I suspect this prompt was written on the understanding that religion means one of the main six, and probably one of the Abrahamic ones.
I’m a Wiccan though, and there’s a mainstream cultural understanding that Paganism is free and easy when it comes to gender and sexuality…
And then there’s Wicca.
My religion was created in the thirties by a civil servant and went public in the fifties when they repealed the Witchcraft Act. So for all it was part of the New Forest melting pot of revolutionary ideas it believes in a God and a Goddess and gaining magical/spiritual power through straight sex, albeit sometimes with a bit of light BDSM thrown in.
And I’m bisexual…and not much for your traditional heterosexual relationships. Wicca can, on the face of it, be incredibly emphasising of (some) heterosexual norms. It’s heavily based in the understandings of Western Hermetic ideas of how magic works. (Thanks Uncle Al and Uncle Sam) The God and The Goddess and their sexual relationship is the gender binary at the heart of divine understanding of the world around us. I mean at the very basis of Wicca is the idea that teaching and learning pass male to female to male and given sex magic is usually somewhere in that it can become very heterosexual.
Aiden Kelly was at some point, whilst I was still a teenager trying to figure out my religion, one of the most devisive figures you could mention if you were Pagan. He’s also kind of the reason I call the autumn Equinox Mabon, kind of. He was big into Feri Wicca and it was his Wicca (even calling it Wicca is going to raise the hackles on a lot of people) that Starhawk was familiar with, as someone who read Robert Graves The White Goddess early in my spiritual journey I didn’t see a problem with expressing poetic truth over archaeological especially within the context of a magical religion but it’s not just the Reconstructionists who do.
In anycase, within the context of my sexuality it’s the lesbian creation story that really resonated with me – the Goddess making love to a reflection of herself and from that act the reflection spinning out and away and becoming the blue androgynous deity, then the green man then a more recognisably male God. That’s what really spoke to me, that the duality held sacred within Wicca could speak about other things and of course it was the controversial tradition that spoke about it.
It’s getting more common now for more mainstream people to talk about the place of gay and bisexual people within Wicca and so who needs to find divine reflections of the experiences we recognise in the sidelines and controversial figures who exist on the margins of our religions anymore? Perhaps some of us still do because the experiences written about their more are more true and authentic? Or perhaps our truth has broken into the middle of even heterosexual, heteronormative Wicca. Perhaps. After understanding so much magic through heterosexual lenses I needed to see magic through a bisexual lense to gain my full understanding of it, hell I still think going down on a woman can be the most potent magical act there is. And the thing about magic is that for me, and within Wicca (because it’s hella Hermetic Magic influenced), magic is the physical link between the divine and the material it’s the wyrd of touch, the spiritual manifesting within this world and our conscious enacting of it. So I needed to understand it via my flesh and my flesh is unequivocally bisexual – unlike Uncle Gerald.