On Natural Religion and Proselytizing
A response to Mental Wanderer
Recently, I posted about the need for proselytizing within Gentile religion as a means of helping Gentiles to return to their native religious traditions.
One of the responses I received was a very thoughtful series of questions from a user that goes by Mental Wanderer. The questions went to the heart of our strategy as an organization and our relationship to natural religion in such a way that it required a thoughtful response.
Here is a link to his original thread of questions, which I will quote and respond to below: https://x.com/num1ina/status/1756330396394869229?s=20
Proselytizing to whom exactly? Gotta know your target audience. Most attempts at reviving paganism in the modern area have failed to reach people other than historical hobbyists/enthusiasts, LARPers, and immature people looking for an excuse to rebel against their xtn upbringing. - Link
This is a very accurate observation about the state of modern paganism and the kinds of people it tends to attract. We addressed some of this in our post On Tradition and Reconstruction. However, there is more we can say about it regarding our strategy for proselytizing.
We are proselytizing to Gentiles, i.e., Europeans. Ultimately, we aim to return all Europeans to our classical religious tradition.
It is true that most organizations today have only attracted historical hobbyists, LARPers, and what I call anti-Christians. This is why our approach is critical of each of these trends within “pagan'“ reconstruction efforts. We do not put the ancient past on a pedestal and treat anything that the ancients did as some kind of benchmark for our current behavior or practices. As Cicero put it, we should emulate the virtues of our ancestors but be mindful that we do not inherit their vices.
The ancients were not perfect, and we shouldn’t think that just because our ancestors did something, that makes it perfect or even good. We have to be able to analyze their actions and use the Good as our guide rather than the past. Putting historical reconstruction as our guide is ultimately a categorical error. It places the past and history as more important than truth and the Good.
Next, we reject LARPing in all its forms. We do not and will not ever engage in any form of historical reenactment. We see these activities as purely secular, non-religious, and anti-thetical to the restoration of authentic forms of worship. In short, LARPing and obsession with historical periods has no place in a group that is genuinely seeking the divine, just as the modern military has nothing to do with war reenactors.
Lastly, there are the anti-Christians. I will say it plainly: we do not hate Christians or seek their ultimate destruction. We ultimately hope to transform them and lead them back to the truth through philosophy. We cannot do that if we treat them with hatred, anger, and contempt. Our victory is assured because the truth is on our side; we only need to speak it, and the souls trapped in the darkness of Abrahamism will be drawn to its light.
The Christians may see us as “evil pagans,” but we merely see them as wrong and misguided. There are many good Christians, and there are many things Christians have contributed to Western culture that are worth preserving. Our movement is ultimately a corrective one that seeks to restore Western spirituality to its original vitality that is based on Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.
Furthermore, hatred and anger are vices. Taming our anger was one of the primary pieces of guidance spoken by the philosophers. As Pythagoras says in the Golden Verses:
“And accustom yourself to control: first gluttony, sloth, lust, and anger
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Endure your lot with patience, whatever it may be, and never be angry.
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If any falsehoods are advanced, arm yourself with patience.”
Those who are motivated by hatred and anger are led further into generation and away from the divine by a lack of emotional control.
We have reason to disagree with Christians over their ignorance, and we may be upset over the destruction of aspects of our tradition, but to allow that to fester into anger and disrupt our souls is a far worse outcome than any material loss we have ever incurred by their hand. The world is ever-changing and temporal; all traditions may be lost through the cycles of ages, but we must always guard our immortal souls. Justice must prevail over emotion.
So, if we are not trying to attract historical hobbyists, LARPers, and anti-Christians, who are we trying to attract?
As I said, our focus is on Gentiles. However, we are attracting Gentiles who want to seek God. As Plotinus said, “Our endeavor is not to be out of sin, but to be God” (I. 2.6, 2-3). This means we want people who are sick of dogmatism and want the Truth. We want people who no longer want virtue signaling and the appearance of righteousness but the Good itself. And people who want to be a beacon of Beauty to the world both within their souls and in their actions and worldly creations.
So far, those are the exact people we have attracted to the Society.
Essentially, Neopaganism has proven to be more a "fandom" than an actual religion. A real religion can appeal to and accommodate whole families and communities. Paganism currently has nothing to offer an ordinary person looking for community support type organizations. - Link
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Your average little corner church can provide 500x the community support vs. typical pagan groups. Germanic paganism is the closest thing in the US that has come to actually appeal to reg. people but even then, Germanic pag. has very limited/nice appeal +limited source matrls.
