haptalaon | Paying the Clergy

I'm spending more time on the internet of 10 years ago, replacing my social media browsing time with digging into old pagan blogs - so many of them, gems. Whenever I come across a good article, I save it under a topic & I'll put up that webpage on my site when I'm ready.

I've got together a little cluster of blog posts on Should We Pay Our Clergy, with a whole range of perspectives, so I'm going to share those now - and under the cut, some of my own thoughts on this (tl;dr no we shouldn't)

Debates around Pagan Clergy

Shauna Aura Knight: How do we pay for all this? Memberships, Tithing, and Pagans - probaby the best overview on this topic, & she also has a series on Fundraising looking at practicalities.

Quaker Pagan: A Cup of Coffee and a Bagel with Christopher Penczak
Codex Astarte: Monetize Everything!

Gleewood: Charging for Training

Hardscrabble Creek: The Dangers in being 'Ministerial'

Thorn Coyle Big Fish in a Small Pond

John Beckett: Paying Pagan Clergy - an Organic Approach

David Oliver Kling: Is it Noble to pay your cleric? An exploration of full-time paid clergy.

'A Bad Case of Methodist Envy: Copying Christian models of clergy is a Pagan dead end'- John Michael Greer in Witches & Pagans #28 which unfortunately doesn't seem to be around online; does anyone have this magazine? I'm going to write to him and see if I can put this essay back online.

Quaker Pagan: Toward a Pagan Commons? A Conversation

Fritz: Rant: Community Support, Does it Exist?

Isaac Bonewits: Freedom of Information and Supporting Pagan Creators

Drew Jacob: “Temple Without a Song: a Report to the Community”

To be blunt and true: nobody owes you your dream career.

I've encountered this attitude repeatedly among digital freelancers aspiring to creative careers - illustrators, tutors, performers etc, anyone who relies on being paid by their peers. A simmering resentment towards your fellow community members for not becoming your customers. You feel entitled to this job; the thing standing between a thing you and it are other people; therefore, other people are at fault. 'If only' they were paying you, your career would be gold. But that 'if only' is the essence of doing business. If nobody needs or wants your product...you haven't got a business.

This is a rough lesson. We are raised in a world which valorises business owners as socially good & describes them as hard-working geniuses - instead of what they tend to be, which is some dope who inherited his father's apartheid-era emerald mine and keeps falling upwards. Even people who self-identify as progressive seem unable to resist this trap, of believing they can succeed through effort alone. People making these arguments raise the spectre that - if nobody pays them, the only people who will be able to do {creative niche} are people who can afford to do it for free. But this is **already true**. The only people who succeed in these careers have pre-existing capital, a wealthy spouse, privilege, connections.

If you don't have that, your best option is to commit to it as a hobby, and arrange your working life to maximise the time and resources to do what you love. (i.e. a high paying job with lots of holiday to fund your SCUBA diving; a turn-up-work-anywhere bar work & begging career enabling you to travel; a low-effort, low-energy sitting at a shop counter that leaves you the energy after work to play in a band...etc)

This feels unfair, because it isn't fair. It's profoundly lousy.

So yes - it is true that pagans will claim to be broke when the concept of paying clergy comes up and yet find money for other things, and this shows you that there is no actual desire for clergy - the market sector doesn't exist. If there was an organic want and need, the money would be there. Nobody else is as excited about your dream career as you are. 'But if you don't pay me I won't be able to do this any more' people cry, as if that's a problem that impacts me very much at all. Nobody comes into paganism wanting an echo of their ambiently Christian upbringing and, as much as one might not want it to be true, a lot of people are happier with their shallow-engagement weekend shaman course in which they get to have agency and importance than they are in a long, slow way as learners and followers under you. To be ones own Pope is a distinctive and appealing feature of Pagan spirituality!

No amount of wishing makes a dent in any of these facts.

(if your skill at witchcraft is so great you deserve to be paid to teach it, perhaps you should do a spell for that.)

