Oh trust me, Young.... you do not have to be rural to be a redneck!
Except that people unfamiliar with how you use it, especially those who don't speak English as a first language are going to find that it's commonly defined to have those connotations, thus enforcing those connotations. Furthermore, I can probably very easily find white people who'll say "you don't have to be black to be a n-----" (I've actually met people who've said that), but that doesn't make it OK for myself (being white), for example, to adopt that slur in reclaimation. I cannot meaningfully empower a word when I'm not among the people it was designed to disempower. Yes, the history of the word "pagan" as a slur clearly shows that it's evolved from "paganus" to be more-inclusive, but that doesn't change the fact that a majority of people, including self-identified pagans, have this mental image of "pagans" who not only take a very spiritual approach to nature, but explicitly celebrate it, often ignoring or simply being ignorant of any spirituality to the cities. Even
Urban Primitive by Raven Kaldera and Tannin Schwartzstein, one of only two currently in-print book about urban pagan spirituality, has a very clear and unapologetic rural bias in its pages (the other being Christopher Penczak's
City Magick, but I've never read it; Patricia Telesco's
The Urban Pagan has been out-of-print for
years, and I don't have a copy to reference). How easy is it to find on-line guides to "pagan camping", but pretty impossible to find a guide to "pagan couch-surfing" or "pagan squatting" --the pagan community just assumes that everybody who does or may identify with it is going to welcome the rural and rustic spirituality, and so it ignores or outright rejects the urban, making it a super-special niche topic for anybody who might be interested.
Yeah, maybe I'm not helping the matter by pointing this all out (and I claim a cookie the first time anybody attempts to accuse me of "dwelling on it" -LOL), but it's a very real thing I have to live with: The community of self-identified pagans has not designed itself for people like me, and any time I try to make a corner for myself and others like me, I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle. There's a very real historical and etymological basis for this rural bias, and that's fine, but at the end of the day, I still feel like if I'm going to empower a formerly pejorative term for my own purposes, it should be the Latin equivalent of "city-slicker" rather than "hillbilly". That doesn't mean I don't feel some solidarity with the pagan community, especially those with whom I share practises and worship the same gods --but I always only feel "pagan, but only just barely".