Narrative Summary
Interview with Jeannie Brazeal by Trevor Mitchell
Interviewing Jeannie Brazeal was an experience I will never forget, and one that has
given me a new insight into a set of religious practices I had hardly ever thought of until now.
After moving from church to church as a child — she said her mother was more
interested in getting across the morals of the stories from the Bible than she was actually
promoting the religious beliefs — she had what she referred to as an “encounter” around her 17th
birthday.
Jeannie said the only way she could describe this “encounter” was like “stepping into
someone’s bubble, their space,” and suddenly being able to feel and take on their emotions until
she exited that same bubble.
She talked about being unable to find anything about what she had done in the Bible — at
least anything that didn’t indicate that she might have done something wrong or bad.
This began what would be a 13-year journey to finally calling herself “pagan,” around the
year 2010, when she met her partner Rey’n.
Jeannie also said that there is some disagreement in the pagan community about how
“out” people want to be.
While there are some who are proudly, blatantly pagan and will gladly tell anyone they
meet, there are a multitude of reasons people avoid it. Some want to avoid the drama, she said,
whereas others still aren’t convinced that the Ozarks are a safe place for pagans to openly state
their beliefs.
Jeannie said she hadn’t personally faced any considerable discrimination or opposition —
although she spoke of one instance where her child brought home a set of notes she’d completed
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at her school that day. The contents horrified Jeannie.
They’d been learning about different religions and discussing the difference in beliefs,
and the teacher had been telling them what to write down for each belief system. There was a full
page for Christianity and a couple of lines of text for Hindu.
There were only three words for Islam.
“Muslims are bad.”
Jeannie described herself as “livid” upon reading this, saying that while they weren’t
raising their child to be one specific religion, they wanted her to make her own choices, and to be
respectful of all beliefs, no matter what they were.
She did nothing to bring the matter up to the school system, as she had just spent years
attempting to get a teaching degree, and thought that any mention of it could potentially have the
effect of sabotaging everything she’d worked for and wanted to work toward in the future.
Her partner disagreed strongly with this decision — something that brought forth another
one of her main points.
There is a huge variance in the belief systems of pagans, making it different to fit them all
under one umbrella term or to describe many of them with a single set of beliefs.
Jeannie talked about how Rey’n dislikes coming to school choir concerts — she feels as
though she’s being sung songs about Jesus for no reason, something which irks Jeannie but that
Rey’n can’t stand.
Some pagans believe in deities, some have none, some believe the universe itself is the
deity — there’s a vast amount of ways to believe.
The way Jeannie worded it was “it dictates everything I do as a person, but it doesn’t
affect my daily life.” Basically, for her at least, there are no weekly meetings or gatherings that
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she attends on a set basis.
Jeannie’s personal beliefs mostly align with being in tune with the earth, and trying to
give back as much as she takes and keep from wasting anything that has been gifted to her.
She’s also slowly working to try to make people realize that pagans are just like them —
they aren’t “sacrificing babies,” like some people might like you to think, and they aren’t
worshiping the devil.
And that’s more than anything what I took away from this interview — that no matter
what they believe, pagans have beliefs that are just as varied as any other religion.
I know for a fact from speaking with people that paganism is still seen as “weird” or
“creepy.” I know now this is simply a belief held by people with a lack of knowledge —
something that could easily be addressed by simply speaking to a pagan themselves.
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