I blame it on my evangelical roots, but as I contemplate my own spirituality and its glacial slide toward paganism, there’s a significant portion of my mind that wants to create a distinction between a god versus a deity. I mean, I get it: deity is just another word for a god. When you look them up in the dictionary, deity means a god or goddess. They’re synonyms of each other, and people use them interchangeably.
But I grew up Christian. And evangelical. God meant God, with a big ‘G’, and there was only the one. Christianity is inherently monotheistic and has been since its inception 2000 years ago. Plus, I live in the US, where Christianity has been the predominant (or at least the loudest) religion. So when you hear someone say, “God,” here, you usually know who they’re referring to.
More and more, though, I’ve come to consider myself atheo-spiritual — atheist with a healthy dollop of spirituality mixed in. And I realized a while back that my atheism is a direct response to the kind of right-wing, fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity I grew up under (something I thought I’d already written about here but haven’t and so will at some point in the future). Because of that, I’ve realized that means I’m actually open to spirituality as a whole and, by association, paganism and polytheism.
But here’s the rub — I’m not a fan of the term ‘god,’ even in a polytheistic sense. At least, not as a personal practice, as something that I might in the future adopt for myself. I know this is simply a reaction of it being too much like the term big-‘G’ God and as such is something of an irrational, emotional association, but there it is. I’m not comfortable with the term little-‘g’ god and much prefer to refer to them as deities because calling them gods puts them on a pedestal too similar to the one I grew up believing in and worshipping. (The irony here, of course, is that the God I grew up believing in himself has polytheistic origins that got pushed down and written nearly out of existence, but that’s something I didn’t learn until I was already well away from faith in Yahweh.)
This might all seem like a game of semantics, but for me now, for where I am at the moment in my journey of spirituality, this distinction matters to me. Calling them deities and not gods makes it more palatable to me to entertain the idea of becoming pagan and polytheistic. It’s just something I’ve been mulling over recently and wanted to share my thoughts on. I’d love to hear yours, if you have any, especially if your background is similar to mine. Religious trauma from Christianity is a real thing, and it’s something I’m continuing to unravel from the way my mind works.
