ReligionWise

Analytical Approaches to Pagan Worldviews - Eric Steinhart

• Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding • Season 4 • Episode 9

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On this episode of ReligionWise Philosophy Professor Eric Steinhart joins us to discuss how his work on contemporary paganism challenges traditional boundaries in the philosophy of religion. We consider the historical limitations of the field, the value of including minority traditions, and how his eclectic academic interests have shaped his approach to religious diversity and philosophical inquiry.

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Chip Gruen:

Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host, Chip Gruen. Today's guest is Dr Eric Steinhart, who's professor of philosophy at William Paterson University, joins us to talk mainly about his book Contemporary Pagan Philosophy, but also just to think more generally about religious diversity and the complicated nature of religious landscape, particularly in 21st century America. This is not the first time that we've had a philosopher of religion on the show. If you remember, Tad Robinson, colleague here at Muhlenberg College, has appeared on two separate occasions, one in season one, to talk about the philosophy of religion, and another episode in Season Three where he talked about transforming his class on philosophy of religion into a class that is more about spiritual spirituality and philosophy, to kind of broaden the scope of that class and broaden the kinds of questions that it asks. And I would encourage you to go back if this conversation is interesting to you, and listen to those as well. Today's conversation is in the same vein in that it really seeks to broaden that conversation. It is the case traditionally that philosophy of religion is interested in not exclusively Western traditions, but the vast majority of the work is dealing in those traditions, in monotheistic frameworks, the way that the questions are asked and the types of materials that are considered have sprung up out of the Western intellectual tradition, and therefore are deeply interested in the kinds of questions that are asked within Christianity in particular, and then to some extent, in Judaism and Islam, obviously, in our pluralistic world, where we're much more aware of global diversities, we can find people who are interested in philosophy of religion who want to consider questions in other major world religions as well. Dr Steinhart takes that question further and really wants to address religious traditions that are not always on the top of mind when we think about religious community or religious belief and practice. If you're a long time listener of the show or follower of the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding, we really like to emphasize a radical diversity in the kinds of traditions that we consider so while we are deeply interested in Christianity and Judaism and Islam and Sikhism and Hinduism and Buddhism, and all of these things that you might find in a introduction to the world's religions. We also try to expand the conversation into thinking about, well in today's case, paganism, new religious movements, movements that might not have a large number of adherents, or movements that might not be organizationally, institutionally recognizable, in the same way that more mainstream religious communities are. All of these things, though, are ways to understand the world, think about the world, and number of adherence or popularity of a movement doesn't necessarily indicate its relevance for our contemporary conversations. You'll hear today, and Dr Steinhart takes this maybe even a step further, and wants to argue that there is a lot going on that is underneath the radar, but pretty popular, not just marginal or on the fringes, but that there's a lot of interesting things going on by relatively large numbers of people. His attitude is similar to ours here in the Institute, that if there are people out there believing and doing and thinking and making meaning for themselves in the world, that it behooves us as scholars to understand it, to think about it. Now the difference here is that while the questions that are the bedrock of most religious studies professors and the discipline of Religious Studies, those questions tend to be anthropological, sociological, historical, comparative, structural, those sorts of methods. Dr Steinhart is a philosopher, and so he's interested in questions of truth, in questions of not only what people believe, but why they believe it, and whether that has any basis in reality, much more philosophical questions than are often the case in a traditional religious studies classroom or religious studies department. So this offers a different perspective than some of the things that we do here on the on the podcast, and certainly a different methodological perspective than the one that I like to bring to bear on these conversations. A case in point in thinking about how we think about religion, when we think about religion, is that we invited somebody from the Raelian Movement, the Raelian community, to appear on our live in person event here on Muhlenberg College's campus. And this isn't necessarily the time and place to get into that belief and practice, but it's illustrative that we got an email from somebody who follows our work that said, basically, Is this pseudo religion worth even considering? Obviously, the community in question that day was not a part of the definition of religion, or at least the definition of legitimate religion that that this particular community member thought worthwhile or useful or deserving of analysis or empathy. I think there's much work to be done about inclusivity, not just about the things that seem normal and mainstream, but some of the things that are depicted in the media or depicted in popular culture as fringe. I will remind you in these times that we live in, that what is considered fringe, or what is considered on the boundaries is a moving target. We can look at various times in history and all of the religious communities that we know and are familiar with and might be members of were probably considered fringe by somebody at some point in in their histories. So that is not to say that every one of these marginal movements will be vastly successful and a major cultural player, but I don't think that we want to lead with prejudice or pre judgment about what worldviews we are willing to think about and which ones get dismissed out of hand. Please, as always, feel free to reach out with questions, comments. Please, like and subscribe. Go back into the archive, listen to other episodes, be engaged with the material as much as you can. So with all that being said, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Eric Steinhart, where we consider a lot of things that are not top of mind when we think about religion and religious community in 21st century America. Eric Steinhart, thanks for coming on ReligionWise.

