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Cringe Is the Cost of Commitment
Most religions are aging.
Young people aren’t particularly atheist, but they increasingly tend to be “nones:” whatever their spiritual interests, they don’t care to join organized groups. So, congregations get older and fret about retaining their members’ grandchildren.
As the prototypical “disorganized religion,” Paganism is dodging that demographic crisis. Solitary or household practice, punctuated by the occasional open circle or festival, has been the norm for most Pagans since at least the 90s. Paganism has no centralized organization. It’s a loose, heterogeneous current of spiritual resources. Both organized traditions and solitaries draw from and contribute to it at their discretion. Young people are just as interested in witchcraft today as their Silver RavenWolf-reading predecessors were a quarter-century ago. If it turns out to be a shallow interest for most of them, so what? The resources are there for those who turn out to be serious.
Experimenting with witchcraft, though, doesn’t imply actually publicly committing to a Pagan identity. Young witches often take a defensive tone. Their practice has to be justified in secular terms, often LGBT politics, intersectionality, or anti-racism. Philosophically, they mistrust some older Pagans’ second-wave feminism and deep ecology. They get uncomfortable seeing the kind of eclecticism…