In a bout of melancholy, I posted the following a few days ago (April 11):
I’m middle-aged so I have a different view of some things, but being a part of the cohort born in the late 70s/early 80s, whatever you call us, I’m in that in-between generation, in the middle of how things used to be and the brave new world. We have a perspective shaped by growing up in the old word and coming of age in the new one, “ill-equipped to act,” though I’m sure many of my co-generationists have sufficiently more tact than I. I’ve seen things that have been “the way things are” or “how it will always be” utterly fail to deliver and also cease to exist. I like to think I’m more open to change and less hidebound than prior generations for whom things worked mostly as they were supposed to.
Anyway, I say this with no joy, but I think the west is going to go fully or mostly pagan very soon, more in Europe than the U.S., but some here as well.
Christianity, wrongly, is blamed for progressive managerialism, our sclerotic, suicidal societies, and the reaction, especially among young men with little to nothing to lose, will be to reject it entirely. They’ll see Christianity as womanly and effete—which the majority of churches are, let’s be honest—and go “Nah.” Why not worship rocks or trees or the sun, and pretend Apollo or Odin is behind them, than a deity who is responsible for the decline of manly vital manliness or whatever? (“Muh Magic Jew!” There’s a lot of actual, non-trivial Jew-hatred behind anti-Christian sentiment as well.)
I get that. I really do.
I also get why many reactionary types see allure in Islam. To be fair, its admiration from far off with a lot of meme-level “BASED TALIBAN” nonsense, but I myself have been there. Not that long ago I thought, “Man, my life sucks. I’m going nowhere. Maybe I should be a part of a religion where I can get actual respect? Where men aren’t viewed as the cause of all of the world’s ills? Where I’m supposed to wage holy war on all unbelievers?” But then I realized, nope, the theology doesn’t make any sense to me.
But I get it. Oh, I get it. Honestly, who the fuck wants to be meek and humble? Especially men? But they don’t call us fools for Christ for no reason.
(Nobody tell pagans that Islam is just as hostile to paganism as Christianity used to be.)
So I think we’ll see westerners instead turn toward ls trying to reconstruct some form of their “ancestral beliefs” (nobody tell them their ancestors were Christian for 2000 years) in an attempt to reclaim some sort of tradition, of rootedness. To reject universalism in favor of a strong, unique identity.
I get that too.
Will our de-Christianized westerners have the same revulsion towards their “hypocrite” co-religionists and clerics like they do to Christians? If “People at church were scumbags!” made you reject the religion itself, will that same standard be applied to Zeus-worshipping congregations or whatever?
I don’t know. While a return to paganism will likely be good for men, I doubt women will very much appreciate the de-Christianizing of the west. But I could be wrong.
I think Christianity and Christians will persist, particularly among strongly ethnicity-based denominations, like Armenians, Russians, Poles, Greeks, Arabs, Ethiopians, etc. But otherwise, I think guys around my age will live to see our grandchildren worshipping rocks or Saturn or whatever. It doesn’t mean we have to be enemies, but it does mean things won’t be the same in the near future. Everything changes and everything comes back around again. Stay strong, get ready, and hold on.
Later, I came across this article by the incomparable
called “Dark Enchantment,” from the May 2024 edition of First Things. It is a review of Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come by John Daniel Davidson.According to his publisher:
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. Over a nearly twenty-year career in journalism, he has written widely for national publications including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Guardian, the New York Post, the Claremont Review of Books, and First Things. He has also been a regular guest on many podcasts and radio and television shows, including Tucker Carlson Tonight, The Ingraham Angle, Fox and Friends, NPR, the BBC, and the Megyn Kelly Show. A Texan for many years, he now lives with his family in Alaska. So there’s your background for you.
But isn’t a book review about a book I haven’t read, nor is it a review of a book review of a book I haven’t read. What I want to do is focus on the rest of Lyons’s article where he discusses Davidson’s conclusions. This is interesting to me because they dovetail so nicely with my April 11 post. What a coincidence! Just kidding. One tenet of my life is that There Are No Coincidences.
