Been chewing on this for a few days - forgive the links not being fresh-out-of-the-oven.
The contemporary NeoPagan revival has happened almost completely in what might once have been called Christendom. There are lots of reasons for this, one of the chief among them being, that outside of Christendom and its Islamic counterpart, the "old religions" never really went away. Buddhism, the only Dharmic religion with a conversion imperative, was and is pretty good at existing alongside the forms and practices of indigenous religious practices. Hinduism is an indigenous religion, as is Shinto. Confucianism and Taoism also live alongside the various Chinese traditional practices (and each other, for that matter). And while Judaism isn't exactly an indigenous practice, in many ways it has more in common with Hinduism than it does with its Abrahamic descendants. In short, the only places where the local PaleoPagan practices were suppressed enough to create a need for NeoPaganism are the places where the Abrahamic religions with the conversion imperatives suppressed them, and Christianity has a head start on Islam.
Unfortunately, that means that we all come at the myriad gods with a head full of, at a minimum, Christian religious language, and in the majority of cases Christian theological ideas as well. For those of us who were brought up not merely nominally Christian but active in our (or, more often, our parents') churches, there's a double whammy. We cease being Christians when we realize that we no longer believe the right things; I personally spent many years identifying as a heretic, one whose beliefs are not orthodox [i.e., right-teaching], before I took the label of Pagan. But we don't become Pagans because we have orthodox Pagan beliefs; there are none! Being Pagan, even NeoPagan, is a matter of what we do and the experiences we have. If there is ortho-anything in NeoPagan circles, it's orthopraxis - right-practice. And each grove, coven, house, temple, and circle seems to develop its own orthopraxis; other than the two Wiccan standards of creating some sort of sacred space and raising energy by some method, even within Wicca every group does it differently - and non-Wiccan groups may do both of those, or only one, or neither.
At any rate, talking about "faith" in a Pagan context is slippery at best and actively harmful at worst. On the one hand, when we're talking with Christians, especially ones who are somewhat sympathetic, it makes sense to use language that's familiar to them and easy to understand. I'm guilty of referring to NeoPaganism as a "faith tradition" in the context of such conversations, myself, albeit with the caveat that it's actually a broad cluster of traditions. I've also pointed out in conversations both with other Pagans and with Christians that I "have faith" in my gods in exactly the same way I "have faith" in my friends and lovers, not in the way that most Christians "have faith" in Jesus or Yahveh (although, being honest with myself, my relationship with Jesus as a late child bears more resemblance to my relationship to the Green Man now than it does to what the church of my upbringing expected it to be).
Finchuill, in "Faith or Fides,"suggests that the words we want as Pagans (especially as polytheists) are "confidence" or "fidelity" (which share the root) rather than "faith" in our gods. I'm in general agreement with this, especially with his point that, especially in Protestantism, "faith" is about an inward process or struggle, and a polytheist Paganism is largely external - not that there isn't plenty of internal work, but we are fundamentally about ritual - again, what we do and who we are, rather than what we believe. Still, it's a tricky bit of language to pull off in a religious climate that takes sola fides as a given - never mind that "salvation" is an even less-relevant concept to us than "faith" is.
P. Sufenas Virius Lupus, in "Christianity Through a Polytheist Lens," goes deeper into the problem of accidentally ceding theological territory to Christianity through our use of language that isn't really meant for polytheist ideas and practices anymore. (It was, once, of course - I have had several arguments with atheists and agnostics who complained that what I worshipped weren't "real gods," and I have had to explain that the word "god" means what Odin and Thor and Tyr and Frey and Loki are, and did long before the monotheos got labelled with the morpheme.) There's a strong tendency by monotheists to assume that humans have generally evolved towards monotheism - this despite half of them not believing (there's that word again) in actual evolution! And if by that they mean "adopt this or you won't live to reproduce," then there's some evidence for that, I suppose, but I don't think that particular memeplex is heritable in the way they seem to be assuming - if it were, I'd probably have fallen no farther than an eclectic and syncretic Catholicism instead of all the way into idol-worshipping, Ba'al-honoring, Asherah-pole-erecting Paganism. I also like his post's defense of cataphatic mysticism - I failed a college course on ancient Jewish mysticism once because I couldn't wedge my head into the idea that the "beyond words" sorts of mystical experiences were somehow more true (or at least more worthy of study) than the more sensory and sensible sort.
For me, at least, the tension between speaking enough of the same language to make sense to monotheists and not being drawn into reinforcing their terms and worldview is pretty severe. To a certain extent, it's the usual "the master's language" problem all over again, although at least in this case we can make a much clearer case for reclamation - English was a polytheist's language once, and can be again. It's a matter of us being clear about what we mean, and that means talking about what we do and experience, not just what we believe is true.
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