[Editor’s Note: This essay is from the same title, “Enchanting Christianity: Christian Goddess Thealogy” by Mary Ann Beavis included in Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (Mago Books, 2018).]
In her introductory textbook on women’s spirituality in the western religions, Johanna H. Stuckey notes a new development in Christian feminism that she describes as “Revolutionary,” dubbed “Pagan Christianity” by one of her students:
A ritual example was reported from a Women-Church group: the ritual begins with a c alling down of the spirits of the four directions, a borrowing from Wicca and other traditions; continues with the reading of Bible sections that praise Earth; and ends with worshippers weaving a communal web … Such a ritual certainly pushes Christianity to its limits.[1]
A notable aspect of Stuckey’s “Revolutionary” Christian feminism is “to routinely use female language and symbols for deity and even to import goddesses from other traditions,” contrasted with a more “Renovationist” theology that uses “some female symbols for deity” and sometimes sees “deity in female roles,” or a “Revisionist” approach that seeks to use gender-neutral, non-oppressive words for the divine.[2] All are united by a discomfort with the maleness of the Christian God, with “Revisionists” cautiously seeking gender-neutrality, and “Renovationists” more adventurously adding language of the female divine to the mix. “Revolutionaries,” however, have gone a large step further, and use predominantly female language for deity, routinely use the language of the Goddess and Goddesses to express their relationship to the divine, and are comfortable blending Christian and Neo-Pagan elements in their worship. From the Neo-Pagan Goddess Spirituality side, Judith Laura devotes a whole chapter of her book Goddess Matters to “emerging Goddess figures in Christianity”—Mother Mary, Sophia, and Mary Magdalene[3]—as well as “more obvious Goddess veneration” in some forms of Christianity, notably at Ebenezer Lutheran Church/Herchurch in San Francisco, where a Goddess rosary service is held every week, and both Goddess and Christian images decorate the sanctuary.[4]
In my research, I have been increasingly interested by what Stuckey calls the “Revolutionary” approach, since I have often encountered it in my experience of Christian women’s spirituality: a Christian academic administrator whose fiftieth birthday celebration, held at a seminary, included a croning ceremony; a United Church minister who consulted Goddess oracle cards each morning before leaving the house; a meeting of a Christian feminist organization held in a Christian college, where the speaker, a Catholic sister, referred to the “Goddess times” before patriarchy, and everyone understood (and apparently had no problems with) what she was talking about. However, little research has been done on this development in Christianity, where the emergent religion of Goddessianism[5] (a term suggested by Judith Laura) and Christianity are being blended—a phenomenon that goes back several decades. The little academic analysis available has been the byproduct of research into Goddess Spirituality/Wicca/Neo-Paganism, and to be piecemeal, anecdotal, and, in social-scientific research terms, based on very few subjects;[6] occasionally, it is heresiological (Davis, 1998; Steichen 1991).[7] However, there is a relative plethora of popular literature pertaining to this kind of “blended” spirituality, some of it Christo-Pagan,[8] some of it Christian Goddessian without the Neo-Pagan aspect,[9] some of it esoteric/gnostic/speculative.[10] The distinction between Christo-Pagan/Wiccan, Christian Goddessian and Gnostic-Esoteric should not imply that these are three competing spiritualities; rather, they are more like intersecting spiritual paths where travelers often meet, share, and journey together for parts of the way. This is not a New Religious Movement, but part of a contemporary religious trend.
