The reality is this: other religions grow by including/incorporating/indoctrinating children from a young age. The more children you do this with, the more of them grow up deeply rooted in your faith; and that's what leads to lovely community religious environments which are truly communities in the ancient sense. Five or six or fifteen families, growing together. Not just adults spending money on their voluntary weekend hobby. But creating a village within a village, of old people and babies and everyone in between, sharing the work of life, challenges and successes, resources, and so on.
As you say, these contexts are some of the places where religion can be at its most fucked up and destructive. So it's good we don't do this, and you're right that bad relationships with this kind of religion is a driver for people to join "alternative/countercultural religions", and this is a thing worth celebrating as a Pagan characteristic.
But still...I have a massive longing for Amish-style communities, and I even have warm feelings about like, Three Wives One Husband (which is set in a Mormon village established very recently), even knowing what I do about how misogynist and controlling isolated Christian sects tend to be. I don't have a great relationship with my family. So, I think that's the appeal of intentional communities: that one could create a support structure, and in my imagination, it's a support structure which doesn't have these failings.
Paganism is, I think, one of the easiest religions to raise a child in, because we tend not to be dogmatic or punishing with threats of hell and sin, and quite open to people having individual relationships with the divine. Paganism can just be...going for a lot of walks. Inviting your child to garden with you. Watching nature documentaries.
(But that's not to underplay how colossally messed up Paganism can be around kids; I know a couple of horrible, high-profile examples, primarily to do with sex-centric Pagan traditions. And actually, one example of this I read about recently was a very good take on The Wicker Man, a film in which the pagan islanders are generally taken to be counter-cultural in contrast to the outsider policeman's fusty Christianity. The author points out that, although Summerisle is unconventional, its sexual morality is in fact profoundly traditional & focused on controlling teen female sexuality in a messed up way:
Now obvs, a dumb horror film is not Real Paganism, and is probably influenced more by the creator's interpretation of what pagans do than any reality. Nontheless, it isn't entirely off the mark. There's a handful of 70s-era/free-love Pagan sources which talk about celebrating first menstruation, or understanding children as sexual beings, or simply bringing children into environments where the tradition is centered around sexual polarity and...it's a mess. It's a mess in exactly the same ways that Christian traditions obsessing about fertility and sex are a mess. That's the bits children need to be kept away from, at all costs.)
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The reality is this: other religions grow by including/incorporating/indoctrinating children from a young age. The more children you do this with, the more of them grow up deeply rooted in your faith; and that's what leads to lovely community religious environments which are truly communities in the ancient sense. Five or six or fifteen families, growing together. Not just adults spending money on their voluntary weekend hobby. But creating a village within a village, of old people and babies and everyone in between, sharing the work of life, challenges and successes, resources, and so on.
As you say, these contexts are some of the places where religion can be at its most fucked up and destructive. So it's good we don't do this, and you're right that bad relationships with this kind of religion is a driver for people to join "alternative/countercultural religions", and this is a thing worth celebrating as a Pagan characteristic.
But still...I have a massive longing for Amish-style communities, and I even have warm feelings about like, Three Wives One Husband (which is set in a Mormon village established very recently), even knowing what I do about how misogynist and controlling isolated Christian sects tend to be. I don't have a great relationship with my family. So, I think that's the appeal of intentional communities: that one could create a support structure, and in my imagination, it's a support structure which doesn't have these failings.
Paganism is, I think, one of the easiest religions to raise a child in, because we tend not to be dogmatic or punishing with threats of hell and sin, and quite open to people having individual relationships with the divine. Paganism can just be...going for a lot of walks. Inviting your child to garden with you. Watching nature documentaries.
(But that's not to underplay how colossally messed up Paganism can be around kids; I know a couple of horrible, high-profile examples, primarily to do with sex-centric Pagan traditions. And actually, one example of this I read about recently was a very good take on The Wicker Man, a film in which the pagan islanders are generally taken to be counter-cultural in contrast to the outsider policeman's fusty Christianity. The author points out that, although Summerisle is unconventional, its sexual morality is in fact profoundly traditional & focused on controlling teen female sexuality in a messed up way:
https://www.room207press.com/2019/08/neopagans-neoreactionaries-and-folk.html
Now obvs, a dumb horror film is not Real Paganism, and is probably influenced more by the creator's interpretation of what pagans do than any reality. Nontheless, it isn't entirely off the mark. There's a handful of 70s-era/free-love Pagan sources which talk about celebrating first menstruation, or understanding children as sexual beings, or simply bringing children into environments where the tradition is centered around sexual polarity and...it's a mess. It's a mess in exactly the same ways that Christian traditions obsessing about fertility and sex are a mess. That's the bits children need to be kept away from, at all costs.)
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