Paganism, equality and diversity
The bigger picture: pagan repression
“The project is especially important to people in the pagan community because it is one of the few examples of an official body validating and recognising them as a faith group...The Guardians are ambassadors for Avebury, the National Trust and paganism.” (May 2006)
In the wider world of pagan activism, much attention is being paid to policy and legal frameworks. Pagan efforts for identity recognition build upon, and are instructive for, the struggles of other oppressed constituencies.
“The ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) recognizes the right to religious freedom but this is generally determined as tolerating or preventing direct discrimination against practicing a particular religious faith and doesn’t entitle individuals to equality in religion” (Kirton and Green 2004, p143)
In Britain there is no official definition of religion. Indirect recognition is currently sought in two ways. Both the Druid Network (Ryder 2007) and the Pagan Federation (2006) are applying for religious charity status. And if paganism was an included option on the census, pagan affiliation could be approximately quantified for the first time (Pagan Dash 2007). Aside from this legal recognition, pagans could indirectly benefit from the recent abolition of various commissions for separate inequalities, in favour of a single Commission for Equality and Human Rights (Morris 2007). The legal rights accorded will not be dependent on an inaccurately uniform definition of pagan practice or identity.
As the study and practice of oppressed groups has developed, certain hierarchies of oppression have developed (Maddock and Parkin 1996). At times equal opportunities statements in particular read as a list of those more and lesser qualified for special attention. Race and gender usually top the list as being ‘more’ oppressed, followed by age, disability, faith and sexual orientation, jostling for position. In reality, discrimination is multiple and complex. I am a pagan and I am white, non-disabled and, by some definitions, middle class. I am also a woman, and bisexual. Although these group identities are important, even essential to me, studying equality in the context of diversity allows me to focus on the various mechanisms common to oppression, rather than the characteristics of group membership. I could not evidence the widespread exclusion of pagans from employment or other opportunities and social resources, in part because very little such research has been done. However, I am anecdotally aware of the ridicule and social exclusion many British pagans of all traditions experience. Our oppression is maintained in the everyday experience of a constituency of people nervous about revealing their religion to others. This is such a difficult process, many pagans describe informing others about their religious identity as if it were a sexual orientation, as ‘coming out’. A human being locates his or herself in relation to other beings, and makes choices about how to reveal their identity based upon trust. Through instinct or experience, many pagans do not trust most of British society.
Stereotypes are useful when they are consciously held and modifiable based on observation and experience (Adler 1996). They are easily distorted by synthetic and second hand experience via gossip and the media. Prejudice is a process of marginalisation wherein through fixed stereotypes a group is subjected to patronisation, devaluation of its norms, invisibilisation and trivialisation, in the process passing discrimination from the personal to the cultural sphere (Thompson 2003). Although the marginalisation of British pagan identity is under-researched, we can be confident that the everyday battle against people’s preconceptions damages at least our self worth and mental health. As Thompson’s (2001) P(ersonal), C(ultural), S(tructural) model describes, this prejudice both informs and is supported by institutional attitudes and procedures, leading to an experience of inequality and oppression.
A mass, group self-awareness of British pagan identity is emerging, as is a diverse pagan culture. There are ancient tales, modern heroes and multiple ritual practices converging around the eight festivals. Each tradition has its own, commonly recognisable symbols, such as the Wiccan pentacle or the druid Awen (Hofstede and Hofstede 2005). These reference common cultural values. Using Hofstede’s (2002) dimensions of inter-cultural analysis, these values show a small power differential, long term orientation and weak uncertainty avoidance. According to Hofstede, these shared values include those most helpful for cross-cultural collaboration.
Many of us as pagans live our religion in the everyday, as we live the reactions of others. We differ enormously in the patterns of our practice, but much less so in the values beneath them. A druid facing a midsummer sunrise and a Wiccan lighting an altar candle are both seeking a reverent and direct relationship to sacred fire. Yet within wider society, pagan values are less understood. Without them, we are culturally reduced to a quaint obsession with candles and sunrises.
“Cultural meaning, however, is invisible and lies precisely and only in the way these practices are interpreted by the insiders” (Hofstede and Hofstede 2005, p8)
Hofstede and Hofstede say the nation and the family are our usual sources of common mental programming (ibid).