In order to understand the scope and characteristics of this phenomenon, I undertook a research project that involved a series of semi-structured in-person and telephone interviews with 100 women who self-identify as blending Christianity and Goddess Spirituality. The research sample was made up of women between the ages of 22 and 78, most of whom reside in the United States and Canada.[11] Interview subjects were located through personal contacts, Christian feminist organizations, listservs subscribed to by Christian Goddessians and Goddessians, Facebook Groups,[12] and a series of in-person interviews conducted at Herchurch in San Francisco in November 2012.[13] In qualitative social-scientific terms, this is a kind of “purposive sample” tied to the objective of the study, where the interviewees meet the criterion of blending Goddess Spirituality and Christianity. Due to the variety of strategies for locating interview subjects, the sample exhibits considerable variation in that it includes individuals occupying a spectrum of perspectives and positions in relation to the phenomenon that I have named Christian Goddess Spirituality (CGS). Only women (including one transgendered woman) were included in the study, since women are by far the majority of practitioners of this spirituality, although men are part of the picture; at this point, my hunch is that men (including Christian men) relate to the female divine differently than women.[14] In addition to the interviews, a focus group made up of volunteers from among the interviewees was held on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan, where my college is located (June 18, 2013). Of an initial list of sixteen volunteers, thirteen women were able to travel from various U.S. and Canadian locations to participate in the discussion.[15] The focus group participants were (1) volunteers; (2) who were able to meet on the specified date; (3) whose travel and accommodations could be comfortably covered by the research grant.[16] The focus group discussions were designed to complement the questionnaires by enabling interaction among participants, especially in “gaining insights into people’s shared understandings of everyday life and the ways in which individuals are influenced by others in a group situation.”[17] Focus groups are particularly conducive to feminist research, with their emphasis on experience, and their encouragement of interaction and the free flow of ideas among the participants. The Focus group was facilitated by myself as the Principal Researcher, guided by a limited list of topics for discussion designed to encourage conversation, and to allow in-depth discussion of issues and questions raised in the interviews. Like the interviews, the focus group discussions, which took place over a six-hour period of intense and wide-ranging discussion, were taped and transcribed.
The interview and focus group data, along with my own participant observation in CGS activities (primarily at Herchurch, where I participated in three annual conferences, a month of weekly Sunday services, and Goddess rosary prayers), were interpreted primarily by means of narrative analysis, which “examines the informant’s story and analyzes how it is put together, the linguistic and cultural resources it draws on, and how it persuades a listener of authenticity” in order to understand the role of CGS in the formation of these women’s spiritual identities.[18] In the case of CGS practitioners, the primary “listeners” seeking authenticity have turned out to be the interviewees themselves. Respondents frequently mentioned that they had little opportunity to speak about their personal spiritual lives, and welcomed the opportunity to do so—to “hear” themselves. This finding is reinforced by the fact that most popular writings by CGS women have a strong element of spiritual autobiography.[19] The data analysis also has affinities with grounded theory, an inductive method of analysis which seeks to discover social and psychological processes, in this case the psycho-spiritual experience of CGS women.[20]
Before sketching some of my preliminary findings, a few notes on terminology. Scholars often use the terms “goddess feminism,” “feminist spirituality,” and “goddess spirituality” (or “feminist goddess spirituality”) interchangeably (e.g., Eller, 1995),[21] and although most of the women interviewed for my project self-defined as feminist, a significant minority did not like to use the term, or did not relate “feminism” to their spirituality. Thus, the term Goddess Spirituality is more encompassing of a range of women’s experiences than formulas that incorporate feminism. All of the women interviewed regarded the term “Goddess” positively, although some were more comfortable speaking of the “female/feminine divine” or “sacred feminine.” Some of the interviewees considered themselves as Christian-Wiccan or Christo-Pagan, but many did not regard these terms as descriptive of their spiritualities, although they were not averse to them. Another terminological issue is what to call this phenomenon that I’ve called “blending,” or, as Giselle Vincett calls it, “fusing.”[22] In academic discourse, terms like “syncretism,” “bricolage,” “hybridity,” “interspirituality,” “hyphenated Christianity” or “multiple religious belonging” are used to describe the mixing and matching of elements from distinct religious traditions, although none of them completely fits the practitioners of CGS. While some genuinely do consciously synthesize elements of Christianity and Goddess Spirituality into a more or less coherent spirituality, others experience them side-by-side, attending church on Sunday and engaging in Goddess-related activities privately, or in group settings. The attitude to religion here is less like the compartmentalized notion of separate “religions” in the west than it resembles the East Asian attitude, where traditions which “may seem quite opposite to each other” (e.g., Taoism and Confucianism), but in fact “co-exist as complementary value systems …, and a person’s thought and actions may encompass both streams.”[23] Perhaps “complementary religious practice” would be the best way to describe it.
To date, only one social-scientific researcher, Giselle Vincett, has written about CGS at any length,[24] as part of a larger study involving both Christian and Goddess feminist ritual groups in the U.K. In the course of her research, Vincett spoke to twelve women who combined Goddess Spirituality and Christianity; her work on Quaker Pagans (“Quagans”), generated by the same project, was based on four U.K. women, supplemented by Quagan email lists and blogs.[25] Although the numbers are small, it is significant that Vincett’s overall sample size was 50, meaning that 32% of her interview subjects were either Christian or Quaker “fusers.” In view of brevity of the journal article format, and for heuristic purposes, I will be comparing Vincett’s findings to my own preliminary analysis of my interview transcripts.
