American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement

American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement. By Jennifer Snook. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 221, preface, photographs, notes, glossary, index. $29.95 paper.)In a cultural climate where the charge of racism can serve as a final, decisive diagnosis that closes down all discussion, there is a particular need for scholarship that resists such intellectual shortcuts. The study of spiritual movements with programs explicitly based on ethnic identity is especially fraught with the temptation to identify them as racist and be done with it. Jennifer Snook's American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement is a welcome antidote to this tendency.Snook's book is a result of the author's long-term involvement in American Heathen communities as a researcher and practitioner. This insightful and detailed study, based on fieldwork, interviews, and online research, addresses a few of the most pressing aspects of contemporary religious movements and Heathenry in particular: the challenges of recreating a past lifestyle, the movement's relationship to other religious traditions, the influence of the Internet on spirituality, and the meanings of gender and race. Snook paints a complex picture of a network of communities engaged in the construction of divergent and sometimes conflicting meanings of what it means to be Heathen. This picture has depth as well as width: Snook takes care to explain how the movement has changed over the past decades and how these changes were reflected in the personal journeys of its members. Snook's analysis includes descriptions of concepts central to the Heathen worldview and a useful glossary.Following an introductory discussion of the movement and relevant scholarship, Snook's second chapter investigates identity production and the boundary-constructing activity of American Heathenry. Like many emerging religious communities, contemporary Heathenry distinguishes itself from Christianity, equating it with the homogenizing and degrading forces of modernity. The project of Heathenry is in many ways a project of undoing the perceived harm of Christianity. Snook goes beyond the customary identification of Christianity as a pagan movement's most salient Other in order to discuss Heathenry's fraught relationship with Wicca and Neopaganism. Many Heathens are critical of what they see as the fuzziness of Wiccan thought and the self-indulgent drama of its adherents. Heathenry, by contrast, is distinguished by its rigor and responsibility. At the same time, many come to Heathenry from Wicca and other "softer" versions of paganism, and Wiccan influence on Heathen rituals often proves difficult to shed.In the third chapter, Snook describes how Heathens discover or recover a spiritual tradition and a corresponding lifestyle. For Heathens, spirituality has roots in the distant Germanic past. With access to this past restricted, if not impossible, different approaches to the project emerge, notably the clashing attitudes of rigorous reconstructionists and of Neo-Heathens focused on personal spiritual journeys.The fourth chapter investigates the influence of online communication on Heathen communities. …