First, Davidson’s conclusion, via Lyons: As Christianity recedes and Christians become a minority, America will become more pagan not in any form we know and not outwardly with any sense of the world being enchanted or mystical—no Thor or Zeus worship or human sacrifice to them, or other old gods—but in overall outlook and practice:
Until now, America has been governed largely by the tenets of political liberalism. But as Davidson points out, liberalism always relied on “a source of vitality that does not originate from it and that it cannot replenish”: the Christian faith. And as the nation repaganizes, “we will revert to an older form of civilization, one in which power alone matters and the weak and the vulnerable count for nothing”—neither in spirit nor in law. “As Christianity fades in America,” Davidson warns, “so too will our system of government, our civil society, and all our rights and freedoms.” The state will no longer allow the principle of individual rights or conscience to override its desires, and it will not hesitate to use force to get its way, even if that means violating previously sacred norms by, say, threatening to break up the families of those who refuse to submit.
. . .
Davidson observes that this state-enforced morality reflects the occultist Aleister Crowley’s old dictum, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” As Mary Harrington has put it elsewhere, it is becoming hard to resist “the startling conclusion that post-Christian America is an increasingly Satanist regime.
Davidson predicts that life under this regime will be characterized by oppression and coercive violence, and that this “violence will be official—carried out by government bureaucrats, police, health care workers, NGOs, public schools, and Big Tech.” Those who refuse to render the expected moral sacrifices to Caesar are likely to come under intense pressure to conform, hounded not only by the state but by all the aligned institutions of American society. They can expect life to become very difficult: their bank accounts closed, their ability to travel restricted, their access to education and employment limited. The threat of arrest and prosecution for “extremism” and other vague crimes will loom constantly. Such an environment of totalitarian coercion should be expected because, in addition to delineating loyalty, the doctrines of official ideologies always serve as a means of coordination and mobilization across the disparate elements of a regime. By permeating every level of the many institutions of the American managerial apparatus and determining the thoughts and behavior of their members, from journalists to judges, the new pagan public morality will become integral to the function of the system as a whole. In other words, we will live under a pagan integralist state.
Basically, Davidson sees the ultimate fruition of the Enlightenment’s promise of absolute individual freedom to create oneself, and absolute freedom from any unchosen bonds:
[New Pagan America will have] a solipsistic focus on self-expression, self-empowerment, and pride; a radical emphasis of unabridged individual autonomy and liberation from all customs, taboos, and constraints, including all duties and relational ties; an extreme aversion to boundaries and limits on desire, and the self-creation not only of all aspects of personal identity, but of the body, nature, and reality itself; and ultimately an undiluted worship of the self and the will to power, hidden behind a mask of empathy, tolerance, and the language of the therapeutic. Under this regime the strictest of commandments will be that it is forbidden to forbid anything.
Who is to say you cant’t change your sex? Why not you race? Why can’t you be yourself and let your freak flag fly? Why do we even need an age of consent?1 Drugs are victimless crimes. Children need to know about this stuff anyway, and are fully capable of making permanent, life-altering decisions before they even lose all of their baby teeth. Who are you to judge?
A lot of this strikes me as (a) gnostic, (b) libertarian, and (c) basically the direction America has been going nearly my entire life with no bottom to the slope in sight.2 No limits, no constraints, no problem! Anything that stands in one’s way, especially that big meanie God, is the enemy. Why, don’t those judgmental Christians call Lucifer the “Lightbringer,” like Prometheus? Lucifer sure sounds cooler than Jesus. Maybe we should worship himinstead. At least he doesn’t tell us what we can’t do.3
“But Alex, are you saying you’re wrong?”
Yes, or more accurately, not yet—keep reading. See, when I foretold a rise of paganism, I foretold it4 in the context as a part of a reaction to this satanic stuff that’s been woven into the fabric of the founding since day one. Looking for an alternative, like I postulated in my post “What A Beautiful World This Will Be,” people, particularly the young, and particularly young men, will view Christianity as the faith that failed, see atheism as also a part of the problem, and turn to paganism and/or Islam, and while these newly enchanted people might ally with Christianity on certain issues, they will still remain hostile to it.5
To quote myself:
In a polyglot, multiethnic, multiracial, and multi-faith society, a lot of new Americans are not going to be as tolerant of degeneracy—or blasphemy—as normal Americans and mainline American Christians are, which will give social and cultural conservatives enough allies to finally do something meaningful about it. I think we’re already seeing the Christian-Muslim coalitions against gross stuff being taught to schoolchildren. Add people of other faiths and races and ethnicities to this coalition, and I think our permanent president will have to take such concerns about public morality seriously in order to keep the peace.