Eric Steinhart:

Well, thanks for having me here. Great to talk with you, and looking forward to hearing your questions.

Chip Gruen:

All right, so let's just jump right in. So before I ask specifically about your recent work on the philosophy of paganism, I wanted to talk a little bit more about your academic interests more generally. So in our pre conversations we've been having getting ready for this interview, I've had the pleasure of learning about your eclectic interests, and really want to contextualize the conversation on the philosophy of paganism in those interests. So could you talk a little bit about the scope of your scholarship in teaching what you do?

Eric Steinhart:

Yeah, certainly, it's not just it's not just paganism, right? I'm interested in all the new and emerging religions that are that are appearing in the particularly in the United States, a little less in Europe and South America and but them too. I mean, we live in a period of great religious change, right? Things are really changing, and it's not clear how they're changing, right? Surveys like from Pew or Gallup or other places give you some sociological data, but they don't give you much explanation for why things are happening, for what people are thinking, right? And as a philosopher, I'm certainly interested in what they're thinking, not just in their beliefs, right? That would be very Protestant way to approach these new religions. And generally, they're not very Protestant. But what, what reasons motivate people to do the things that they do is my particular interest. Why, why is somebody at Burning Man? Why is a pagan out in the woods on, you know, one of the solar holidays. Why? What motivates people, you know intellectually in their minds to do these things? So I'm interested in all the new religions that are appearing and growing and multiplying in the US, and trying to understand them conceptually. What are their structures? What are their interests? And it's pretty wild. So I'm interested in, in what's happening.

Chip Gruen:

Let's contextualize that a little bit more in, you know, in sort of your your lived experience too, because your broad interests don't come from from nowhere, right? You are in in New Jersey. You've sort of grown up or had your formative years in the mid Atlantic in the Northeast United States. Can you talk a little bit about how your biography, your interests have affected what you're interested in academically? How does this all fit into the story of Eric Steinhart?

Eric Steinhart:

Yeah, I mean, I come from a very unusual religious background, right? I'm Pennsylvania German. That that's Deutsch. We're not Dutch. We're Germans. And, you know, the Amish are probably the most famous, you know Deutsch people. But there's, they're, they're a minority, actually. And Deutsch religion is very magical. It's very it's a very unusual form of Christianity. I suppose some people would doubt that it's Christian at all, even though, of course, there's the Bible and church and all those things. But you know your your your minister is an astrologer, and we have magical practices and magical specialists Brauchers, who were the benevolent magicians, and, you know, Hexers, who were socially malevolent magicians. And I mean, a lot of that culture is gone now. It still survives a little, but it certainly was in full swing when I was young, you know, in the 1960s and so that culture is a very different take on religion, right? I mean, there was magical stuff. I grew up on a farm in Lancaster County. There was magical stuff happening all the time. You know, if a horse got sick, you called the Brauchers and they took care of it. I had my natal astrological chart cast when I was 10 by three, three Brauchers. We had a poltergeist a ghost in our house that was unruly and needed to be talked to. So we brought in the the witch doctors. Brauchers are also called witch doctors. Not witches, those would be the Hexers, but witch doctors. So they came in, they did another term for the magic is pow wow. You know, they did not our term, a term that was given by the English to Deutsch practices because they seemed to resemble Native American practices. And yeah, the witch doctors came in and talked with the ghost and things settled down. You know, we had a dowser set our well, I mean, you just this was, there were, I grew up in a house with charmed furniture, you know, furniture painted with certain magical charms and symbols. My grandfather was a minister. He was, of course, an astrologer. And, you know, they did everything by the signs, you know, the signs in the sky. And my mother, my grandmother, his wife, was an herbalist. One of my great grandfathers was a Braucher. And so I grew up in this culture that seemed now, I think people would say that's all very pagan stuff, right? It just didn't, I didn't know anything in those days, but it was a world where everything had power. You know, there's power in rocks, there's power in trees, there's power in herbs, power in the power in the sun and the moon and the earth and the sky and the stars and the planets. And it was very animistic, animated world. And so I came into religion from a very strange place, right? And that has probably got me interested in all these other strange religions, which, which are American religions. I mean, America has a long tradition of, you know, I hesitate to say, like nature religions. But you know, you've got the New England Transcendentalists. You've got, actually, all kinds of magical cultures in the United States, not just the Deutsch but of course, there are African American cultures that are magical, Appalachian magic. There's just, there were just in the early days, especially so many other ways of being Christian in the United States than there are today, and those often had very strong mixtures of magical, animistic kinds of practices. Spent a lot of time in nature, grew up hunting, grew up hiking, you know, worked on a farm, and so I was really in, just immersed in this world of natural powers. And then that just got me interested, right? Well, who's doing what out there? And I became alert to that. So that's a little history that I hope explains it.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, and I think the other part of this that I that I kind of want to push on a little bit, is that, with your interests, you look around in the mid Atlantic and the Northeast, and, you know, you mentioned that there are a lot of these animistic type traditions, but there's just diversity of all kinds that I think most people don't see, right? That there's, there's a kind of, I don't know invisibility is too strong, right? But that, if you just put your ear to the ground, these things are all around you, even though they may not be in large number. So I don't know, it just, it just occurs to me, right, that this is one of the things you need to know what you're looking for to see that these things are actually around us. It's not just the Presbyterians and the Methodists down the street.