Due to my much larger pool of respondents, the use of purpose sampling, and my different geographical focus, the women interviewed for my study show a wider age range of twenty-two to seventy-eight, in contrast to Vincett’s “late twenties to their sixties”.[26] Vincett describes her respondents as all “white and middle class.”[27] While the majority of my interviewees did fall into this category, a minority were of Asian, African, Latina or First Nations ethnicity. Vincett describes her interviewees as tending to be “well educated,” with many holding “more than one higher educational degree.”[28] In general, this holds true of my respondents in that most of them had some post-secondary education, including some advanced degrees (M.A. and Ph.D), but a few had only high school, and one had never completed high school. Since Vincett was specifically studying women in feminist groups, all of her subjects self-identified as feminist, whereas a significant minority of my respondents did not consider themselves to be feminist. Unlike Vincett’s respondents, many of my interviewees did not belong to organized Goddess or Christian feminist groups and were widely geographically dispersed, with some residing in big cities like Toronto, Chicago or Los Angeles, and some living in isolated rural areas. Like some of Vincett’s subjects, many of my respondents were church-goers, although unlike Vincett’s “fusers,” not all my churchgoing interviewees came from “liberal denominations,” and a many were Catholic.[29] There was a surprising lack of correspondence between geographical location and access to Goddess Spirituality or CGS groups; some big-city dwellers felt quite spiritually isolated, while some women living in smaller—even rural—centres were members of thriving, nurturing and congenial spiritual communities of various kinds. Others relied on web-based networks such as listservs and Facebook Groups. However, many CGS practitioners are fairly solitary, usually by necessity, although sometimes by choice. Whether they belong to a church, an alternative spirituality group, both, or neither, the vast majority are discreet about whom they tell about their spiritual orientation. CGS practitioners may meet with strong disapproval from both Christians and Goddessians/Wiccans/Neo-Pagans, as well as from acquaintances, family and friends.
All of Vincett’s respondents were Christians who had “fused” Goddess Spirituality; none were Goddessians who chose to blend Christianity into their spirituality. Although my interviewees mostly followed this pattern, I interviewed one young woman who had been brought up Wiccan, and had chosen to pursue a Pagan-Christian path partly because of the stability a church community offered relative to the coven she had belonged to growing up. Another interviewee had self-identified as Wiccan growing up, but was currently very involved in earth-based Christian theology and is now an ordained minister in a liberal Christian denomination. I also interviewed two women from Jewish families who found that CGS was a better spiritual “fit” than Judaism, and one who had been raised by a Christian mother and a Muslim father, and whose spirituality at that time could be described as Muslim-Christian-Goddessian.
(To be continued)
[1] Johanna H. Stuckey, Women’s Spirituality: Contemporary Feminist Approaches to Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Goddess Worship (Toronto: Inanna, 2010), 121.
[2] Ibid., 113.
[3] See Mary Ann Beavis, “The Deification of Mary Magdalene,” Feminist Theology 21,2 (2013): 145-54.
[4] Judith Laura, Goddess Matters: The Mystical, Practical and Controversial (Kensington, MD: Open Sea, 2011).
[5] Ibid., 27-32.
[6] Giselle Vincett, “Feminism and Religion: A Study of Christian Feminists and Goddess Feminists in the UK.” PhD Dissertation, Lancaster University, UK, 2007; Vincett, “The Fusers: New Forms of Spiritualized Christianity.” In Kristen Aune, Sonia Sharma and Giselle, eds., Women and Religion in the West: Challenging Secularism (London: Ashgate, 2008), 231-45; Vincett, “Quagans: Fusing Quakerism with Contemporary Paganism,” Quaker Studies 13,2 (2009): 220-37.
[7] E.g., Philip G. Davis, Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality (Dallas: Spence, 1998); Donna Steichen, Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991).
[8] Joyce and River Higginbotham, Christopaganism: An Inclusive Path (Woodbury, MN: Llewelyn, 2009); Carl McColman, Embracing Jesus and the Goddess: A Radical Call for Spiritual Sanity (Gloucester, MA: Fair Winds, 2001); Nancy C. Pittmann, Christian Wicca: The Trinitarian Tradition (Self-published by author, 2003); St. Clair, Adelina, The Path of a Christian Witch (Woodbury, MN: Llewelyn, 2010); Mark Townsend, Jesus Through Pagan Eyes (Woodbury, MN: Lleweleyn, 2012).
