What Is a Pagan?

From an address given at the Unitarian Church of Underwood, Minnesota

November 17, 2024

Good morning. My name is Steven Posch.

Along with nearly 2 million of my fellow Americans, and perhaps 200 million others worldwide, I identify as a pagan.

Like tribal people everywhere, we think of ourselves as the Original People.

“Pagan,” of course, is a name-from-outside. Like Indigenous Americans, who thought of themselves as Lakota or Anishinabe or Hochunk, and had no idea that they were Indigenous Americans until someone else came and told them so—the encounter with the other invariably leads to a change in how we perceive ourselves—we Indigenous Europeans, who thought of ourselves as Dobunni or Cornovii or Iceni, had no idea that we were pagans until the Church came along and told us so.

(The same is true, of course, of Indigenous Africans, Asians, and Australians.)

So the name “pagan” lumps together what, in essence, are ten thousand very-different-from-one-another tribal religions. Like “Nature,” “pagan” is a conceptually problematic term.

Like “Nature,” “pagan” is a term of convenience, no more. Nonetheless, some of that 220,000,001 have today come to embrace that term, because those ten thousand very-different-from-one-another tribal religions all share two profoundly important family resemblances.

All are deeply rooted in the thews—ways—of the ancestors.

All engage in conversation with the non-human world.

(That's my colorless-but-less-conceptually-problematic way of saying “Nature.”)

That's my definition of “pagan”. A pagan is someone in conversation with the non-human world.

In this era of profound environmental crisis, it's time and high time that, as a species, we resumed that conversation.

220,000,001 of us think so.

With special thanks to Allison Francis

and all the good folks of UCU