Eric Steinhart:

Yeah, I think you do need to look around and, like you said, you know, put your ear to the ground. But they're not. These things aren't, and people aren't entirely invisible, right? I mean, they're there. I mean, people know, for instance, about, you know, let's say Burning Man, right? I mean, even if people don't know much about it, or they think, you know, oh, it's just a music festival or something, which, you know, it's not, but they've heard of it, right? They've heard of pagans and, you know, Wiccans, and they, they might have false beliefs about them, but there are, and of course, I think a lot of New Age stuff is really common in the United States, right? There's anybody's going to know, I would think most Americans these days know about, like crystals and, you know, sort of these kinds of alternative medical practices, or meditation or yoga at least, you know, if you look at Pew surveys, right, it's, it's, you know, a large number of Americans participate in at least one of these kinds of activities, right? And many of them, and even, like evangelicals, right? So these things are there. They're not prominent in, let's say, the big news media. If you're looking for religion that gets national media attention, it's going to be white evangelical Protestants, right? But all around, I mean, there are, there are 1000s upon 1000s of, you know, metaphysical shops in the United States that that have crystals and books and things like that. There are hundreds, if not, I'm going to say many hundreds, maybe 1000 you know, like retreat centers in the United States where the some of which are quite large, which are engaged in all sorts of new religious act and spiritual activities, right? Lot, lots. Again, hundreds and hundreds of Buddhist places. People are aware of these things. They don't think about them a lot. And philosophers, really, philosophers don't think about them hardly at all, which is kind of surprising to me as a philosopher.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, so that's where I want to go next.

Eric Steinhart:

Yeah, sure.

Chip Gruen:

That in your your recent book Contemporary Pagan Philosophy, you don't really address too much the traditional boundaries of the philosophy of religion. It seems to me that this kind of work that you're doing is not routinely addressed in the field. So can you tell us a little bit about the history and contours of that discipline, and the assumptions that are in the history of that discipline that continue to affect the work in the field that you're a part of.

Eric Steinhart:

Yeah, it's, I think it's really sort of very strange, and I don't understand the sociology of the field very well. Nobody has written about it. I don't think anybody understands it. Certainly, philosophers were very connected. Have traditionally been very connected with religions. And in the United States, you find, you know, there are Catholic philosophers that sort of have a separate sphere. They have some of their own journals, their own colleges, their own conferences and networks, and then you get lots of sort of, I mean, the Protestant philosophers and then, but philosophy is generally devolved into a kind of fight between the so called, you know, naturalists and the theists, where the theists are generally represented as being white evangelical Protestants and the naturalists are some kind of atheists. There's no reason why this should be the case, except for some odd historical accident. And there certainly are a lot of people who, you know, mostly sociologists and anthropologists, who would say that atheism in the United States or in Anglophone countries is a kind of Protestantism, right? It's a kind of hyper Protestantism. It's a kind of apophatic Protestantism, and in that sense, you know, philosophy just looks extremely Protestant. Why that is, I find baffling. I don't know why philosophers don't just get up in the morning and look around and say, you know, Burning Man is really interesting, right? There's something to be said philosophically about that. Let's go look at it. I do not know, besides myself, of a single philosopher who has written about Burning Man, I find that just bizarre, especially given the media attention it's gotten, or about the new age, or, you know, New Age religions, or about spiritual but not religious people, or any or paganism, like there's just, it's just crickets, it's just silent. And that strikes me as very strange. And I wish I had a good answer to your question, and I could say, oh, it's because, you know, Christianity starts with the letter C, and philosophers really love the letter C. This makes no sense to me.

Chip Gruen:

I mean, do you think it has anything to do with the way that academic training goes? I mean, if you don't have people who do a thing, then it's very hard to get the thing started. You know what, you know what, I mean, I would guess maybe this is a way into that question. You know, your training, your dissertation advisor, I mean, he wasn't interested in, you know, philosophy of paganism, right?