[9] E.g., Jann Aldredge-Clanton, In Search of the Christ-Sophia (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1995); Lucy Reid, She Changes Everything: Seeking the Divine on a Feminist Path (New York: T. & T. Clark, 2005).
[10] E.g., Timothy and Peter Gandy, Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians (New York: Three Rivers, 2001); Margaret Starbird, The Goddess in the Gospels: Sacred Union in Christianity (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Company, 1998). There is also an emerging literature on the related topic of Jewish Goddess Spirituality, e.g., Melissa Raphael, “Goddess Religion, Postmodern Jewish Feminism, and the Complexity of Alternative Religious Identities,” Novo Religio 1 (1998): 198-215; Jenny Kien, Reinstating the Divine Woman in Judaism (Boca Raton, FL: Universal, 2000); Jill Hammer, Hammer, Jill. “‘To her we shall return:’ Jews Turning to the Goddess, The Goddess Turning to Jews,” In Elise Goldstein, ed., New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2008), 22-35.
[11] One interviewee is Australian; another is Canadian, living in France; a third is British, living in Scotland. Interestingly, the respondent in France belongs to the French Ordre de la Dea, and she reports that several members of the order blend Christian and Pagan identities. The number is approximate, as, at time of writing, I am currently open to scheduling additional interviews.
[12] Internet resources specifically mentioned were the Goddess Scholars Research Listserv; Witchvox; Women’s Theological Institute; Spiral Door; Circle of Aradia; Cultivating Women’s Spirit and Empowering the Feminine; Goddess Christians; Christian Pagan Fellowship; Goddess Christians; Christian Pagan Circle; Coven of Christ; Trinity Circle; Catholic Network for Women’s Equality; Amazon Clergy; Feminist Spiritualty; Jann Aldredge-Clanton Blog.
[13] For further information on Herchurch, a Lutheran (ELCA) feminist church whose mission is ‘to embody and voice the prophetic wisdom and word of the Divine Feminine, to uplift the values of compassion, creativity and care for the earth and one another’, see http://herchurch.org/ (accessed February 12, 2014).
[14] E.g., Tim Ward, Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess (N.p.: O-Books, 2007).
[15] It should be noted that one of the focus group participants was Canadian, but living in France. Five were American citizens, and eight were Canadian; however, three of the Canadians were then residing in the U.S.
[16] The research project was funded by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
[17] On the use of focus groups in feminist research, see Esther Madriz, “Focus Groups in Feminist Research,” in N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln, eds., Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials (Thousand Oaks/London/New Delhi: Sage, 2003), 263-88.
[18] C.K. Riessman, Narrative Analysis (Thousand Oaks/London: Sage, 1993), 2.
[19] E.g., Jann Aldredge-Clanton, Breaking Free: The Story of A Feminist Baptist Minister (Waco, TX: Eakin, 2002); Changing Church: Stories of Liberating Ministers (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011); Lana Dalberg, Birthing God: Women’s Experiences of the Divine (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths, 2013); China Galland, Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna (London: Penguin, 1990); Trish McBride, Faith Evolving: A Patchwork Journey (Wellington, Aoteotara, NZ: Trish McBride, 2007); Sandra Pope, Growing Up without the Goddess: A Journey through Sexual Abuse to the Sacred Embrace of Mary Magdalene (Self-published by author, 2008).
[20] See http://onlineqda.hud.ac.uk/glossary.php#G/, accessed February 12, 2014.
[21] E.g., Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America (Boston: Beacon, 1995).
[22] Vincett, “Feminism and Religion,” 159-91.
[23] Mary Pat Fisher, Living Religions (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1999), 178.
[24] Vincett, “Feminism and Religion.”
[25] Vincett, “Quagans.”
[26] Vincett, “Fusers,” 135.
[27] Ibid., 135.
[28] Ibid., 135.
[29] Ibid., 136.
[Author’s Note: This essay is a revision and update of my article “Christian Goddess Spirituality and Thealogy,” Feminist Theology 24,2 (2016): 125-38; for the complete study, see my Christian Goddess Spirituality: Enchanting Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2015).]
(Meet Mago Contributor) Mary Ann Beavis, Ph.D.