So what it comes down to is - you have to do it as a vocation, because you love it, because it is its own reward. You have to do it in a self-supporting way, not a self-sacrificing one, putting in no more effort and resources than you can offer as a gift or conceptualise as for your own pleasure. The right attitude - practically and emotionally - is to recognise this from the start, and plan your career accordingly. If you are going to resent your community & feel lesser because you are not being paid, because you want recognition and success to come in the form of a money-number - it's going to be miserable - and if what you want is money, you're better off doing anything else. If these careers weren't rewarding, nobody would wish to do them: you are being paid, in respect and esteem, in social connections, and the sense of a life with purpose. And you have to do it for the spirits - because you're being guided to do so by Them, and because it honours Them or helps other to o so, and that too is enough.

You have to do it this way, not because of an abstract right/wrong morality, but because it's the only option.

When I read these rants, it reminds me a bit of my mother having a go - doing some awful self-sacrificing thing I never asked for and then yelling at me for not being grateful enough. If I didn't ask you to do something for me, it's nothing to me that you've done it.

& because I don't want to be around shop owners and advertisers, I want to be around peers and friends. I don't want my religious life to be mediated through commerce in this way. I find parasocial relationships stressing and uncanny (not in a cool way). I feel neutral or good at the thought of these businesses failing, because they don't offer something I want and stand in the way of things I do.

My vision of a pagan community does not include professionals who are paid to work for me, who treat me as a customer or client, who behave towards me like other service providers in my life. Not my postman, not my bank teller, not my therapist, not even my fireman or garbage man.

These are the people beside which I encounter the gods, walking together to build a new dawn. People I tangle my energy with. People I trust to bring me back from danger. People I can be vulnerable enough to show the baby bird of my inner revelation.

It's like paying for sex. Nobody involved in that transaction is evil, but it's also no substitute for an intimate relationship.

Putting on my joyless Marxist hat for a moment: whenever one starts thinking as an individual, one tends to go wrong politically. Not heinously wrong, I don't mean one becomes a monster - but it leads your analysis astray.

The petit-bourgeoise pagan has picked the wrong solution to the right problem. Because everybody has the right to their dream career. That's the goal. A future in which all people have time for leisure, time for their art, time for one another, and also time for necessary work, shared proportionally, to make this all possible. And yes, it does suck to have a dream career in mind and be unable to fulfil it; in this, you are on a par with everyone around you - they're not to blame for your situation, nor should you be demanding they support you as if your right was the greater.

I was talking about this with a friend - who has a very different economic situation to me. She thought paid facilitators, readers etc was good, because at least some people get to do it - in other words, it allows her to live vicariously through them and, on a cosmic level, it ensures the work is being done.

It's funny, because I take a different takeaway from this image. I don't see the one person in freedom, but the six or ten or sixty people who must stay in the trap of the world to fund that one person. In other words, it's not a collective solution - it comes at the expense of others. & I think yr average pagan instinctively knows that, which is why the Big Name Pagan is more often figures of resentment than seen as actually useful public servants.

My takeaway from having attempted to sell patterns on Ravelry is that I'm better off economically when everyone gifts their patterns for free. That is, I might make £20 in a year or more if I'm lucky, but never enough to give up work, and for most people it's *so* little that it won't even cover the cost of buying knitting patterns from others. If I am paid £20 for my labor, but pay out £50 in a year to others - I've made a loss, and the sense of business success is illusory.

When one is thinking as an individual small business owner, it takes your focus from asking -

'what would need to happen to liberate my entire pagan community from the drudgery of work, so that we all have more time and resources for the Great Work?'

(and this, too, interrelates to the thought of Buying Pagan Land - something which is only useful and liberationary to your community if it can free them from the troubles of land. For example, if you can buy an abandoned valley with four empty villages for cash & gift it free of strings to be collectively owned and operated, enabling your flock to dwell for free, and work for the world far less and for the gods far more. That would be useful enough to others, enough that others would care. Buying Pagan Land cannot be a euphemism for other people buying you a house; it has to mean buying a house for other people.)

Having said all this: I think Shauna Aura Knight's post on this is an absolute classic, I've recommended it before and will do so again.

I vibe with her vision of tithing. Her criticism of the shopfront model is spot on - that is, we buy objects from shops and pay to attend one-off classes, the Pagan Shop or Pagan Festival acts as the thing mediating money, lay members, and paid members. But it doesn't build community - the money goes to private business(es), not a collective, and it doesn't build a social network - but a customer-provider attitude where people drop in and out based on a whim.

