Paganism and its Discontents: Enduring Problems of Radicalized Identity ed. by Holli S. Emore and Jonathan Leader

Reviewed by Adam Dahmer

Reading Paganism and its Discontents, a timely exploration and repudiation of the Alt-right infiltration of Neopaganism, made me wish I had attended the 2019 conference for which its contributors had originally penned its component essays. As a Neopagan – or, at any rate, a practitioner of a highly syncretic and pagan-influenced form of Christianity – I have noted with mounting concern a seeming increase in recent years both in the appropriation of pagan religious practices and aesthetics by overt racists and xenophobes, and, consequently, in the mainstream perception that such people constitute the dominant or even the only ideological faction within Neopaganism as a whole. It seems only fitting that these disturbing trends should concern academics – especially those of a Neopagan bent – and I find it reassuring that a conference and its proceedings should treat on this subject exclusively.

With regard to subject exclusivity, however, the book did give some cause for disappointment. As a Celticist specializing in the language and culture of the Scottish Gaels, I found it frustrating that the book – and, evidently, its conference – focused almost exclusively on Neopagan religious practices based on Teutonic antecedents. With the exception of one contribution – that of Holli S. Emore, a Kemeticist who wrote about the complexities of navigating race and religion in the twentieth-century Southern United States – the focus on and by the Nordic and Nordic-adjacent seemed so total that I would suggest that the editors preface the title of any future reprintings with the word ‘Germanic’, so as not to mislead prospective readers.

However, to give credit where credit is due as far as inclusivity of the Celtic, Michael Strmiska –  in his paper derived from the conference’s keynote address – did make at least passing reference to such early-Medieval Goidelic-language texts as the Táin Bó Cúailgne and the Book of Invasions, and suggested that they and similar writings might fruitfully serve as the basis for future Neopagan religious praxes rooted in language rather than in genetic heredity – a suggestion which I wholeheartedly endorse, not only as an anti-racist, but as a revitalist of minority languages: learners of Scottish Gaelic, for instance, could only benefit from zealously studying older forms of the language; and the fomentation of religious reverence for the Goidelic languages and their texts might go a long way toward undoing their centuries-long disparagement and marginalization in Anglophone culture.

On the subject of religious communities defined by genetic heredity, I feel indebted to authors Jefferson F. Calico, Ben Waggoner, and Diana L. Paxson for their collective multi-chapter discussion of the Asatru Folk Assembly – a truly insidious and ideologically deplorable organization which I had not previously encountered in academic literature, and of which I am thankful to have been made aware. These authors’ three essays worked admirably in concert: Calico did a fine job of tracing the history of the AFA and that of its philosophically chameleonic but ever-charismatic founder, Stephen McNallen; Waggoner used his expertise as a geneticist to thoroughly refute the organization’s ‘metagenetic’ theory of religion-as-biologically-heritable-race-memory; and Paxson outlined the means by which to create an anti-racist ideological middle-way between the extremes of protectionist, chauvinistic hereditarian religions and universalist religions almost wholly unmoored from any specific cultural heritage.

Donning, again, the Celticist mantle, however, I must say that the refutation of McNallen and his racist religious ramblings could have benefited by the occasional application of a non-Nordic lens. Because the cult-leader’s pet theory of ancestral pan-Northern-European affinity with the Nordic gods rests on the erasure of historical distinctions between speakers of Germanic and Celtic languages, and the absurd hypothesis that these affinities are transmitted genetically, the soundest and most straightforward way to rebut his theory would be to assert the cultural distinctiveness – and therefore the non-Germanic-ness – of Celtic-language speakers. The very fact that his name is McNallen and not Nallensson should mean, according to McNallen’s own twisted logic, that he is bound by his genes to worship Brìghde and the Dagda rather than Freya and Odin. Instead, by eliding the myriad distinctions between the Celtic and the Germanic, McNallen can pretend that by being descended from Celts, he is also descended from Teutons, and that all the ancient and modern cultures defined by those two linguistic groupings are essentially the same by virtue of their perceived whiteness – an absurd proposition which nonetheless gets no critical treatment in the book.

