“God Is My Quarantine Buddy”: Debates in Ritual Practice Among North American Pagans in 2020

The past four decades of research in the contemporary paganism faith movement in the United States have focused on the creation of cosmologies based on scholarship, reclamations of heritage, counter-culturalism, and environmentalism. However, the dialogue has changed drastically in recent years due to the rapid and global communication between faith groups through the Internet. This became more apparent when so many had to digitize the entirety of their social lives during the pandemic of 2020. Contemporary paganism in the 21st century has become an amorphous mass of intersectional social issues and individual cosmologies because of the nature of human impact on the surrounding world. This is not just due to the intergenerational mixing of cultures brought on by globalism and a socially conscious attempt to avoid poaching someone else’s belief system while celebrating and discovering one’s own. Rather, this is a purposeful and ongoing dialogue that highlights how younger generations integrate their social and political values with their faith: personal cosmologies that function alongside a global political community are generally more important than a general cohesive doctrine that is shared by people of multiple disparate socio-political backgrounds.