“Everybody looks at the world from behind the windows of a cultural home, and everybody prefers to act as if people from other countries have something special about them” (ibid, p363)
The realisation that there is no cultural norm, that all is relative, is an uncomfortable one (ibid). What they fail to explain is the roots of diversity within the ‘common mental program’ of national diversity. As Modood (1997) points out,
“For many people, members of minorities and of the majority alike, the existing images of Britishness do not embrace the new mix of cultures and communities that exist today.” (ibid, p359)
As Modood states, in the last thirty years, personal and group identity have evolved from the unconscious and implicit, to the explicitly political and asserted. In the struggle for social recognition, British paganism is often overlooked as part of an ancient, native tradition of oppressed, anti-establishment religious practice that has bubbled up periodically since enforced Christianisation. Paganism is important to an understanding of oppression because it questions a uniform Britishness from within. It claims ancestry and heritage, and in doing so it is part of a re-questioning of both what is British, and what is sacred. In the right light, paganism reveals the dominant, supposedly universal, apparently native and uniform white British identity as contested, plural and fragmented.
Power: revealing culture’s hidden mechanisms
Understanding the workings of power is essential to challenging inequality (Thompson 2003). Traditional management theory neglects the impact of the external environment and assumes uniform, consensual organisational cultures (Newman 1995 in Kirton and Green 2004). In reality societal values and powerful individuals can both affect organisational behaviour (Mills 1992 in ibid). An organisation reflects its society of origin.
Older, equal opportunities initiatives cater to perceived group need. An equal opportunities initiative might establish a quota of pagans that are allowed access to certain sites on ‘agreed’ sacred dates. Such universal solutions give an illusion of sameness to the diversity of a group, in this case assuming all pagans have the same issues and even the same festivals. Responses that consider diversity theory focus on the barriers to access rather than group membership.
Promoting and valuing diversity is a logical extension of both the human contract and the learning organisation. Organisations in positions of power need narrow, single-loop justifications for change (Foldy and Creed 2003) that appeal to core practices, whilst policy statements make triple-loop challenges to values held at a corporate level. The final challenge for equality and diversity’s organisational operators is widespread double-loop acceptance:
“people’s ability to accept individuals different from themselves." (ibid, p253)
But who has the power to decide what is sacred to the British?
Since the rise of New Public Management in the 1980s, public and voluntary organisations have been subject to repeated change by external forces. The heritage sector governing our sacred sites has not escaped New Labour’s attentions. Change has been regulated by means of monitoring and targets, and implemented by creating a marketplace for public and charitable services (Haynes 2003).
"If you (local government) are unwilling or unable to work to the modern agenda, then the government will have to look to other partners to take on your role.” (Blair 1998, p22 in Newman 2002, p84)
Voluntary organisations benefit from large state sponsored grants if they can prove to government agencies that a project ‘adds social value’, and particularly if they work in partnership with local and community groups. In the 90s, governance theories began to examine the forces at work in this complex, multiply-partnered new arena. Power is now distributed along networks of stakeholders, personal influence and persuasion (Haynes 2003). These new networks reflect the pragmatic and normative nature of ‘third way’ national politics.
Partnerships reduce the power differential between professional workers and service users (Thompson 2003). The citizen as consumer is an indirect source of the funds that heritage organisations like the Trust depend on to conserve their holdings. Constituency groups that understand these power mechanisms can exploit them. But establishing true integration between cultural groups requires arenas in which they can meet as equals. Pagans are increasingly demanding to be part of the decision making process. Previously they have been at best consulted, and at worst ignored.
Power reveals itself in culture via dominant and subversive discourses that debate what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘important’ (Thompson 2003). The funding market forces accountability into the heritage sector, but has little influence on power mechanisms that replicate through normalisation. To achieve a more plural, diverse understanding of the sacred in Britain, we must address our complicated relationship as individuals to the dominant culture. We must consider not only how we are able to shape it, but how we have allowed it to shape us. Those of us who work in the emerging, partnership funded, heritage and community sector need to ask ourselves: who are we working with and who are we working for?