This is certainly a problem within the modern world. New movements are struggling to gain a local footing in a world where we can access millions of people worldwide online. This isn’t just a problem for religious and spiritual groups; there have been declines in local organizations across the Western world for decades due to technology and globalization.
Despite this, groups like Pietas, Labrys, and the AFA have succeeded in their community-building efforts despite having very few materials and limited appeal to the average person. So it’s not an impossible problem but simply an obstacle we have to tackle by encouraging a network of home worship and using tactics like proselytizing to get more people aware that this is an option for them spiritually. In fact, it’s the modern reliance on the internet and weak communities that is the reason we need to be proselytizing and can’t leave our growth up to chance.
I am confident that if most people were presented with Romanism as a legitimate spiritual path with rewarding practices, community, and a lack of dogmatism and the blind faith required of Christians, they would flock to it en masse. We have already seen that there is a massive appetite for this as Gentiles have joined Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and Yogic schools in search of spirituality that is not found in the Church. The saddest part of that is that they are wholly unaware that they have such a tradition in their own backyard.
Taking over the little corner churches and turning them into temples is one of our stated goals and is more possible than most people realize. This is something we could realize within the next decade easily if we are determined and committed. We are not there yet, but those who have this vision should consider joining organizations like to Romanist Society and asking how they can help.
Secondly, I think what you are proposing comes from a good place but it conveys a fundamental misunderstanding of how Natural Religions work (vs. Revealed Religions). NRs always grow organically over time in a very LOCAL context. - Link
NRs are about (1) a particular people inhabiting a particular patch of land, and (2) the land itself and its Numina, and how the people interact with the gods and sprits of the land. Real "paganisms" must grow organically as meatspace communities rooted in specific locales.
Look at your own brand of paganism (Roman) and see how it developed over time as the greatest example to illustrate at what I'm getting at here. It all started as a household cultus for each individual Roman family, which eventually coalesced into community cultus, and then...
..finally, civic/state cultus. What you are looking to revive is something that took about 800+ years of slow-cooked development in a very specific fixed place. A genuine American NR will likely take at least 500 years to develop into something coherent and it will be regional.
There is nothing that says natural religion has to form locally over the course of hundreds or even thousands of years; that is just how they have developed up until now. But even if that were the case, we are not starting from scratch. The natural religion of the West has been bubbling under the surface of Western spirituality ever since it was driven underground. There have been countless movements from hermeticism, alchemy, magic, esotericism, theosophy, perennialism, traditionalism, and more that have kept the chain of natural religion alive in the West. It is a Christian myth that natural religion was conquered and destroyed. It merely became Occult, i.e., hidden from the public eye.
What we are doing now is not a reinvention of the natural religion of the West but merely a reformation of our current practices to conform with the natural religion that has bubbled under the surface ever since the late Roman Empire.
Our process for reformation will mirror how these practices developed in the first place. Natural religion begins in the home surrounded by the hearth and family. One Father can be the seed of the Gods in his family, and one family can be the seed of the Gods in their community. This is how we grow. There is no waiting for hundreds of years. We can accomplish in a few decades what would take centuries organically if we simply get to work and stop making excuses for why we can’t. This mindset that we have to wait for our religion to develop organically is leaving the survival of our religion up to chance. That’s a risk I am unwilling to take, especially when there is so much we can do to facilitate its growth and revival.
I’m sure many people told groups like Pietas, Labrys, Templvm, and the AFA that they couldn’t do it, but their existence is a testament to what is possible if we try.
What you are attempting to do is a top-down ideological-spiritual movement. Which is fine, but it's not NR. I think something like a "Platonic Church" would be more realistic and something more resonant with established American religiosity. Anything too LARPy is DOA.
Even then, the appeal with that is going to be all (would-be)priests and no laity (another common problem with modern pagan movements). Platonism is too complicated for the average person to grasp, much less find appealing or relatable to their everyday experiences.
I don’t use the term natural religion to describe our movement. The standards of what is and isn’t a natural religion are not set in stone either. Wikipedia explains it as a religion “in which God, the soul, spirits, and all objects of the supernatural are considered as part of nature and not separate from it. Conversely, it is also used in philosophy to describe some aspects of religion that are said to be knowable apart from divine revelation through logic and reason alone, for example, the existence of the unmoved Mover, the first cause of the universe.[1]”
We fit this definition. However, whether people want to consider us a natural religion or not is of little concern to us. Again, our goal is to seek God. Religions have to change with the circumstances of their time. Hinduism, for example, is another natural religion, but when faced with challenges from Buddhism and Jainism, they had to develop a more orthodox religion with more codified philosophy, practices, and beliefs. Adi Shankara, in his very short life, managed to reform the Vedic religion with his Smarta sect and Advaita philosophy. Much of what we consider standard Hindu practices and beliefs can be traced back to Shankara’s reforms 1300 years ago.