Eric Steinhart:

No, no, my dissertation advisor, though was a she, it was Eva Kittay, and I did a dissertation on metaphor. But yeah, initially, sure, it took me a while to get into this stuff, but I got into it just because I was curious, right? And not because I had some, you know, urge to to do it. I just was looking and seeing all this stuff and saying, This is an enormous social and cultural change, right? Why aren't people writing about this? And you're right, there are startup costs, right? There are you gotta if you're writing an article, there have to be reviewers, and the reviewers are not familiar with what you're writing about, it's going to be harder to publish it. I certainly understand that. And, and I think you are seeing some people get starting to get interested in these things in philosophy, you know, I don't want to say it's just particularly, although maybe this is religious again, right? There's enormous interest in psychedelics and in one department after another, in universities, right from medicine to sociology to anthropology to biology to neurology, and again, if you look at philosophy, nothing. I mean a few, you know, maybe a dozen things, and they're all about medicine, but bioethics and things like that. But by and I mean, I can tell you, there's probably three philosophers who have written stuff about it, you know, generally and again, is it? I mean, I don't want to complain too much, but I do think philosophy has gotten very siloed into very narrow problems that it just keeps grinding away at. And I think those are just dead ends. But be curious. That would be my advice to anybody. If something's happening in the culture around you, look at it.

Chip Gruen:

I think, yeah, yeah, beyond, beyond that curiosity. I mean, it seems to me like one of the things you're doing is that you're, you're wanting to offer your substantive contribution to the field through thinking about the, for example, contemporary pagan philosophy, right? But on the other hand, you're wanting to change the field, right? You're wanting to say, hey, look like as you say, be curious, right? There's more out there. How is, I mean, aside from sort of being a better description of the world we live in, how is the philosophy of religion more complete as a result of the kind of work you do and you would like others to do as well in these newer movements, or, you know, less mainstream movements?

Eric Steinhart:

Yeah, I think, Well, certainly I think philosophy has a job to do, and the job is to understand what's going on in the world around us, right? And to understand how humans, we are, rational, social animals, how we're motivated by reasons to do the things that we do, right? And if philosophy is just ignoring, you know, the vast majority of what's happening culturally around it, then philosophy needs to change, right? And I do think that it is slowly starting to change. It might be generational. Another area right that is, you know, kind of religious that I'm interested in is, I think it is religious right. I'm interested in, you know, metal music, extreme metal music, like black metal, death metal, that kind of stuff. I think that that that is a religious community. I think that it's, it's pretty clearly a kind of religious community. I think it goes hand in hand with, you know, weird fiction, HP Lovecraft, those kinds of people I went to the gave some talks at the big Lovecraft convention in Providence last year. You know, 2000 people, right? And, and it would be more than 2000 people, except they don't have hotel space for more than 2000 people, they have to cap it, right? And the interest there is enormous. And being at that convention, I was just this is, this is all a kind of religious movement, right? And people are talking about Gods, they're talking about other worlds. They're talking about all kinds of things. There's, of course, big overlaps between, say, weird fiction, Lovecraft and extreme metal, right? And paganism as well. I want to try to understand, right? So, for instance, if I look at, so my next book is going to be about black metal and Lovecraft and religion, if I look at like black metal and Lovecraft and that kind of religious thing, and I look at psychedelics, and I look at the old, like rave, rave music kind of scene, which I think was, was very religious people would people would agree with me on these points. And I look at Burning Man, I think you see the emergence of a new kind of esthetic religion, right? Religions that are centered around extreme experiences of beauty, right? Instead of religions that are focused on, say, divine persons, right, on gods or goddesses or something like that. You know, we could contrast esthetic religions with theistic religions, whether they're monotheistic or polytheistic or whatever. And so I think, you know, I'd like to understand is this, you know, of course, maybe I'm wrong, maybe, maybe this is all just fad. You know, a fad, a trend, it's going to disappear, but it suddenly seems interesting, if you can see that there's something all these different, apparently different groups have in common, right? And does that suggest that you know people, particularly in the US are, are becoming alert to new ways of being religious, right? Right? I mean, that would I, I often get a lot of interest from Christians as well, because, you know, I'm always telling them, Look, your enemy is not atheism. Atheism is a kind of Protestantism, right? If you're looking for something that's a challenge, it's coming from somewhere else, right? Where exactly, I'm not 100% sure, but sure from esthetic religions, from New Age kinds of things, spiritual but not religious, right? The sort of war between Christians and atheists. That's an that's an inter Christian war, that's a war between one kind of Protestant and another, which is often why it's so bitter, right? But it's not, it's not really what's going on on the ground, right? I mean, atheists represent a very small fraction of the American public, and even though people who identify as spiritual but not religious, that's the nones. You know, if you add them into that's up to like 40% of the population. If philosophers and theologians and religious scholars are ignoring 40% of the population, they've got a problem. You know, they're not doing their jobs. So I would like to encourage everybody to get out there and start looking at what's going on.

Chip Gruen:

So as a scholar studying these kinds of traditions, one of the challenges that that I'm sure you faced, although you've addressed it a little bit in looking for commonalities, looking for, you know, a different way of categorizing, as you say, esthetic religion here, but one of the classical sort of problems with dealing with these groups is how diverse they are, that there's no centralized authority or shared text or discernible unifying characteristics that we can kind of easily put our fingers on. Does that pluralism present challenges? Opportunities? How do you address that in your work more generally?

