It's been a while... I had top surgery finally in November and have been dealing with some motivation issues since then. But I at least have crawled out of the woodwork to talk about something that is marginally topical in that there are increasingly some weird takes about it.
Over the past twenty-plus years I've developed a sort of capitalization standard that I use when talking about words Pagans tend to use... and I capitalize pretty much all of it. Pagan? Capitalized. Witch? Capitalized. Warlock? Capitalized. Goddess? Capitalized. This isn't that weird in the Pagan community, although in a lot of cases people are just capitalizing those words because they don't know how capitalization really works.
In my case, though? It's a deliberate choice, and I capitalize these words when talking about them within the Pagan community but not in reference to things not a part of that movement. Me? I'm a Witch. Elphaba in Wicked? She's a witch.
There's a bit of a snarky movement against this, in which folks who do capitalize these words are criticized for Not Using Proper English, on the grounds that it makes us look nonacademic and poorly researched. This attitude is often also associated with some other killjoy beliefs, such as that we shouldn't be calling ourselves "Pagans" at all and should always use "neopagan" which is A Separate Thing Altogether. And I get it... I went through a thing several years ago where I was really adamant about using Proper English when I wrote about Paganism, insisting the whole world was laughing at us and we needed to respond by doing everything "right." I wrote an article for Witchvox in which I didn't capitalize "Pagan," "Witch," or any of those other words even though they explicitly had that as their standard (I merely wrote a note to them explaining why I wasn't going to do it and they let it through). In fact, around that time I was pretty obsessed with writing that way all the time, becoming entirely insufferable if anybody dared to so much as replace "you" with "u" in AIM.
What changed? I stopped looking at English that way. I started to understand that the obsession with using Proper English for everything was based in a tag team of classism and repression of unpopular dialects of the language, and that it would be better for everybody including myself if I just gave it a goddamn rest. That doesn't apply to Paganism exactly, but did plant a seed regarding the hierarchy of who gets to play with the English language. Here's what I ultimately concluded.
First you need to understand that Christians capitalize pretty much everything. If there's a religious group out there that plays fast and loose as fuck with capitalization, it's Christians. I have even seen blogs that lamented the lack of "proper Christian capitalization" because typically devout Christians capitalize damn near everything that has anything to do with God, and although it's often annoying, they do it for a reason. Capitalization of proper nouns is a tool of respect in that community and has been used that way since long before grammar, capitalization, and spelling had consistent rules.
This is improper English, if such a thing exists, but it can be a tug of war in religious studies discourse, where there is always vague strife between the comparative and divinity (usually Christian divinity) tracks of that field. Things like whether you should use C.E./B.C.E. or A.D./B.C. to talk about time are hot button issues because a great deal of that study is being crafted and controlled by, quite frankly, Christian supremacists. And that leaks into everything. If you use "proper English" to talk about Christianity, they consider that disrespectful.
What "proper English" Pagans do not properly address, in my opinion, is how the exact opposite is also true... the reason Pagans are expected not to capitalize "Pagan," "Gods," "Witchcraft," and so forth isn't just because it's proper English, but because doing so puts our faiths in the realm of "not real religion" among folks who have for a very long time used capitalization as a sign of respect. I'll show you a particularly egregious example from Billy Graham's website:
Indeed, Muslims who speak languages other than Arabic use “Allah” as the name of god. But as soon as the Christian begins to explain that the true living God is the Father of Jesus Christ the Son, the Christian is making clear that the true living God is not Allah, but our Heavenly Father.
[...]
Muslims do not speak of God as their heavenly Father. In the Islamic faith, Allah is not only a different name for god; the deity it designates is far more impersonal than the God of the Bible.In this piece, there is an extremely deliberate capitalization of God when it refers to the Christian God and de-capitalization when the same word could be applied to Islam. In religion, capitalization is used like this to make this point almost constantly, and going the opposite direction--de-capitalizing improperly capitalized instances of "God," "Father," and so forth--looks so awkward in a Christian supremacist society that it's hard to get away with doing it unless you are writing exclusively for other non-Christians. There is only so much lecture I can handle from my fucking aunt or whatever.