Part of the reason “paganism'“ progresses slowly or not at all is that many pagans are more concerned with rebuilding the past instead of looking at the modern landscape and responding to people’s spiritual needs today. They are lost in a fantasy about the past rather than adapting to the current challenges we face and providing solutions. If we are going to succeed, we need to fulfill the real spiritual needs of people today, not the people of 2000 years ago.
Where there is pain, there is an opportunity for someone to provide relief for that pain. People are starving for real spiritual engagement today. We live in some of the most shallow, vapid, and meaningless times in all of history. This is why people are turning to drugs by the millions and obsessing over brand identities, movie franchises, and money gurus. We are saturated to the brim with sophists. People are desperate for their lives to mean something, and through philosophy, we have the actual solutions to their suffering. Those who are philosophically inclined have a moral responsibility to help pull other suffering souls out of this Iron Age. We can all be that person. We don’t have to wait to be told we’re a saint or a purified soul to get started.
As to Priests and the complexity of Platonism, I think this is a great commentary on the problems facing Platonism in particular. Today, Platonism is too often a rational and not a spiritual pursuit. One of the goals of the Romanist Society is to simplify many Platonic ideas and present them to the common person in a simple-to-understand way. Our website doesn’t dive deep into complex metaphysics and confusing arguments around first principles. We try to keep things simple without losing the deeper meaning. Also, the books and other materials we are producing are all focused on real-life practice and not complex metaphysics. The problem of Platonism being too complicated for the average person is really an online problem and the result of many Platonists doing a poor job of explaining what they mean in simple terms. Most online Platonists are not even trying to reach a broad audience but rather prefer a very small niche community of insiders who “get it”.
Part of the goals of proselytizing is to learn to condense our ideas down to simple principles. We should be able to explain our position in roughly 20-30 seconds and have it resonate with a wide variety of people.
For example, “You’re a Romanist? What’s that?
“Romanism is a classical European religion that worships Jupiter and the Roman Gods. We use philosophy and spiritual practices to purify our souls and seek liberation from the cycle of generation.”
Every religion has to do this to be successful. For example, if you decide to join the Catholic church, a priest doesn’t dive into Aquinas and Augustine on day one. They start with the basics and encourage practice and purification to get people started. They teach about Jesus and how to be a good Christian, how to pray, etc. After that, they move to the Catechism, which is the simplified teachings of the church on all the major issues with many examples to help people understand. But even Catechism is relatively advanced. Most Catholics are not keeping up with the Catechism after their confirmation. As for Aquinas and Augustine, that is the purview of very few Catholics. Most will never read a page and could not explain the advanced metaphysical ideas behind even something as central to their faith as the Trinity.
Likewise, I don’t expect most Romanists ever to crack open Proclus or Damascius. It is the responsibility of those with a priestly disposition and soul to guide those who are not born with a mind for Philosophy. This is why being consumed with hatred and anger towards Christians does us no good. Those Christians are future Romanists if we can lead them to the Truth.
So this is where I circle back to my original question: Proselytizing to whom exactly? Intellectuals? Mystics? Regular people? Cosplayers? People looking for a fraternal type org?
We are proselytizing to Gentiles, which is to say, Europeans. We will always encourage people to seek their native traditions, but we are concerned here with our own people who have been led astray for far too long.
Some of those we will proselytize to will be Christians, atheists, Pagans, and intellectuals, but most importantly, we want normal, everyday people with families or those with aspirations to have a family. We will present them with a different outlook and a more fulfilling way to come to the divine and bring the sacred into their home. We are bringing a spiritual tradition that is in line with their ancient heritage, enlightened by logic and philosophy, and rich in spiritual practices that bring the divine into their daily life in a real and present way.
If they are not interested, that’s fine. Maybe in their next life, they will be ready to walk the path. If not, we wish them well in whichever path works for them now. King Jove has promised that we all will come to liberation at some point in time.
The only requirement we have is that they desire a deeper relationship with God and the Gods. The expectations of the laity are that they lead their families in the worship of the Gods and, when they are ready, seek the higher mysteries through philosophy and spiritual ascesis (exercises).
A note to mental wanderer: Thank you for the post. I hope you know that I mean no offense to you with anything I have stated here. As you mentioned, sometimes these types of discussions come off as more combative sounding than they should, especially when the questions are so good! I greatly appreciate the questions and hope I’ve clarified the perspective of the Society on these issues.
For the Glory of Jove