The Druid Network Granted Status by the Charity Commission

"Druidry has been recognized as an official religion in Britain for the first time, thousands of years after its adherents first worshipped in this country," reads the first line of a news story about a decision of the Charity Commission for England and Wales to an application of The Druid Network. The group, founded by neo-pagan Druid and Author Emma Restall Orr, will now benefit from a charitable tax status. Its standing as a religious body has also been confirmed.

The decision is the result of a process that spanned more than four years. It involved in-depth questioning of the applicants about their beliefs and practices, as well as the services they provide to the community. Druids in England are perhaps best known for organizing Midsummer rituals at locations such as Stonehenge, but The Druid Network also provides services to individuals and small groups. These include ministry in hospitals and prisons, and rites of passage for such occasions as the birth of a child or retirement from the work force.

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(Photo: Andrew Dunn/Wikimedia Commons)

Religion as Selective: Relegere vs Religare

For many years we taught, as do many contemporary scholars, that the word religion derives from the Latin religare, a word derived from the root LIG- (through ligus, "binding".) Religion then, was a binding back with the divine.

We had known that there was a connection with words like neglect (or rather with its opposite) but perhaps the concept of binding back again was particularly attractive to those of us who have had the infamous experience of "coming home." And so we tended to overlook another possible derivation of the world "religion":  the one that is linked to the root LEG- or sometimes LIG- (through the Greek lego, logos, logas.)

The sense of these words is not only to gather together, to care for or to set things in order, but also to speak and to repeat. Certainly, Cicero emphasizes both the concept of careful selection or gathering, and that of retracing one's steps or re-reading something of value:

For religion has been distinguished from superstition not only by philosophers but by our ancestors. Persons who spent whole days in prayer and sacrifice to ensure that their children should out-live them were termed "superstitious" (from supersies, a survivor), and the word later acquired a wider application. Those on the other hand who carefully reviewed and so to speak retraced all the lore of ritual were called "religious" from relegere (to retrace or re-read), like "elegant" from eligere (to select), "diligent" from diligere (to care for), "intelligent" from intellegere (to understand); for all these words contain the same sense of "picking out" (legere) that is present in "religious." Hence "superstitious" and "religious" came to be terms of censure and approval respectively.

~ Cicero, De natura deorum (45 B.C.E.)

The quote is from Liber Secundus, which represents the view of the Stoics. The complete text (all three books) is embedded below, thanks to the folks at the Internet Archive.