So when I am told that I need to stop capitalizing words referring to Pagan religion because it's "Not Proper English," I reject that, because if I can't get away with using proper capitalization when talking about Christianity, I'm going to at least equalize it and use the same conventions for my own religion.
"But people will not take us seriously if..."
Listen: People don't take us seriously because we're Pagans, not because of our capitalization. If capitalizing too many things made people think a religion was ridiculous, Catholicism would cease to exist, and yet here I am right down the street from St. Elizabeth's even still.
And it gets worse. Not only are people being dramatic about our capitalization practices, we're also being told that we can't call ourselves "Pagans" or call "Paganism" our religion.
We need to call ourselves "neopagans." Yikes.
"Pagan" is, well, a slur. It's been used for hundreds of years to indicate a member of a religion that is backwards at best and evil at its most usual, which is why it's wildly inappropriate to refer to believers of Indigenous religions as "Pagans" even if they kind of technically meet the definition. I meet the dictionary definition of a lot of things that you should not call me. Me using the word "Pagan" is a deliberate reclamation of a hurtful word that I reclaim much in the same way I reclaim "queer." Like other reclamations, the point--at least for me--is to say "you call me this which means that... well, I am that, and there's nothing wrong with it."
"You're a faggot." "Oh, I'm a man who loves men? No shit, I'm a faggot." There is of course a lot to unpack here. Having been a Pagan for over twenty years I'm acutely aware that there are plenty of people who genuinely have no idea that "pagan" is a slur Christians use to hurt people, but the same can be said about most reclaimed slurs. It also fits me better than any other word a Pagan might use... I'm not a member of a particular Pagan religion. I don't follow the rules of Wicca. Saying "you can't just be Pagan, you have to be something underneath that umbrella" is absurd. There are Wiccans, there are Asatru practitioners, there are people practicing Hellenismos, but I assure you, there are also "just Pagan"s, just as the existence of Catholics and Methodists doesn't mean there aren't folks who are "just Christians."
But one thing I really don't like being called, on an individual level, is "neopagan."
Now, if you call me a neopagan as a general label to include me in discourse about other neopagans, that's fine. It's important sometimes to make the distinction between historically "pagan" beliefs and the modern movement of neopaganism. I'm not ashamed of being a member of a new religious movement, and no, I don't care if you capitalize it. But policing that we all need to constantly make sure that "neo" is there ignores the power of that prefix and how it's used to undermine the credibility of movements, for better or for worse.
To use a flip side example (just because it's a really poignant example), when you think about the difference between a "Nazi" and a "neo-Nazi," what do you assume? Are you under the impression that neo-Nazis are less extreme? Less dangerous? Just a poor man's copy of the National Socialist party of World War II Germany? That's the power of a "neo." It takes whatever a group represents and then waters it down to a n00b version of it, implying incompetence. "Neo-Nazis? Ah yes, Nazi LARPers amiright?" That's dangerous thinking.
In the field of religion, it's mean-spirited thinking. The first time I saw "neo" weaponized it was against practitioners of solitary Wicca. Many Gardnerian or otherwise lineaged Witches have a problem with solitary Wicca, and some of those have devised the convention of referring to any non-lineaged Wiccan as a neo-Wiccan as a way of implying they are less-than other Wiccans. Again, it's not that it's never important to have a distinction, but the enforcement of always including "neo" in front of anything that happens to be a new version of a religion or a reconstruction of a religion regardless of whether a comparison is actually being made serves only to put that religion in the category of "less than" and imply that it is a watered-down version of it.
And you know... a great number of the people who are advocating the strongest for us to drop "Pagan" and go "neopagan?" I have no doubt they really feel that way about the religion/s.
Happy trails,
-- Setkheni