Eric Steinhart:

Well, I mean, I think you know one thing is, a lot of these things have been addressed, more or less in like sociology and anthropology and Religious Studies, there are people who are writing about all these topics, right? Some more than others. But like, again, Burning Man or paganism. There's a large literature in sociology and religious studies on them, so I read that stuff, and I get books and articles, and of course, I have friends who are involved in all these things, and I talk with them. So yeah, there's no standardized texts or centralized authorities. I don't think that really matters, because even in religions with sort of centralized authorities, most of the people in the religions don't know what the religions officially teach, and they don't care. And so you know, they may participate and they may go to church, but if you ask them about what their church's particular doctrine is about the Trinity, they don't know, you know, and you're gonna get into some weird philosophy about identity and indiscernibility and stuff, and they're just gonna, you know, they don't care. And why should they? I mean, some technical issue. But you can talk with people. You the more you talk with people, the more you I mean, I'm always alert. I go to a conference. I meet a guy, and he mentions that he's going to a psychedelic ceremony at a retreat. Okay, I want to talk with this guy, right? I have a, you know, I don't know what a cousin by in law by marriage, who's been at Burning Man since the start. So I talk with him, and I'm very interested in what he I listen to him, interested in what he has to say. Made friends with some pagans. Went to some pagan ceremonies, right? I want to and Mormons, right? Let's not forget them, right? I've been to some I've been invited to speak at some Mormon conferences. I talk with Mormons. Have a lot of Mormon friends. Just meeting these people as human beings and talking with them, you start to learn more about what they're doing, right? And so there's some literature, there's right, but there's, there's nothing, at least for scholarship, at least starting out, it's like, yeah, there's no standardized I can't, I can't, you can't pull, you know, when I wrote the paganism book, I got like 50 books by various and I but I asked, I said, you know, is this a good author? Okay, that's a good author, right? I look around on the internet, yeah, that person's not trustworthy. Don't, don't read them. That took a lot of time that that's but that's basic research, right? I take it that's my job. So yeah, it is, it is. It presents its own challenges. But any philosopher can do this, right? If you're trained as a scholar, you can do this.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, it seems to me like there's a couple different things going on here. One is sort of a history of scholarship, the history of research, right, finding sources that are reliable. But the other part of it is just the very nature of the religious traditions you're interested in, or the movements, or whatever we want to call them. You know that they very often buck hierarchy, buck standardization, are not particularly interested, you know. So for example, you're, I absolutely agree with you about going and talking to Christians about Trinitarianism, like they but they know that there's something that they probably should know, right, that they know that there is something that is sort of the gold standard, even if they can't describe what it is, as opposed to the new age or pagan types of groups that you're interested in that know that there isn't a standard, right? It seems like there might be a little bit of a different methodological question going on, you know, whether there is an authority that you know that you're not well read on, or whether it's just no, this is a part of the fabric of our community, is that there is no right sort of central thesis that we often ascribe to.

Eric Steinhart:

Yeah, I think that's, I mean, that's, that's problematic in some cases and not in others. Like, you know, for Burning Man, there's Burning Man, yeah, right. And there are other regional burns, and there's a structure to it, right? You've got the man, you've got the temple, you have various, various organization, organizational you have the 10 principles of Burning Man. There's literature. It's a very that's a very focused community, right? And so there are fairly standardized structures and texts and things for that community. I would say the same thing for Wicca, right? I mean, Wicca has lots of variety, but you've got, you know, the ultimate one. You've got the god, the goddess, the solar holidays, on the Wheel of the Year, reincarnation, you've magic, you've got a fairly standard package, even though there's variations within that package. The same thing for Asatru, right? Norse paganism, I mean, you've got, now there, you actually do have texts, right? You have the lore, right, the old Prose Eddas and the Poetic Eddas and some other texts about the Old Norse gods, right? And those texts may have multiple interpretations, but you do have texts, right? So some of these things, some of these things, are fairly standardized, right? Druid Druidism, again, another kind of paganism, fairly standard system of ideas and practices. So they can all be compared with each other when you get and I'm thinking psychedelics as well the psychedelic churches, they are a little looser, and it's not clear how unified their doctrines are, but they have at least unity of practice, right? They're they're doing practices centered around, you know, preparing for a psychedelic ceremony. Take the psychedelic and then having integration, right? And they they at least have and they have some structures from like Santo Daime or Uniao do Vegetal, those religious groups. It's true that when you get those groups I've just mentioned, there's really not much problem figuring out what their commonalities are, what their structure is, what even though there's no central authority, you know, you can get you, those groups are fairly well defined in themselves. When you get to the new age, it's really unclear. It's just was, I don't know. Why does Reiki and shamanism, and and, and here's a crystal and yoga like I don't understand. I don't think anybody clearly understands very well what's going on in that space. We have a very big sort of new agey center near where I live, the Omega Institute, which I think is in Rhinebeck, New York, and I get their catalogs. I, I couldn't tell you that there's any common theme, or even that there are five common themes, right? I go through these catalogs, carefully circling the keywords, and they're, it's just like a random matrix. That's, that's a problem. And I don't know what I would say about that. I have no way to approach it. I would say with the spiritual but not religious, there are a couple of really good books that point to a fairly standardized system of beliefs that people who say they're spiritual but not religious have, right? They're not likely to believe in a God. They are likely to believe in some kind of universal energy, right, some sort of spiritual energy that permeates all things. They might call that God, but it's not a person, right? It's just energy. Everything's filled with energy, and you could talk about that as a philosopher, you can think about that, right? And people have to start doing that, so, so I don't think scholarly, I, there are challenges, but they're not that bad, right? Except for the new age. I got, no, that's chaos. I got, I have no clue.

