Charity begins at home

I see that the Druid Network has been granted charitable status. As Church Mouse points out, this does not define the Druid Network as a religion for any other purposes - not least because they were probably defined as such for discrimination purposes already.
And this does not mean the whole neo-pagan rainbow of beliefs has been "recognised as a religion" or granted charitable status. Every other group, if capable of defining itself as such, would have to meet the same criteria.

And good luck to them. In this most free-range of societies, if mosques, chapels, Hindu temples and Church of England churches are allowed to claim charitable status then why should we stop there? There is no ombudsman responsible for defining what is an acceptable religion - no list of what is and isn't an acceptable religious group. You can have one of three choices - either they are all allowed to be charities (based on some guidelines), or there are one or more religions that are best defined as "established" - or no religion can be a charity. They're the options that I can see.
On the subject of defining what is and isn't a religion, the churchwebsites blog comments that the Druids have been around longer than the Jedi, but firstly I'm not sure that matters - after all, the Christian faith was pretty new in 33AD - and secondly it begs the questions - which druids? The saintly William Stukeley, late vicar of All Saints Stamford, seems to have been the first modern-day druid revivalist. He came up with a combination of Christianity and Celtic re-imagining that may be familiar to readers of this site or purchasers of the products of the Iona Community. But since his day we have had the Church of the Universal Bond, The Ancient Order of Druids (founded 1781) the Druid Network and many more offshoots, generally having less relationship to Christianity and more to neo-paganism as time has gone by. Indeed, they have shown many of the traditional symptoms of Protestant Christianity - experiencing schisms, exchanging whatever the druidic equivalent of anathema are and wearing clothes that are hundreds of years out of date.

Incidentally, and on a subject that is always of real concern round here - the Druids themselves have indicated to the BBC that if it were up to them, they wouldn't bother going for charitable status.  They'd just stick to chanting and wandering about in woods.  And who can blame them, with the amount of government interference that charitable status opens them up to. But charging a reasonable membership fee - presumably to enable the organisation to invest in silly hats and faux-gold sickles - means the Revenue takes an interest. After all, with all the tax avoidance and evasion going on, they're not going to want 350 blokes with fake beards syphoning off literally tens of pounds under the eye of the taxman, are they?
On the other hand, the Druids' own press release suggests they were very keen on charitable status. Maybe both statements are equally true in Avalon?

If you are interested in the phenomenon of Druidic revival from the outside I can recommend you, as ever, to Christopher Chippindale's Stonehenge Complete for a view that is, while not comprehensive as far as Druids go, informative and at least mildly sympathetic. And it has the advantage of separating history from imagination while still being easily accessible.

And if you're wondering, I'll do without the charitable status, thanks. I find a limited company that is a 100% subsidiary of an offshore holding company a much more efficient way of doing business.