I’m trying to engage people not as occasional attendees, but as regular members who care about what’s going on with the group

Where I dissent, though, is the role of money in this. Financial support can be a way of buying in, but there are many others.

We need to look leftwards - at conversations about mutual aid and anarchist structures of care which help people thrive without reference to the structures of the world, because anarchists always assume they will doing their best in a hostile environment, providing that care *despite* the world, even if nothing else changes. And to what we already know, about family and friendship networks. In fact, money and business tend to blow those social connections up - one must always be very careful about mixing money and family - and that should teach us something about the role of money in newly constructed communities.

And karaoke. Lot of karaoke round here, lot of folk bars, people turn up to give gifts: their performance, their applause, their company. Nobody is muttering into their beer that they ought to have been paid for that Meatloaf cover - or, if they are, they belong in a competitive world where they can stand or fail by their talent, but not a community venue.

I think we should ask more often: if we can't do this without money, does it need to be done? We need to work within the limitations that exist, and for the average pagan that includes their budget and free time. Acknowledging that takes us further than fantasising about your mates working extra hours to pull together £22,672 for you annually. Much better for everyone to stay on an even level - all of you hampered equally by the difficulties of being in work - with clergy who can relate directly to what their peers are going through - and to prevent communities beginning to center around special individuals, rather than resisting the control of any one personality.

I think there's a temptation to seek expenses, because that makes one feel like one's organisation is more serious; but in my view, no expense is useful if it means cutting participants out. A free class for 30 is a better time than a paid class for 4, in terms of truly building a community network. Large congregations are more self-sustaining than small ones. We live in a consumer society which trains us to consume - it's a fight against our natures to say, 'this act needs no consumption'. And to remember that your lay members are already paying something - their own transport costs, their own time away from other commitments, their own robes and contribution to the ritual feast, as well as their participation. I think it's healthy and humble to consider a ritual attendee as equal in importance to a ritual facilitator; both are required.

I think about the leftist concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone - like, squatting a public park and deciding that this is your encampment for delivering radical lectures plus feeding the homeless for as long as it takes for the cops to evict you, with or without permission from the landowners. Anarchists developed these ideas to provide the maximum good in the world we live in now - i.e. we can't wait for a day post-revolution, or even a day post we-buy-our-own-farm, we have to do it now and within limitations. Pagan land is nice, but nothing is stopping your collective wild-camping together.

And these conversations also have implicit value-judgements within them. Suppose a community can put up a notional wage each month - to assign it to clergy is a decision about value, to value skill and experience. There are other models - for example, you could give it to the lowest-waged participants so they can take time off and get the bus, or to parents so they can hire a babysitter. Those too sustain a community. I never see this discussed. When people say 'if you don't pay me, I can't run this workshop' - that's rarely literally true. They're generally free on the day and with the skills at hand. They're making a decision about what their time is worth, as is their right. However, if you can't get childcare or afford a bus, that is a concrete and absolute limit on those people's participation.

I also think there's a naivite about what being paid clergy would be like. As John Michael Greer correctly notes, the only people that I’ve ever heard insisting that there ought to be paid full-time Pagan clergy are the people who want to become full-time Pagan clergy. But when you're being paid, other people expect things from you - their own things, not the things you imagine; it won't be more time alone to work on your books, it won't be deliving the program and rituals you planned and developing quietly like you're on retreat. & I actually think few of these people are ready for that sense of being owned by others, of being employed directly by your social peers. It serves as a fantasy, the same way 'if only we owned land' is a fantasy - one of control, escape, freedom, peace but which actually conveys none of these things (is infrastructure liberation...or is it more of a hassle? will the gods be pleased that we own a community center, or will it just suck up our time in doing extra tax forms?).

The dynamic changes profoundly once your rent depends on something. I don't think you can be calm in such a situation - it tends toxic by nature, you can't help yourself. The risk of becoming controlling and domineering in order that nobody challenges your authority and takes away your income; or the risk of being bullied into a corner and unable to say no to anybody. Even with the best of intentions, it changes who you can be. It is a good thing to be freed from those fears within a social and spiritual space.

Above all - because I think the most viable model for a coven or community is just a group of people you like spending time with.

Hearth & Horn

Paying the Clergy

Paying the Clergy

Debates around Pagan Clergy

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