Chip Gruen:

So at the risk of, you know, over generalizing here, I think it is the case that when we look at some of the traditions that are more commonly dealt with in the philosophy of religion, you know, Christianity of all kinds, even even Jewish and and, and Muslim philosophy is not unheard of. Right to be, to be considered paganism often emphasizes different kinds of discourses. So we've talked about you've already talked a little bit about about belief versus practice, materiality versus transcendence, the natural world versus the cosmic again, at the risk of oversimplification, how do philosophical perspectives shift when we're in a world of different discourses, right, where different kinds of things are emphasized than what we traditionally see in the field?

Eric Steinhart:

Yeah, I think that's a good question. I mean, certainly, an enormous amount of philosophy of religion is, you know, and obviously, I hang out with lots of philosophers of religion. I mean, I, and I don't want to paint the field as too monolithic or narrow, right? I mean, there are people who are doing great work to expand the boundaries, right? Yujin Nagasawa has a whole series of the global philosophy of religion. He was doing a whole global philosophy of religion project, really trying to expand that series. So he's doing great work. Andrei Buckareff also trying to do work expanding. And lots of other people that are too long to name list. Well, Dean Zimmerman trying to put together a project on studying the spiritual, but not religious, right? And so people are starting to think about these kinds of things. But a lot of philosophy of religion comes out of a very Cartesian mindset, right? The you know, reality is either mind or matter, and these are the two fundamental categories. And you get all sorts of variations on those categories. Everything is all mind, it's all consciousness. Or, No, it's all materialism. It's just matter. Or, well, we can be dualists. You know, sometimes minds get stuck to bits of matter, or we can be panpsychists, or they're really just this variations on the same two notes, right mind and matter. And if you get into these other newer religions, that's the first thing that has to go that dualism just has to disappear, because it's just not adequate to understanding what these religions are doing, right? And I think philosophers get trained in a very Cartesian mindset, particularly in philosophy of religion, right? And so you need to learn a new system of categories, and you learn that system of categories by studying the primary texts, right? You read Wiccan books, or Asatru books. Or, you know, study what's going on in psychedelic religions or at Burning Man, or, you know, contemporary other contemporary pagan or spiritual movements, and that's where I think the philosophy gets really interesting. I mean, I'm just, you know, the other stuff is just boring to me, right? I'd like to think new thoughts with new kinds of categories and new new networks of concepts, right? Looking at black metal, which is, you know, it's another interesting thing, right? Black Metal has always conceived of itself as religious music from the very start, when it started out as a kind, you know, in the early days of sort of Satanism or Luciferianism, or it's early pagan, you know, Norse paganism, that kind of stuff. It always conceived of itself as religious music from the very start, right? And most of the literature that's been written about it, again, by sociologists, anthropologists, religious studies, people, characterizes it as religious music, right? And those folks have written a lot about this, but okay, and it's odd to me that that philosophers have not since there is, you know, there is a Christian extreme metal scene as well. And I know, I know several Christian philosophers who are really into the music. And I'm like, why don't you write about this? They're like, Huh. It doesn't fit these old Cartesian categories very well, right? What's going on is goes often, I think, way back to ancient categories, right? I mean, I hesitate to use the word pagan for this stuff, but you know, ancient Platonism looms large in all these, and I mean ancient, like, ancient Roman paganism, like, like the people here are Iamblichus and Plotinus, and Plotinus has been Christianized, right? He's been baptized, right? So they're almost everybody writes on Plotinus is, first of all, a Catholic, and second of all, thinks that Plotinus is a church father, and this no, you know you want to say them, just, just read the Enneads, which is filled with magic, astrology, gods, temples, weird rituals, but certainly Iamblichus, right? Iamblichus is clearly not baptizable, right? He is hardcore into a worldview that is to a Cartesian mindset is almost an unintelligible right? What are the gods in Iamblichus, or what are these powers in the Iamblichus? They are not, you know, immaterial thinking substances, right? Even though there's a, you know, there's a contrast between matter and the immaterial in Iamblichus. It's not Cartesian, it's just, it's just weird. And it takes a long time to think about these things and to think them through, right? So, yeah, there's a new there's just different systems of categories that are here at work.

