When people ask what pagans believe about Jesus, they’re usually expecting one answer. There isn’t one. There are at least four major positions within contemporary pagan, neo-pagan, and earth-honoring traditions, and the differences matter.
This piece walks through the four main views, where each one comes from, and where our community — the Pagan Church of Christ — falls on the spectrum.
Position 1: Reject Jesus Entirely
Some pagans reject Jesus altogether. Often these are people who experienced harm from Christianity — being thrown out for being gay, being told their natural spiritual instincts were demonic, being threatened with hell — and who associate Jesus inseparably with that harm.
For them, working with the deities of pre-Christian Europe (or Africa, or the Americas) is a deliberate refusal of the religion that hurt them. This is not careless or shallow. It is a moral stance, often grounded in real pain.
Within this position, Jesus is often viewed as either a historical figure who has been weaponized, or as a literary character whose followers built something violent in his name.
Position 2: Ignore Jesus
Some pagans neither reject nor embrace Jesus. He simply isn’t part of their tradition or interest.
Wiccans, Heathens, Druids, and reconstructionists working within Norse, Celtic, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, or African traditions often fall into this camp. Their spiritual life is centered on the deities and practices of those traditions. Jesus, like Krishna or Buddha or Quetzalcoatl, is part of a different system that they don’t engage with.
This is not hostile. It’s just orthogonal — like a Catholic not engaging with Shinto. The traditions don’t overlap, and there’s no need for them to.
Position 3: Respect Jesus as a Teacher
Many pagans, especially those influenced by the New Age, neopagan, or eclectic traditions, view Jesus with significant respect — as a wise teacher, a healer, a mystic, possibly an initiate of one of the ancient mystery traditions.
In this view, Jesus is one of many enlightened beings (along with the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Krishna, Black Elk, and others) who pointed humanity toward deeper spiritual truths. His ethical teachings — the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the love commandments — are taken seriously and even practiced.
But he is not seen as uniquely divine, as the only path to truth, or as the founder of the one true religion. He’s a teacher among teachers.
Position 4: Embrace Jesus
Some pagans actively embrace Jesus — not in the doctrinally-Christian sense, but as a spiritual figure central to their practice.
This is the position of the various Christian-pagan, Christo-pagan, and pagan-Christian movements that have grown rapidly over the last two decades. People in these communities pray to Christ, take communion, observe the Christian liturgical calendar — and mark the wheel of the year, work with the moon, honor the seasons, and draw on earth-honoring practice.
This is also the Pagan Church of Christ’s position.
Where the Pagan Church of Christ Stands
We sit firmly in Position 4. We embrace Christ.
But it’s worth being precise about what we mean.
We take the teachings of Christ as central. The Sermon on the Mount, the love commandments, the care for the poor and marginalized, the suspicion of religious hierarchy — these form the moral core of our community. They are not optional.
We hold the divinity of Christ in a way that’s compatible with earth-honoring theology. That is: we believe the sacred is present in and through all of creation. Christ embodied that sacred presence with particular clarity. So do the trees, the rivers, the seasons, and one another — but the witness of Christ’s life and teaching is for us a uniquely focused expression of what is true about all of reality.
We do not believe Christ is the only valid spiritual path. Other traditions point toward the same sacred reality through different language and ritual. We do not believe people of other religions are damned. We do not believe we have an exclusive franchise on truth.
We take the resurrection seriously. Not necessarily as a one-time biological event, but as a pattern — that death is never the final word, that what is loved is not lost, that the universe bends toward more life. The cycle of the seasons and the cycle of the cross point toward the same truth.
We don’t think the institutional church has always represented Christ well. Much of the harm done in Christ’s name was not Christ. We hold this carefully and try not to repeat it.
Common Misunderstandings
Not exactly. We are people who hold that earth-honoring spirituality is not optional, decorative, or separate from following Christ. The wheel of the year is as central to our practice as the liturgical calendar. They are integrated, not stacked.
We do, in a particular way. We don’t recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday. We do believe Christ embodies the sacred uniquely and centrally.
We read the Bible. We take it seriously. We also read other texts — the writings of earth-honoring elders, the works of mystics from every tradition, the wisdom of the natural world itself. The Bible is one library among the libraries we draw from. It is not the only one.
Those passages were written in specific historical contexts and condemn specific practices (mostly imperial state religions and child sacrifice) that we don’t engage in. We don’t take them as condemning everything any non-Christian religion has ever done, and neither did most early Christians.
Why This Matters
This is not abstract for us. The question “what do pagans believe about Jesus” has lived in the marrow of many of our members for years before they found this community.
If you were raised Christian and feel drawn to earth-honoring practice, you may have been told these are incompatible. If you came from a pagan background and feel drawn to Christ, you may have been told you’re betraying your tradition. Neither is true.
What’s true is that the sacred has been expressing itself through both streams of human spiritual experience for a very long time, and that holding both is not only possible — it’s, for some of us, the only way the spiritual life makes sense.
If this resonates, read more about what we believe, or come to a gathering and see for yourself.
Sources & Further Reading
- Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon (Beacon Press, 1979, rev. 2006)
- Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford University Press, 1999, rev. 2019)
- Christine Hoff Kraemer, Seeking the Mystery: An Introduction to Pagan Theologies (Patheos Press, 2012)
- Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (HarperOne, 2009)
- Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (HarperOne, 1994)