Once again the self-appointed guardians of shintô purity question the "legitimacy" of shintô practiced in the Twin Cities area. It would be nice if they could at least get their facts straight before making accusations.

They conflate the Sacred Cedar Shrine and the shiyakujin no hokora. While the shrines are both family maintained — by separate unrelated families — they are on the opposite ends of the shintô spectrum, with the former leaning towards shimbutsu/jinja shintô and the latter focused on minzoku shintô.

We know each other, but have independently encountered shintô on very different paths. Indeed, it wasn't until a few years ago that we found out that we both were shintô practitioners.

Then there's the question of the "legality" of our ordinations. First here at the hokora, I do not and have never claimed to be ordained priest — shintô or otherwise. I feel that would invalidate my whole folk religion orientation. As an involved lay practitioner and head of my family, I mainly act as tôya for our family shrine and the local community. And as the "Shinto Police" have correctly pointed out, minzoku shintô neither does nor requires ordinations.

As for the head of the Sacred Cedar Shrine, he is in fact ordained and his ordination is legally recognized by Wisconsin and Minnesota both of which both allow him to marry, bury, spiritual counsel, and otherwise function as a priest. As far as the law of the United States is concerned, you can't get more legal than that.

I'm not entirely sure what they mean by "legal ordination", but I suspect they mean "not certified as a priest by their particular branch, or branches, of shintô".

Again they conflate all the various types of jinja shintô into a single monolithic jinja shintô, but there is no single certification organization passing judgment on the fitness of an individual to serve as a shintô priest. Instead there are at least fifteen associations and a number of independent shrines that each have their own sets of criteria.

And the confusion about what's needed to be a priest gets even worse when you get to kyôha (sectarian) shintô and shintô derived religions. Many of these were founded by people who either weren't ordained, or were ordained in a different branch of shintô, or were even ordained in a different religion.

Does this invalidate the ordinations of those who followed the founders? Fortunately, as far as minzoku shintô is concerned, no it doesn't. But it also means that certification (ordination) only applies within each particular group.

So yes, we don't belong to the "Shinto Police's" particular groups, but as such we are not obligated to conform to those group's certification process.

As long as we fulfill the criteria of our particular groups, that's all that really matters, and arguments about legitimacy of practice are just another distraction on the way.