An academic preoccupation with social identity began in the 60s, with the theorisation of gender and race (Kirton and Green 2004). Social identity is integral to society, and different group identities allow differentiated access to power through the expression of self-determination (ibid). Although:
“Social group membership is usually conceptualized in juxtaposition to the dominant majority group” (Roberts 1996 in ibid),
that is usually white, male, heterosexual and non-disabled, post-structuralists such as Lyotard (Thompson 2003) have questioned the uniform nature of structuralist metanarratives that predict experiences of oppression and access to power according to social group membership. The mechanisms, causes and results of power are more complex, and reside instead in relationships and discourse (Foucault 1980 in Thompson 2003). Power can be expressed not only in dominance, but in resistance and reclamation (ibid). Access to a social arena does not signify acceptance (Heilman 1994 in Kandola and Fullerton 1998), a realisation that informed the development of diversity management when social inequality theories began to influence organisational sociology in the 90s (Kirton and Green 2004). Equality of opportunity is not sufficient without an equal power to influence organisational and societal culture. Denying minority faiths their part in the narrative of what is sacred denies them, denies us, the equal chance to:
“organize, interpret and make sense of their experience through story-telling modes” (Best and Kellner 1991, p73, in Thompson 2003, p52)
The power mechanisms that sustain culture across society can be usefully modelled with reference to theories of mass and gravity. The normative, dominant centre is maintained by its own mass. As mass gathers at a specific point on the margins, the dominant majority culture risks being decentred. A certain level of difference is allowed, depending on the current level of uncertainty tolerance within a culture. Extreme deviance is threatened with cultural exclusion, which is the symbolic withdrawal of group membership via the reactions and perceptions of others (Thompson 2003). An increase in tolerance for cultural diversity does not therefore address cultural inequality, because it does not alter the mechanism sustaining the dominant centre. Diversity in biology produces symbiosis, co-existence and dependence, but not equality. In the social sciences, diversity marks difference, not cohesion. A radical conception of cultural diversity maintains the struggle for equality through legitimate dissent and civil disobedience. It does not ignore the history or actuality of specific mechanisms of oppression affecting different constituencies. In cultures dominated by capital, such as in Britain, a moral argument is not always sufficient to provoke social change.
Conclusions: why is it important?,
In the United States, diversity management theory developed as a response to projected changes in the workforce as described by Johnston and Packer’s “Workforce 2000” in 1987 (Kandola and Fullerton). Although British employment statistics do show a proportional rise in ethnic diversity, older workers and more women at work (ibid).
“In the UK, the ‘managing diversity’ approach emanates from the widespread perceived need to anchor equality objectives to broader business and organizational objectives” (Kirton and Green 2004, p6)
The benefits of managing diversity are usually described to persuade the employer or organisation: better retention rates, a competitive edge or improved public image (Kandola and Fullerton 1998). Proposed methods for achieving equality and diversity in the workplace are implemented from above (ibid; Hofstede 2002; Kirton and Green 2004). Of the former, only Kirton and Green question the relative power of employee and employer. They also question Kandola and Fullerton’s assumption that an organisation’s diversity pre-exists diversity management.
Putting aside the ‘corporate’ benefits, considerations of ethics, rights, dignity and community identity reveal the true benefits and potential of diversity initiatives. These considerations move the managing diversity debate on from a liberal politics of tolerance to creating the spaces in which cultural diversity can be discovered on a more equal basis. Corporate discussions of equality and diversity are secular, and rarely concern themselves with notions of dignity, faith and sanctuary.
“Isn’t the so-called horizon (of nation) itself the shifting expression of equilibrium among the many forces that constitute and operate the horizon: gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, etc?” (Radhakrishnan 1992, p78)
As our solidarities are formed from the particular, so nations are forged in kinship and community, not ideology (ibid). An appreciation of global cultural diversity begins with celebrating diversity on a personal, local and national level (Sallah 2006).
“We need houses, sanctuaries, and other places to meet and talk in our global village” (Hofstede and Hofstede 2005, p374)
As a modern druid, I honour the centrality of story, of narrative, to my religion. The bardic tradition uses story as a meme-carrier, to transmit and debate pagan cultural values. How heritage organisations decide to tell our national stories, and who they invite to contribute, is important.
"It (the National Trust) must retell the story from the point of view of the enclosed and dispossessed, rather than just that of the encloser and the over-possessed." (Monbiot 1995)
Across the heritage sector, that commitment will influence the role power of pagan groups and, indirectly, affect the repression of pagan identity in Britain. In the long term it will also be a determining factor in the continuing social relevance of all heritage organisations.
Theo Tigger
May 2008
Adapted from an academic submission
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