I have a friend who describes himself as a “Jesus-ian.” He says he worships Jesus but he’s not a Christian. This used to drive me crazy: Isn’t that like saying “I only sleep with the same sex as me but I’m not gay”? At what point to you get to twist definitions past what they mean?
…which opens up a whole possible conversation about definitions which I’d really like to get into, but is not the point of this post. This post is about religion.
I worship Kali. In terms of formal worship, I do so infrequently and imperfectly, but She is with me and a part of me (literally, via my tattoos), and I often worship informally. Through my relationship with Kali I have developed spiritual relationships with other Hindu deities, specifically Shiva and Ganesha, but also Lakshmi, Durga, and Hanuman.
But I’m not a Hindu. There’s more to Hinduism, after all, than its gods. I’m not a Hindu because I don’t believe in liberation as a basic goal of the human soul, because I don’t accept the Vedas as a primary source of sacred scripture, and because I don’t believe in a guru system nor do I seek to have a guru. Primarily, I think, I’m not a Hindu because I already have a religion: I’m a Wiccan. And while Wicca doesn’t in any way demand that you be exclusive to Wicca (it’s not monogamous), Wicca informs my ritual life and my sense of who I am as a spiritual being. Any Hindu ritual I do is ancillary to my core Wiccan practice, not because Wicca requires it, but because of who I am.
So if I worship Kali and am not a Hindu, I guess my friend can worship Jesus and not be a Christian. I dunno, it still kind of bothers me, I guess because there are SO MANY different kinds of Christians, so many different belief sets that are defined as Christian, it seems like he should fit in there somewhere; if nowhere else, as a “mere Christian,” to quote C.S. Lewis.
But the broader point is that a religion is more than its gods, although we seem comfortable defining religion as “the worship of ____.” Religion is gods, stories, practices, beliefs, goals, and community. All of these. And all of these are found, for me, in Wicca. That other gods are also a part of my life doesn’t actually change that.
