This dissertation argues that religion, for contemporary American Pagans, functions as both a form of memory and as a form of intentional amnesia, evident in imaginative revisions of personal, cultural, and religious histories. Pagan childhood is oriented toward religious, magical, and imaginative idioms that enable adults to resolve their own ambivalent childhood memories at the same time that they endow Pagan children with a complex and vivid religious imaginary—often at the expense of intergenerational religious homogeneity and theological consistency. Pagan parents offer their children a world of contextual ethics and fantasy representative of their own idealized childhood religions. While adult Pagans often disclaim adult status for themselves and insist on their children's radical intellectual freedom, in fact Pagan parents work assiduously, in formal and informal ways, to bring their children into their moral and imaginative world.

This study employs an ethnographic methodology, with data drawn from participant-observation and semi-structured ethnographic interviews with Pagan families in the Northeast, Midwest, and Southwestern areas of the United States. Chapter 1 considers the numerous and sometimes conflicting histories of contemporary Paganism, contending that these historical accounts reflect specific approaches to childrearing highlighted by Pagan families at the same time that they shape Pagan understandings of childhood and parenting. Chapter 2 examines the ways in which specifically Pagan understandings of childhood and adulthood shape the religious worlds of Pagan families and structure Pagan childhood through the communication of dissonant moral messages, both to and about children and adults. Chapter 3 considers Pagan parents' expectations, memories, and imaginative constructions of Pagan childhood and the religious imagination of Pagan families. Chapter 4 explores child-friendly adaptations and innovations to Pagan rituals with children, and suggests that concepts of ritual might be expanded to include everyday activities within Pagan families. Chapter 5 examines life-cycle rituals, created by Pagan adults for Pagan children. These ceremonies welcome children into the religion at the same time that they reflect adult ambivalence about religious tradition and religious choice. Pagan understandings of the religious imagination and Pagan childhood reveal much about American Paganism, childhood religions, and American parenting in the early twenty-first century.