Chip Gruen:

So I want, I want you to help our listeners understand disciplinary difference here, because religious studies has been described as a sort of a Frankenstein's monster of method, right? It's like stitching together lots of different kinds of method and and trying to animate them. But listening to you, you know, I hear echoes of sociological, you know, talking about communities, right? Talking about people doing things together. I hear anthropology that you want to talk to people that you want to, you know, you talk about the work that is done on a lot of these groups is happening in sociology, anthropology and religious studies. So on the on the one hand, there is a kind of an ontology, I hear you talking about, maybe an epistemology, but explain how these philosophical question questions are really different than what might be going on when we're unpacking these traditions from from other methodological lenses or from other disciplines.

Eric Steinhart:

Yeah. I mean, certainly I have questions as a philosopher, I have I have questions about truth and rationality and justification, right? Those are sort of, you know, the primary questions for philosophy you know, going to be truth, value and existence right? If, if a Wiccan is talking about the god and the goddess, I want to know what those things are, right. And I want to have some clear definitions. I want to have a clear understanding. And I want to, I want to know what you know epistemically, they use to justify if they make existence claims about the god and the goddess, what? How do they do that? Do they make arguments? Right? Do they offer evidence? Right? And if so, what kinds of evidence and what kinds of arguments right? So I'm certainly interested, you know, I'm interested in the rational structure of all these things, right? I'm interested in, in finding, let's say, fact, this just occurred to me. Like yesterday, I was thinking about, you know, black metal as an esthetic religion, and I was thinking about psychedelics, and I was and I had it for a completely odd reason, to mention Burning Man in a paper. I thought, Oh, my goodness. These are all the same, right? These are all religions of beauty, and it was all from reading a paper by Zaehner called the "Menace of Mescaline" right, where he contrasts, you know, theistic mysticism with natural mysticism. Okay, fine, so I'm interested in the rational structure of these, these religions, and what reasons people have for believing that the things they talk about exist, or the things they say are true, or the things they do or believe are good, right? If somebody is, you know, practicing Asatru with the Norse gods, it seems to me that they've got to have some reason that they think what they're doing has some truth value, right? I mean, unless they just thought it was a joke, right? Which they usually don't, they usually take it fairly seriously, and that would seem to have some serious commitment, say, to the existence of Thor. All right, well, what is then I'm going to ask, well, what is Thor, you know, and why do you believe that such a thing exists, right? And I want to see what the books say, and I want to hear what the people say. But my questions are philosophical questions like, why is it rational to believe that Thor exists, or how do you define a god, right? Or why are these practices, practices that you ought to do, or practices that are religiously significant, right? And, you know, I'll be asking questions like, well, what is your ultimate concern, right? What is your what makes this religious, as opposed to just entertainment or recreation? So they're philosophical questions, right? I'm always, you know, in terms of method, my my goal is always to answer a set of philosoph fairly standard kinds of philosophical questions. Sociologists and anthropologists religious studies people too. I know from hilarious and sad experience, run away from the word truth. They don't want to ask is, like, somebody is, is this is this claim true? Does the god really exist? You know, whoa, we don't do that. I'm like, Well, that's what I do. You know, that's what philosophers are supposed to get paid to do. So I think, yeah, methodologically, the sort of epistemology that I take just really empirical, and it often is like anthropological work, right on that sense. But then I'm coming, I'm doing that work with an interest in a different set of questions, and I'm asking about truth value and existence, and I'm asking about the rational structure of what people are doing.

Chip Gruen:

So when you're you're asking those sorts of questions, I mean, and this is true in my discipline, as well as as yours, although I might have a little more to say on it, that you can imagine that there are other scholars that are reading your work, but then you could also imagine that there are practitioners who are interested in what you're doing as well.

Eric Steinhart:

Oh yeah

Chip Gruen:

And I would say, and this, I don't know that this will get me in trouble or not, but I would say that you probably, you probably are more likely to have practitioners reading your work, because they tend to be. Here's the trouble part, more highly literate and more inquisitive and more interested in these questions than say, you know, having a Christian in the pew read a book about the Trinity, right? That that they they might be more interested in these sorts of questions, sort of on, on average, right? So do you feel, I mean, a, How is your work received by those audiences and b, Do you feel any responsibility towards them?

