Ministers and Conversion January 23, 2009
Posted by Ian in Christian Thought, Community, Comparative Religion, Ethics, Modern Polytheism, Religion and Faith, Social Change, Wicca.trackback
I’m going to put off my to-do list a little because I want to look at this, which was posted over at the Wild Hunt early this week about Rev. Hovey’s conversion from Wicca to Christianity. Do take a quick look at it, because I don’t want to spend too much time summarizing it and, well, there is a lively discussion along with the post.
In short: the letter details why she has decided to leave the Wiccan faith and begin a ministry centered on the Bible and Jesus Christ. Her reasons reduce to one basic problem she has with Wiccan religious practice, namely what she sees as an absence of serious ethical content.
I want to begin this with an act of readerly generosity and take the letter at face value, not trying to read into it any number of personality flaws on the part of Rev. Hovey. I don’t know her and it feels more than a little disingenuous to engage in psychological portraiture. Moreover, I want to assume that the letter reflects genuine heartfelt struggles she has had in serving as Wiccan minister to her congregation.
With that granted, there is a tension in the letter that I cannot resolve in my own terms. By her own description, she is leaving her ministry of the God and Goddess for that of Jesus because the worship of the God and Goddess lacks a coherent ethical foundation, because it leads to selfishness on the part of its practitioners.
What’s missing here? For one, any reference to her personal sense of devotion to either the God and Goddess or to Jesus Christ. To my mind, faith is about making good on the relationship between you and the spiritual forces you honor through your practice. The practice itself is secondary to that relationship, acquires value only insomuch as it makes manifest (in subtle or not subtle ways) that relationship.
That is the ‘ethics’ at the center of religious practice. A religion doesn’t and shouldn’t be a substitute for ethical consideration in general. A religion is not an ethical engine, in which you input a situation and output a course of action.
Religion is one expression of ethics in general, which relates to proper comportment in the world. As such, the ethics developed in religious matters should inform and deepen ethical action in general. Since the relationship expressed in religious practice is profound, so too should it play a powerful role in how one acts. Just as you would take a friend’s feelings in mind, so too you take spiritual matters in mind when you act.
From my perspective, you don’t convert to bring about a change in your relationship with other people, but in order to manifest a change in your relationship with the spiritual forces in your life. If Rev. Hovey converts to Christianity because of a need to deepen her relationship to Jesus, then all the more power to her.
The letter, though, paints a conversion based on being able to access a more developed body of ethical injunctions. If that is the case, then her choice of the Christian ministry is discomfiting and crass, false to the Church she left and false to the Church she now founds.
If she has not lost the faith that led her to be a pagan minister, the challenge facing her should be how to bring a deeper ethical engagement into Wiccan practice, thereby serving both her God and Goddess but the community of those who also serve them. If that requires abandoning the church, seeking after those in her own life first, then blessed she be on her search.
If she never had faith in the God and Goddess, then her motivations for beginning her new Church are suspect and she ought to take time to reflect upon them before launching into another ministry, lest she repeat her mistakes again.
If she has a deep faith in Jesus, then she owes it to her present and past ministry to make that clear, to not hide behind easy talk of ethics. What brings her to Jesus and not the Lady? If she thinks the practices she once engaged in caused harm, she ought to consider long and hard how she participated in that cycle of harm.
If she has faith in neither, she has no place in either ministry and ought to reflect on what she hopes to accomplish and find the appropriate secular avenues to pursue them.
A minister, by their position, has a duty not just to the spiritual forces they worship, but to the community they serve. To treat that lightly is to make a mockery not just of the faith, of the position, but of the community served.
If she is still seeking after her faith, if she has not found a settled spiritual home but has faith in its existence, she has no place claiming to be a teacher. There is nothing wrong with sincere seeking, but it is antithetical to being a minister, which is about making a home for spirit.
A minister can grow and deepen in their faith, make connections to those of other faiths, but for them to change their faith is a matter of great import and never undertaken lightly. At the center of that conversion must be the minister’s relationship to spirit. All else is secondary to that for it is upon that conection that a ministry rests.
Her struggles were that she wasn’t making the money needed to buy her big luxuries in life. Posing as a high priestess wearing a minister collar almost 24/7 she was very good at making everyone believe she truly cared for their spiritual growth in the wiccan faith. However, as time went by things that were free became not so free and quite damn expensive even if you were in the middle of it. Her spiritual counseling sessions more often than not became material for her metaphysical sermons exposing many people’s personal issues to the general public. While she began FCOW (First Church of Wicca) as accepting of all, as time progressed, those who weren’t making enough bucks or contributions to the Church were quickly kicked to the curb. People who questioned her statements were chastised in front of everyone and she made it quite clear to everyone that anyone who did this their spirituality as a whole was questionable.
This woman did more harm than good and it will be a long time before many heal from her egotistical control freakish ways.
Yes, I am bitter – sorry.
I am saddened to hear the details, saddened, too, by how familiar a story this is among spiritual communities of all stripes. Thank you for taking the time to share your experiences with her church.
I don’t want to get too much more into the details of it here, because I feel like a fuller discussion of the issue in a public forum ought to be thoughtfully moderated and involve multiple perspectives, things which this blog (with the limited time I have to invest in it) is not well-suited to do.
Your post raises many important issues, though, that I think need to be addressed particularly and generally. I hope that you find the proper path to resolve the particulars for I am too distant to speak to those; in the near future, I would like to consider those issues more generally.
I think someone who was raised Jewish (Hovey made this statment on the TV program) I think it would take some time perhaps many years to understand the teachings of Christianity before forming your own church.
As an outsider, I want to both give her the benefit of the doubt without giving her a free pass on questionable seeming behavior. So I both want to agree with the concern and qualify it.
I don’t mean to qualify it in the sense of ‘taking the other side’ so much as to make clear how narrow my window into the situation is and how the real situation could be quite different than I envision it (though all the while having my gut reaction be one of sincerely doubting her motivations).
I want to emphasize that her manner of expressing herself, creating this window, makes a poor case for her decision, and that if it is a full accounting, then she’s making a pretty shoddy decision. If it isn’t a full accounting, then she owes many people (not me, really) a much fuller accounting.
I don’t want to say “this is what she is doing and it’s wrong” but “this way of portraying what you are doing is inadequate, is there more to this?”
Even in the absence of a direct conversation with her, I don’t feel it is my place to paint her one way or another, but reveal the limits of her account, leave an invitation out for her to respond and answer those questions more deeply.
Christianity, especially some Protestant varieties, do emphasize the immediacy of revelation over any length of ‘mere’ education. The Christian fold has many a preacher whose legitimacy rests upon their claims of revelation and the good they bring about in service to that revelation.
The mere absence of time spent with Christianity does not exclude her claims to preacher-ly authority. But it does look suspicious and questionable, and her framing of her ‘conversion’ does little to allay that. She should expect people to approach her cautiously as a spiritual leader, and people should approach her cautiously in that role.
I do wonder what will happen in terms of the priest’s collar–does it stay or go? While it is a quirky affectation for a pagan clergy-woman, it really begins to border on disrespect and dishonesty for a christian minister in her position.