So that’s where I see things going, and I agree with Davidson, or what I know about his book from Lyons’s piece, but like Lyons, I see the future of the American state and American culture6 as currently constituted being deeply and profoundly satanic.
“So what did you get wrong, Alex?”
Wait a second.
Lyons picks up on a thread in Davidson’s analysis that is key to the entire point of Lyons’s article, as well as this article you’re reading now:
It is for me always a bit of an odd experience to read someone who is even more pessimistic than I am. I get an eerie tingling sensation, an unwelcome and unsettling suspicion that things aren’t as bad as all that. In this case something nagged at me as I reread Davidson’s thesis. Something seemed not quite right . . . Ah, there it was: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” This is the slogan he repeats many times throughout the book to encapsulate the core proposition of paganism, ancient and modern.(emphasis added)
It brings to mind a Living Colour song:
Stereotype
Monotype
Blood type
Are you my type?
Minimalism
Abstract expressionism
Postmodernism
Is it?
We are the children of concrete and steel
This is the place where the truth is concealed
This is the time when the lie is revealed
Everything is possible, but nothing is real
Corporate religion
Televangahypnotism
Suffer till you die
For the sweet-bye-and-bye
Science and technology, the new mythology
Look deep inside
Empty
We are the children of concrete and steel
This is the place where the truth is concealed
This is the time when the lie is revealed
Everything is possible, but nothing is real
Everything that goes around
Comes around
Hypothetical
Theoretical
Circumstantial evidence
Irrelevance
Don't think twice
Just roll the dice
Pay the price
Snake eyes
We are the children of concrete and steel
This is the place where the truth is concealed
This is the time when the lie is revealed
Everything is possible, but nothing is real
We are the children of concrete and steel
This is the place where your fate has been sealed
This is the time when your life is revealed
Everything is possible, but nothing is real
Everything that goes around
Comes around
If “Everything is possible, but nothing is real”/“Nothing is true, everything is permitted” doesn’t describe our moment, I don’t know what does.
As you can see from the quoted except, Lyons doesn’t buy this as being “pagan” either.
In a piece filled with money quotes, this might be the moniest of them all:
Our dim and pallid modernist world could not be more different from the pagan’s. Here all has been reduced to mere matter, moved about by the collision of atoms. There is no meaning in the wind. There are no spirits in the trees nor stories in the stars. We can no longer see them. Nor for most of us does God seem, as the early Christians felt deeply, to permeate each breath and every stone of creation with his energy, present at once in all things and beyond all things. Ours is a profane, mechanistic world—a dead world, in which the vast majority of us have, perhaps literally, lost the ability to perceive that it is still alive. Instead, in our drab materialism, most of us live in a kind of self-imposed virtual reality, obsessed with predictability and technocratic control.
Lyons then goes on to quote C.S. Lewis’s assertion that pagans are much closer to Christians than to unbelievers, as (a) both believe, and (b) Christians came to Christianity via paganism. It is materialism which we are seeing lead to Luciferian gibberish chaos and not paganism. This isn’t to say that I think going pagan (as opposed to satanic) would be good for America and other western nations (whatever that even means anymore), but it’s certainly better than worshipping the literal embodiment of evil.
“Dang it Alex, what did you get wrong?”
Glad you asked!
The part you’ve all been waiting for, where I tell you where I was wrong.
My pessimism was wrong. My conclusion that Christianity would see a long, slow defeat until the Second Coming. Lyons provides a dour and morose Orthodox Christians like me a much-needed shot of hope, right into my veins:
Could this really happen? I do not know. What I am confident of is that, before Christianity could ever flourish again, the iron cage of materialism would indeed need to be broken and the world re-enchanted, filled again with an immanence of spirit. It is the materialist worldview—not pagan foes—that has for centuries smothered and subverted Christian faith and passion.
But with the veil of materialism lifted, could we expect that paganism, too, might have a chance to flourish again, as Davidson predicts? That the West might face a “dark enchantment” as much as a return to the light? Yes, I think so. The deadening effect of materialism has undermined paganism no less than Christianity. Freed from its grip, we may all be off to the races.
In that case I’d say: Do not be afraid. This situation would be familiar terrain for the Church. After all, it was precisely in the pagan world, amid its simultaneous suffering and enchantment, that the Christian faith spread like wildfire. There is no reason it should not do so again. Even in the worst case, if Christianity finds itself badly persecuted, as in Davidson’s pagan America, persecution may ultimately give it new strength—as it so often has.