More troubling to me than the authors’ seeming uninterest in fully acknowledging the role of the non-Germanic strands in modern Neopaganism was their evident unwillingness to confront the role of the very construct of whiteness in the problematization of Neopaganism. It is, after all, not only Neopaganism’s association with pro-white racism, but with whiteness itself, that makes it so unpalatable in the eyes of many anti-racists – and the idea of whiteness never seemed to come under direct attack in the book. Tahni J. Nikitins eloquently and quite rightly asserted in Chapter 6 that the ancient Norse were not uniformly white, but neglected to mention that the construct of whiteness, such as it exists today, did not come into being until centuries after the Christianization of the Norse and their political differentiation into the early-modern Nordic nation-states. The ancient Norse weren’t racist, it is true, but their non-racism was not a moral triumph, but a simple matter of tautology, since the concept of race as we know it did not yet exist. Even had they been culturally chauvinist, they would have discriminated against non-Norse – not non-whites – since the idea of whiteness had not yet been invented. Gus diZerega, in Chapter 5, does acknowledge the recentness and mutability of the construct of whiteness, but as a relatively tangential part of a larger discussion of the Herderian concept of the Volk, and not as a direct or thorough repudiation of the construct of whiteness.

In fairness, Nikitins and DiZerega’s omissions regarding the need to dismantle the construct of whiteness would not seem at all glaring if not for Paxson’s seeming endorsement of whiteness in Chapter 4, where she suggested that there is an ‘argument for “white studies”’ on an equal basis with the academic studies of minority ethnic groups in the United States. This suggestion – in what is otherwise a largely well-thought out and philosophically unobjectionable essay – seems an attempt to validate that idea that there is a ‘white race’ with distinct cultural attributes worthy of study in the academic milieu, an assertion which could hardly be more wrong.

It must be stated, unequivocally, that although all people who are white necessarily have cultures, they do not have those cultures by virtue of being white. There is nothing worthwhile or valuable about whiteness – a construct invented in the Early Modern period as a means of enriching the colonial elite and furthering the exploitation of the repressed. Whiteness does not celebrate or enrich the cultures of people who become white, but rather destroys the cultural attributes they had before becoming white so that they may be assimilated to the norms of whiteness. I, for instance, am white, but my ancestors were Gaels, Jews, Frisians, Welsh Britons, and Cajun French, among others. They gave up those identities centuries ago so that they could become white, and thus have access to the power and safety that whiteness confers. Although I don’t blame them for making that decision, and I am not in fact entirely sure whether they even had the power at the time to decide otherwise, I can see with hindsight that they made a terrible mistake – a devil’s bargain that divorced their children from their ancestral cultures, and which made their descendants complicit in the centuries-long oppression of other communities. I’m proud of who I am, where I am from, and those people from whom I am descended, and I believe that pride in those things ought to be a human right – but I am not proud to be white. Whereas my inheritance from my regional and ancestral cultures has given me the songs, stories, dances and other forms of folk-knowledge that make me fully human, my inheritance from whiteness has been nothing but blood on my hands and a proverbial attic-full of colonial baggage. White people have cultures – lots of them, in fact – but whiteness is not the nurturer or protector of those cultures, but rather the cause of their slow ruination. Until anti-racist Neopagans like the book authors work harder to destroy whiteness and its privileges than racist Neopagans like those in McNallen’s AFA work to promote it, then all Neopagans run the risk of being perceived as either racist or complicit in racism themselves – and that work cannot take place unless everyone involved on the side of anti-racism acknowledges that although white people are not necessarily evil, whiteness most certainly is. 

Thus, I conclude that Paganism and its Discontents is a timely book on an important subject, and that its authors wrote eloquently toward the exposition of a tremendous amount of valuable information – ultimately producing a useful and highly readable compendium. However, also I feel that the text leaves too much unsaid, especially regarding the non-Germanic source-traditions underpinning much of modern Neopaganism, and the importance of dismantling the construct of whiteness in furthering Neopagan anti-racism. It must be emphasized, however, that this is not a condemnation of the book or its authors and editors (who, in my estimation, performed commendably in the main) but rather an endorsement of their anti-racist goals, and an exhortation that many more conferences like the one that gave rise to these proceedings should take place in the future – hopefully with a greater emphasis on non-Nordic Neopagan traditions, and with more direct and forceful condemnations of whiteness.

Adam Dahmer, MSc, is a PhD candidate in Celtic and Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. After the completion of his doctoral programme in 2021, he hopes to assist in the revival of Scottish Gaelic as a daily-used, communally and domestically transmitted language in his native Kentucky, in solidarity with the efforts of linguistic activists and scholars throughout the world to further the promotion and defense of linguistic and cultural diversity.

Paganism and its Discontents: Enduring Problems of Radicalized Identity is available now.