Paper short abstract:

The paper presents the mutual relations between religion and politics on the example of conflict about the Ślęża mountain in south-western Poland, where Catholics and contemporary Pagans undertake religious practices in the public sphere to manifest their rights to this place.

Paper long abstract:

The most significant current of contemporary Paganism in Poland is called Rodzimowierstwo. Rodzimowierstwo means Native Faith and refers to the pre-Christian religion of the Slavs. The followers argue that it is a Polish ethnic religion that survived in folk culture for over a thousand years of Chrystianity, which, in turn, is considered a foreign religion, imposed by force, and destroying native culture. In this context, it is also emphasized that contemporary Polish Pagans cannot freely use places which, in the light of archaeological research, were pre-Christian centers of Slavic worship, because most of them are currently occupied, in a sense, by the Catholic Church.

Based on my field research that I have been conducting since 2018, I would like to analyse in detail how such a situation looks on Ślęża mountain in south-western Poland. Using this example, I am going to show how various types of religious practices are manifested in the public sphere as a way of verbalizing and justifying the right to specific places of worship, but also as an attempt to put a given religion in a broader geopolitical context. On Ślęża mountain, both Catholics and contemporary Pagans are trying to make their religion more visible, public, powerful, and thus, in a sense, more political. In this way, both of them create vernacular religious ideologies that are supposed to make their religion recognized as "native" and "proper" for the Polish nation.