So perhaps the rise of a little paganism is a necessary development for renewal—a cause for hope, not despair. It may end up merely preparing the way, as it did before. At least I find a wry poetry in the idea that, should we face a great relapse into paganism, the Enemy may have inadvertently planted the seeds of a greater Christian triumph. God does seem to have a strange habit of winning that way.
In other words, I should not have gotten demoralized and I should trust God.
It is still Lent for us Orthodox Christians. We are near the end of a period of fasting and prayer which began March 18 and will end on Pascha,7 May 5.
It is said that the devil’s dark designs increase in intensity during Lent. After all, the devil tempted Christ Himself (aka God) during Christ’s 40 days in the desert. What makes anyone think the devil wouldn’t try to do the same to us during the holiest period of the year? What hope do we have? We are not Jesus?
No, but we have His example.
We also have the example of the Saints who faced far worse than what we’re facing now. Nobody is getting crucified, or tied to posts and lit on fire to light up an emperor’s pleasure garden, or subjected to brutal tortures for refusing to sacrifice a mere pinch of incense on the altar of some idol.
Yet. And I pray that day never comes.
So yes, Orthdox Christians have a different Lenten period than the rest of Christendom, but that doesn’t mean only one is holy. Both periods are holy. God understands and so does the devil. Lucifer. He is not bringing light, he is bringing darkness. Demoralization. Spiritual demoralization.
I succumbed to that on April 11, the first day of the second half of the Lenten period.8 There are no coincidences.
America sucks and it’s getting worse. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The reaction to our devilish insanity—or seeming insanity, since there is a purpose and organization behind it—will be similarly unpleasant, but I do think it will be necessary.
No, I believe it will be necessary.
Everything is a test. We are being tested and we will prevail. You don’t get sharper by being stuck in the drawer, never used, collecting rust. Our faith has gotten flabby as our great-grandfathers and grand-fathers created good times and our fathers lived through them. Our fathers are waking up, and God bless them for it. But we, us newly middle-aged who never had the chance to transition to real manhood, are the first for whom the system failed, for whom the curtain was lifted and the makeup scrubbed off who can see the ugliness for what it really is. Our children will never know a civilization that delivered real peace and prosperity, never felt like a culture, never knew the good times that we were born into but then had yanked out from under us.
And you know what? Good.
Yeah, though I often lament being born at the worst time it could have been to be born an American, better me than my children and my future grandchildren and their children. We might be the first in America’s albeit short history to do worse than our parents, if worse in the financial sense is your metric of success,9 we can be better off in other ways. Deeper ways. More important ways.
The demoralization will continue until morale improves. Go through the fire and the stupidity and come out stronger. Maybe I’ll be facing this every Lent until the end of my life, but you know what? Good.
Good.
- Alexander
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Ask famous Crowley follower Jimmy Page this question.
The slippery slope is not a fallacy but an iron law.
Translated: “Fuck you, dad!”
Who do I think I am, a prophet or something?
I understand and respect this, because if you don’t think your religion is the one true faith, why would you bother adhering to it at all?
Breitbart was dead wrong: culture is downstream from politics. It’s all about power.
What we call Easter
In Orthodoxy, Holy Week (the week before Easter which begins on Palm Sunday) isn’t considered a part of Lent—there are 40 days of Lent and then Holy Week—but the whole thing is “the Lenten period.”
Which in a thoroughly materialist society like America really is the only marker of success.
We are definitely devolving spiritually at the moment. When I despair at this condition, I usually end up thinking about ancient Israel as described in the books of Kings and Chronicles and for how long their societies had to swing between being ruled over by good and bad kings. It seems like we are just going to have to figure out how to endure these kinds of wider pendulum swings between societal devolution and revival for the foreseeable future. Offering an alternative stability amidst the chaos. As Christian’s our role is nicely stated in the Bible as Ambassadors of Christ, in the Ministry of Reconciliation. Earth is not our kingdom. We are just passing through.
A friend, a 30 year Hindu convert, was falling apart. Terrible bad luck coupled with stupid decision making on his part, led him to a black night of despair. He never prayed and he said if he considered it it would be to Shiva, or his Guru. He hit bottom and literally fell to his knees and begged JESUS for help. He said he had no idea where that came from. He felt real peace. And within two hours major problems began being solved. One thing about conversion to Christianity it can be very sudden, with instant effects. I have never heard this about any other religion.