Eric Steinhart:

Yeah, I think first of all, yeah, to answer your question, I think my work is read more by practitioners than, say, by other philosophers, because philosophers are so narrowly focused, right, and now they are more philosophers are starting to read my stuff, but if I get an email from somebody about it's usually a practitioner, right? The paganism book has found a surprising home in a whole bunch of seminaries, where they have lots of new students coming in who are really interested in paganism. And they're like, Well, what should I read? And somebody's like, Here, read this book, and they get very excited by it. And there's some like, wow, somebody's written about this who's not simply addressing a social question, like, how many pagans are there? Do they all wear shoes? Right? It's like somebody who's actually grasping, you know, seminary students want to grasp with theological issues, so they want a theological book, and so I've written that sort of thing. Similarly, for stuff I've written on the new atheism, it's mostly people who are into atheism or not trying to understand it. And again, often there are Christian ministers or Christian seminary leaders who are who are interested in that stuff, because they are interested in what's, you know, they are legitimately interested in what's going on on the ground, religiously speaking. So practitioners are, are very interested, right? Did that? Was that your own? The whole question?

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, well, and do you, do you feel any responsibility towards them at all?

Eric Steinhart:

Yeah, I do. I feel, you know, I don't. When I try to write these kinds of books and things like that, I generally don't, you know, I neither endorse nor condemn, right? I just try to understand what's going on and try to analyze and inform, right? So the pagan book, I don't, you know, I'm not endorsing paganism, I'm not criticism, I'm not, you know, condemning it. I just want to understand what you know rationally is happening there, right? So I do feel that responsibility, right? I want to, I want to be, you know, sympathetic, critical, careful, because I know that there are actually people who are doing these things right? And I want to, I want to respect them, respect what they're doing. And certainly, because a lot of these movements I study are marginalized, they can get a lot of, you know, shaming and judgment and false false things said about them. And so I don't want to say false things. I want to try to be truthful and accurate. And I am sensitive that there are real people involved, right? And I'm also sensitive to, I try to be sensitive, I think, to their, this is a little bit more arcane, but to their outlook, right? As I'm writing this black metal book, I realize the writing has to be different, simply because the conceptual structure of the black metal religion is different, right? This book has to be a lot more visionary, a lot more symbolism, metaphor, a lot more imagery, and it would be a very big performative, pragmatic contradiction to write a dry academic book about black metal. So I'm sensitive to the pragmatic side of that, right. You know, for the paganism book it's a little drier because, well, it's drier than the black metal book, but it's, it's that one, you know, it's just a lot of that is like, look, things have to be said, right? They need to be said clearly and simply because of controversies or inaccuracies that other people have made or stirred up. The black metal book just has to be, you know, wild. It's got to be black metal writing. It's got to be a very different approach. So I'm sensitive. I'm sensitive to that, yeah, and I'm sensitive to the people involved, right? I mean, I've gone to plenty of metal concerts and shows, and I can see that it's a different kind of community. So I want to be sensitive tothat.

Chip Gruen:

You it sounds like what you're saying is you want to be sensitive to the esthetics of the movement itself, in how you represent it.

Eric Steinhart:

Well, particularly with the black metal and weird fiction project, because this is these are esthetic religions.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah.

Eric Steinhart:

Right, and if you weren't dealing with the religion in the same esthetic way, right? That would seem to be a real serious methodological error. That would be a mistake, right? Again, it's like if you're writing a dry academic prose about a black metal concert or what's going on spiritually there, you've just missed the point. And then you're not talking about that religion. You're not talking about what is religiously happening, right?

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, so one of the questions I like to end with in these conversations is, you know, from my view, I'm open to the fact that I might be myopic when I'm looking at your work and looking at at at what you do, what am I not asking that you think is critically important? Is is important for our listeners to sort of understand either about your work or about the communities that you write about, or the ideas that the communities represent that you write about?

Eric Steinhart:

You know, I don't think that you've really missed anything. I mean, I don't think that there's a complete kind of set of questions here to be asked, right? That's what makes this very exciting to me, because it's, you know, next week, some new thing could could appear, and it could appear on my radar. And there's no fixed boundaries here, right? It's not like, well, you've got the Methodist Church, and you can go down the street and there's, there is the Methodist Church, and you can talk to the minister, and they have a fixed body of doctrine and practices. They've had it for hundreds of years. It's not changing, or at least not very fast. And so there's that's done. It's settled, right? This is all unsettled. It's the Wild West. It's, you know, it's not like I have I don't come to these things with a pre established agenda in my mind, I mean, I certainly have, over the years, built up a view from, just from studying these things, that, as I've said, that there's a kind of sort of inverted or strange kind of Platonism at work here, philosophically, like because I'm a philosopher, I have to do, have to do the philosophy thing. But that could be wrong and so, or that could just be that there's a new thing that's going to appear next week, and, wow, that'll be really interesting, right? So we're not looking at a closed field that has a closed, fixed set of questions, you know, that you might have missed one or something. This is just about curiosity.

Chip Gruen:

All right, well, I think that's a great place for us to leave it. Eric Steinhart, thanks for appearing on ReligionWise. This has been fun.

Eric Steinhart:

Yes, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Chip Gruen:

This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website, at religionandculture.com There, you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts, we look forward to seeing you next time.