me.

I sometimes wonder why emerging Pagan and Polytheistic communities should feel obligated to carry all of that baggage into what we are trying to build. We have inherited a culture in which religion often means something organized, bounded, institutionalized, and concerned with what people believe. It becomes very easy to reproduce that model without realizing we are doing it.

We create statements of belief. We create institutions. We establish authorities. We decide what counts as legitimate practice. We establish boundaries around identity. Eventually we can become so concerned with defining Paganism that we forget to actually live it.

Rather than trying so hard to construct religions, perhaps we should be cultivating cultures. Culture is lived, it develops through stories, customs, language, music, art, food, festivals, ethics, hospitality, ritual, relationships, shared memories, sacred places, and the ways people learn to live alongside one another. Culture does not require everyone within it to think exactly alike.

People participate. They inherit things. They change things. They argue about things. They preserve things. They forget things. They rediscover things. They create new customs that may eventually be handed to someone else. That feels much closer to what I hope Pagan and Polytheistic communities can become. I don’t particularly want to create another institution concerned with defining who possesses the correct theology. I would rather help cultivate communities where people learn how to maintain relationships, with gods, ancestors, landscapes, spirits, communities, and one another. That requires customs, stories, celebrations, places where people gather. It requires ways of welcoming strangers and teaching newcomers. It has responsibilities toward one another. Most importantly, it requires people willing to carry something forward. We can call all of that religious. But we can also call it culture.

Culture also gives us another way of thinking about belonging. I can teach someone a song without asking what they believe. I can invite someone to a feast without demanding theological agreement. I can tell an old story without requiring someone to accept it as literal truth. I can stand beside someone at a sacred fire without needing both of us to understand the cosmos in precisely the same way. We can participate together, and through participation, something begins to grow. That participation creates relationship. Which creates a memory that becomes a custom. Customs carried by a people become culture. That is something I would love to see more of within Paganism and Polytheism. Not the creation of new religions modeled after the categories and institutions we inherited from the world around us, but the cultivation of living Pagan cultures. This does not require everyone to believe exactly the same thing. It requires participation.

Perhaps Religiō Still Has Something to Teach Us

And strangely enough, after moving away from religion, I find myself circling back toward that older Latin religiō. There is something within Cicero’s understanding that I find beautiful.

• Attention
• Careful observance
• Reverence

Returning to something and considering it again. Those ideas do not feel particularly distant from relationship. Relationships require attention. You have to show up, remember, and listen. You have to recognize obligations, changes, and return. That is more useful to me than religion understood primarily as a system of beliefs.