The New Paganism

 I just got to this book by John Daniel Davidson of The Federalist entitled Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Unfortunately, authors keep coming out with great books and I have something of a backlog of reading.  The book is makes clear that reason, fairness, rule of law and such concepts will in the future not hold sway.  Instead, it will be raw power.  I had thought to write a book report when, as chance would have it, Casey Chalk has already written a very good one. You can find his book report at As Christianity Declines, We Must Confront the Threat of Pagan America.

The historical narrative grade-school and collegiate students learn today portrays pre-modern societies across the world living in peaceful symbiosis with nature… until they were brutally defeated, if not destroyed by an intolerant Christian civilization. Davidson relates a number of historical anecdotes proving how blinkered this story is. Whether we are talking about the ancient societies of the Mediterranean, pagan northern Europe, or indigenous America, all demonstrated a profound disregard for (or exploitation of) the weak and vulnerable. Davidson cites the Vikings, Aztecs, and 19th-century kingdom of Benin as civilizations engaging in ritual human sacrifice to appease angry, bloodthirsty gods, but there are plenty of others.

Judaism and then Christianity repudiated such societies, built as they were on power, fear, and the fulfillment of base sensual desires. It was the church that rejected the common Roman practice of abandoning (if not murdering) unwanted children, stopped human sacrifice in northern Europe, and discouraged polygamy in the Americas and Africa.

Citing Tom Holland’s popular book Dominion, Davidson writes: “Human rights, equality, care for the poor, mercy for the condemned, refuge for the persecuted, charity for the marginalized and downtrodden: these were never self-evident truths.” Rather, “they are unmistakably Christian ideas that rely on specifically Christian doctrines, without which they are unintelligible.” Obviously, Christian societies were by no means perfect and were often hypocritical, but it’s undeniable that they ushered in a paradigmatic shift via their understanding of the dignity of the human person.

Davidson notes, and I agree with this, that this paradigmatic shift profoundly influenced the Founders such that the founding documents of our Constitutional republic create a very Christian identity for our nation. The secular nature of our government was meant not to discriminate against any of the many denominations of Christianity to avoid the bloodshed that had plagued Europe. At the same time, this neutrality was not meant to count Islam, or wiccan, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses or any other pagan religion as "religion."  Indeed, some of these did not exist at the time.  I doubt the founders even considered cults outside of Christianity.

Davidson's thesis is that:

...an increasingly secular America is not ushering in a rational, neutral, and indifferent regime, but rather a revitalized form of paganism. Indeed, that irrationalism is on full display in the growing popularity of superstitious beliefs such as horoscopes, crystals, tarot, occultism, wiccanism, and an unwavering faith in “the science” even when what “the science” declares is reversed only a short time after it was considered dogma. But Davidson is just getting started here.

He argues that neo-paganism is visible across our polis. Abortion and euthanasia, for example, are new forms of human sacrifice; transhumanism and transgenderism reflect man’s attempt to usurp God’s authority over nature. Moreover, warns Davidson, if minors have the autonomy to decide their own “gender,” what’s stopping our paganizing establishment from also claiming that minors have the autonomy to pursue sexual relations with whomever they choose? Artificial intelligence, in turn, serves as a “godlike” artifice, a “Promethean power” to be worshiped.

I would argue that the Climate Change scam is also a pagan religion. The notion that we puny humans have the power and ability to control the weather is the height of hubris, and again seeks to grant to humans "godlike" powers. But we can't even predict with accuracy two days out, let alone 100 years.

I am only a little way into Davidson's book, but Chalk's report pretty well hits on the high points of his work. It will be again, as it was in the Roman era when God entered the world and died on a cross for our sins, because we couldn't do it ourselves. Gird your loins, Christian warriors. Prepare to do battle not with earthly authorities by with principalities and powers in the spiritual realm. Oh, and go read Chalk's report.