What We Are: One Pagan-American Response

What makes Pagans valuable to America? What do we bring to the table? How do we exemplify American values? Looking back on the contributions that Jews and Catholics have made to our collective American identity, how do Pagans enrich the American identity?

– Star Foster

We are a million individual voices.

We share no unified belief, but we encourage the development of a personal and a communal practice.

We force our traditions on no one, but we seek to build community.

We are the unique, en masse.

We remember the Earth. Many of us deify Her.

We live liturgically, led most commonly by the natural rhythms of the changing seasons.

We worship.

We make offerings.

Many of us hold paramount the principle, “Harm None,” and we are constantly in a dialogue about what that means.

We live our lives in service to Gods, Spirits, or Ancestors, and, standing beside the humanist pagans, we seek to serve the living kingdoms of this Earth.

We honor the traditions of those who belong to our large, amorphous community, and, like other Americans, we struggle to honor those whose are outside the boundaries we’ve created.

We are no more valuable to this Nation than people of any other religious or social group, but we are equally as valuable.

Today is the 4th of July, and I affirm my intrinsic value as an American citizen, as a religious person whose religious expression is deserving of full protection under the Law, as a member of a community comprised of diverse, imaginative, complicated and creative persons, each of whom is deserving and worthy of the all the rights afforded to any other American citizen, and I affirm the value of all life, human or otherwise.

I am a Pagan-American.

If you are moved at all by these statements, or you feel these messages could initiate valuable dialogue, please share this post on Facebook or Twitter.