Patheos.com's Journey to the Summerlands

The world is not as it once was. Executive orders have changed the face of our nation. The locking down of our scientists is now a reality, with rogue forest rangers being the unlikely voice of dissent on the subject. Our educational programs are in jeopardy of being mismanaged. Our future doctors and leaders , the ones who will be in charge of leading and healing us, are having their educations maligned. Chief among these lock-downs of the public sector involves the unofficial 4th branch of the Government: The News. In a political climate that has focused on public news being labeled as “fake” by those in positions of power, a trusted member of the Pagan news community seems to have fallen to the tides of censorship.

Patheos.com, at it’s core, is more than just a Pagan site. Patheos has had continual upward movement as a trusted source of religious opinion and news since it’s inception in May 2009. In just 8 years this startup consisting of blogs and a religious library has grown to be the largest English religion and spirituality website in the world, boasting channels whose web presence in Paganism, Catholicism, Progressive Christianity and Atheism are the highest in the world. With these web numbers, eleven faith channels, and four hundred and fifty blogs throughout, Patheos has become many a seekers go to for spiritual information on entertainment, lifestyles, education, business, law, and more. (1) It even boasts one of the most preeminent Pagans alive as their editor, Jason Mankey. (A great person with an easy wit and friendly demeanor.)

It is for all of these reasons that in September of 2016 Patheos caught the eye of BeliefNet. BeliefNet was founded in 1999 and from the first time it changed hands, it has had an interesting history with their management. In 2007, it was sold to Fox News Entertainment, who had an eye on integrating it with other Fox-Owned faith based organizations. This didn’t seem to work very well, because in just 3 short years the property was resold to a company called BN Media-LLC. A little more digging finds that, even though BN Media-LLC has its own board of directors, the company's monetary investors are the same people that make up Affinity4; a for-profit company that raises funds for nonprofit organizations. (2)

With a little more digging, we find that Affinity4 is a parent company that funnels money into different charities that it sponsors. (2) Some of them are very positive, such as ‘Feed The Children’, which disseminated 107 million pounds of food in 2015 alone. But there are other organizations that Affinity4 sponsors, such as the self named “American Center for Law and Justice” which is a Christian-based social activism organization that has led campaigns across the world ranging from instilling prayer in public schools, blocking Kenyan constitutional reforms to allow abortion, they were the force behind trying to stop an Islamic cultural prayer center from opening near the 9/11 memorial, and have fought for law changes in Uganda that would install the death penalty for homosexuals. The Human Rights Campaign has even called for the removal of their charitable status due to not meeting 10 of the 20 standards for charity accountability set by the Better Business Bureau. (3)

Then there is “Focus on Family”; another organization run off of the support of Affinity4. FoF is an American conservative Christians organization founded in 1977 with a long, storied, history of pro-fundamentalist Christian activism. Some of the things that FoF works to bring an end to include: Lack of prayer in school, transgender rights, evolution, divorce, opposite sex parents, abortion, intelligent design, and LGBT rights with a particular focus on adoption. (4) They have been called out on numerous occasions for misquoting studies to bolster their position. The commonly misused study that they implore in their dealings with the LGBT community states that studies prove that children do better in families with a mother and a father, but they neglect to tell you that study was done to show that households with two parents (they used hetero couples for the study group) were better for the child than a household with a single parent. It literally has nothing to do with homosexual parents. (5)

This is not a good look for a website that has made its name on inclusive, expansive, well-nurtured, and spiritual content. It took a lot of love to create a community like you find at Patheos. It isn’t something that just anyone can create, which is evident by it’s almost unprecedented traffic up to this point.

When looked at, it seems like the Pagan community at Patheos is up against a harsh combination of ideologies from their new bosses; this is rough news for the Pagan community at large. There are only a handful of websites within Paganism that offer the kind of thoughtful blogging and reporting that you find at Patheos. BeliefNet’s financial founders don’t seem to have any communities’ best wishes at heart other than fundamentalist Christianity, going so far as to outright remove the Atheist section and rename it “Non Spiritual.” Those are not the same things.

On top of all the changes to the front end of the site and to its political ideologies, it would seem that there is a great deal of what could be seen as underhandedness happening behind the scenes. In what will live on only as a series of screenshots, contributor and student of law, John Halstead wrote that on January 31st, 2017 a series of changes to what is expected and provided for writers at Patheos was released. Those changes included not just an increase to two to three articles produced a week, but also a decrease in monthly pay, which according to Halstead was only $50 a month before it was lowered.

To go along with the increased workload and less pay, a censorship clause was introduced. According to the article, this new part of the contract states that editors have the right to change, delete, rewrite, and restructure an article that they deem not falling in line with what Patheos is calling their contemporaries: Huffington Post and Slate.

“I write for Huffington Post, and I didn’t have to sign anything like this to write for them. Nor did I have to sign anything like this to write for ‘Witches & Pagans’ or ‘Gods & Radicals’” the author continues. The final addition to the new limitations of Patheos writers seems to be a complete ban on writing anything negative about Patheos itself. Now, companies have many policies that quiet down public displays of dissent. Social Media Contracts are a good example. MANY companies have gag orders for their employees when it comes to talking to the public, but not many of those organizations are run off of blogs and opinions, either.

The entirety of Halstead’s post can be found in the pictures below, as well as the same page that shows the content removed.

We are not a large company here at Panegyria. We are run solely on volunteers and have been for the entirety of our life as a publication, but we have been a voice in the Pagan community for over 30 years. We pride ourselves not on being the biggest, or loudest, but by putting forth content that is relevant, truthful, engaging, and (hopefully) important. Panegyria’s mother entity, The ATC, has a proud voice in the community, civil rights, and politics. We can attest that we have never witnessed from a contemporary, or produced of our own accord, a gag order on writers like the one that came to light, today. In the face of a nation that is seeing its news organizations under attack from those that would sway them to their own purposes, we at Panegyria find the news of Patheos both regrettable, and as a sign that the changes coming to our country do not stop at our door. They are right here standing next to us.

In closing, Patheos CEO Leo Brunnick stated in BeliefNet’s September Press Release that "BeliefNet is a company who shares our values, and there could be no better community for us to join than theirs."(6) It is a sad thing to admit that your company, that was founded on broadening the inclusiveness of religious dialogue, would find on its final days that it fell in line with, and shared the values of, a company so wholly out of line with the Golden Rule.