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To learn more, I called up Helen A. Berger, one of the only scholars who studies the pagan community, and probably the only one who has studied its appeal to teenagers and young women. "It's definitely not a micro-trend," the sociologist who works at Brandeis University told me. "It's not something I'm surprised to hear is popular in Brooklyn, though."VICE: How many people are pagan in America right now? And how does that number compare to the past?
Helen A. Berger: It is growing, but it was growing at a very fast rate in the 1990s and into the early 2000s. And every indication is that rate has slowed down. It continues to grow but not quite as fast as it had been. That's at least the best estimate. We in the United States do not include religious affiliation in our Census, which makes it more difficult to figure out.How do you measure this without a Census question?
Most scholars, myself included, look at things like attendance of pagan gatherings and purchases of pagan books, like The Spiral Dance, which has sold millions of copies, and books by Scott Cunningham. The latest American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) had the number of pagans in the US at around 360,000, but I think that's low and there's well over a million at this point. It's still a minority religion.
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Disproportionally people were doing this alone. I did one survey that showed a little under half were doing it alone, and then another one later that showed 75 percent were solitary practitioners.People who were doing it in groups were getting involved in one of four ways. You can go on something like WitchVox, which is the largest international site. There's also notices in metaphysical bookstores. If you're a college or university student, or to some degree a high school student, you can find groups through your school. The last major way is through friends.I'm assuming that there are more people walking around New York wearing Pentagram shirts than there are in the Deep South? And how is popular opinion toward magical religions changing in general?
Most of the data does suggest that it's an urban/suburban phenomenon. US pagans are more likely to say that they had experience discrimination, but they were also more likely to be out of what they call the "broom closet."
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When anything appears in the media, particularly something that is widespread, it gets people's interest. It's just like how if we went to war with a country, everyone would suddenly be looking up that country. But what we found was that the people who stayed in the religion said they were more interested in the rituals and feeling connected to the Goddess and to nature and to getting a sense of empowerment in their spiritual path.Those weren't the ones who ended up staying. Something typical would be four girls—boys tended to do it alone—and the majority of them dropping out. As one young woman who stayed told me, "I originally came in because I had a bad relationship, and I wanted to turn my ex-boyfriend into a frog. That was actually the first book I got." Of course it didn't work. But she came for the magic, but she stayed for the spirituality.Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.