Faith and Freedom: In the Clink (Pagan Blog Project 2012)

It’s so early this morning for a rant!

My inbox held an article from HuffPost Religion about religion in prison, wherein a Pew Forum released a 50-state survey of prison chaplains. Many of the results were not surprising: Muslim and Protestant Christian faith systems experienced a growth in religion switching, religious counseling and other religion-based programming are an important part of inmate rehabilitation, and so forth.

But what struck me was the part about Pagan inmates. The Wild Hunt already wrote an excellent bit about Pagan prison chaplains, and they paused over the same part in the article that I did:

At the same time, a sizable minority of chaplains say that religious extremism is either very common (12 percent) or somewhat common (29 percent) among inmates. Religious extremism is reported by the chaplains as especially common among Muslim inmates (including followers of the Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple of America) and, to a substantial but lesser degree, among followers of pagan or earth-based religions such as Odinism and other small religious groups that many Americans may never have heard of. An overwhelming majority of chaplains, however, report that religious extremism seldom poses a threat to the security of the facility in which they work, with only 4 percent of chaplains saying religious extremism among inmates “almost always” poses a threat to prison security and an additional 19 percent saying it “sometimes” poses a threat.

Emphasis mine. Obviously.

Pagan chaplaincy has always been something I’ve been particularly passionate about. I think it covers both the “I really want to help people” and “giving people the freedom to practice as they choose” points that I try to cover when it comes to Pagan faiths. And I’m of the belief that a prison, just like any other federal- or state-run institution or establishment, should allow people of all faiths, including those that “many Americans may never have heard of”, to practice their faiths. Freedom of (and from) religion and all that Constitutional blah blah.

When a survey like this comes back, though, and states that religious extremism is especially common among Pagan or earth-based inmates, and when those surveyed are overwhelmingly Evangelical Christian… it makes you if those Pagans are actually extremists or if the chaplains’ views of Pagan (and Muslim) spirituality are clouded by their own, rather contemptuous viewpoints. And my skin prickles a bit.



I’ve noticed that, as a growing number of people, from those “on the outside” to those in prisons, discover and accept a Pagan faith (34% of prison chaplains report a growth in Pagan faiths), so does the argument that these faiths are “extreme”. These people tend to adhere to religious faiths that are in and of themselves pretty extreme, which strikes me as both odd and ironic. Although Pagans only account for 1.7% of the overall prison population, about 40,000 throughout the system, their level of extremism according to those chaplains who were polled was extremely high, surpassing even Protestant Christians (including those who tend to be Evangelical)!



I’m not saying that there aren’t extremists in Pagan faiths; in my years, I’ve come across a few myself. But in the context of this study, wherein the majority of reporting chaplains are some sort of Christian (and this is representative of the chaplain population as a whole – they’re overwhelmingly Christian) and 44% of those Christian chaplains are Evangelical, are they really able to be unbiased as to what is and isn’t “extreme”?

One of the definitions for “religious extremism”, which a quarter of chaplains mentioned, is incredibly telling: Extreme views are characterized by the “requests for special food, clothing or rituals”, especially if they are seen as “bogus or extreme, such as meat for a Voodoo ritual or a religious diet consisting of goat’s milk, vegetables and oatmeal with sugar”. Oh, that’s nice. So if the request isn’t something that you anticipate in your own religious faith, it’s seen as extreme. (Bonus: It’s also bogus!) And with a population as small as the Pagan one is, and as large the Christian representation remains, of course most, if not all, Pagan requests are going to seem bogus or extreme.

Fortunately, the instances in people believing there to be an extremist problem is slim, and the top-ranking extremist issue is intolerance toward specific races or social groups… as in, using religion as a cover or reason for your asshole tendencies. Inflexibility comes next, which makes sense for a lot of converts to any faith – if you’re new at it, you’re probably going to be rigid in your beliefs and practices. Specific requests are mentioned to a pretty irritating 28%, but those requests, as noted in the survey, are often accommodated.

“Accommodation”, by the way, is not elaborated upon, but I would hope this would mean you could get your raw meat for your Voodoo ritual, your religious dietary needs met, or your Sabbat celebration honored in some form (excepting a boline or athame, I’d imagine! It is prison, after all). Why is part of me remaining doubtful, though.

But this view – that Pagans can be and overwhelmingly are religious extremists, especially compared to a much more widely represented Evangelical Christian population (seriously?) – only makes it harder for the few Pagan chaplains that exist in the prison system. As I said before, the Pagan population is growing not only outside prisons, but inside it as well, and there continues to be an overwhelming number of conservative and Christian chaplains despite the need for representation by other faiths.

In other words, the supply of Pagan chaplains is not keeping up with their need. I understand this might partially be a “well, how many Pagan chaplains are there to go around?” issue, but as demonstrated in military chaplaincy, the chances of Pagan chaplains being hired in general is incredibly low compared to other faiths. Because it's, you know, extreme. And bogus.

In fact, despite the growing number of Pagan inmates, Pagan chaplains are still marginalized to “other religion”, which includes but is not limited to Pagans, at only 2%:



And if others keep up with this mindset that what is “different” is labeled “extreme”, we’ll be hard pressed to make any progress, either in chaplaincy or in our everyday lives. Which is especially frustrating because it’s a perception by other people, not even created by ourselves in the Pagan population.

Not usually, at least. ;)