This Christmas, The Atlantic published an atrocious piece about Paganism – one with the charming subtitle, “Hug a tree or a dollar bill, and the pagan in you shines through.” (Of course, it was written by a monotheist. We’ll get to that in a minute.)
Before we get to the story, let’s review The Atlantic, for those unfamiliar with the publication. It is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher that covers news, politics, culture, technology, health, and more. It was founded in 1857 as The Atlantic Monthly and has a long history of publishing essays, commentary, and long-form journalism. It also has a strong online presence, with a website that features daily articles, blogs, and other content.
The magazine has won numerous awards for its journalism and has a reputation for producing high-quality, well-researched, and thought-provoking journalism. As a high-traffic media provider and thought leader in politics and culture, The Atlantic is considered one of the most credible news sources on the internet. Its reporting is consistently rated as highly factual, and many services that track bias consistently rate it as left-of-center or moderately liberal.
Cover of the first issue of the Atlantic Monthly, November 1, 1857 [public domain]
All of which raises the question: why did the magazine’s editor wake up one morning and think, “After some coffee, why don’t we throw Pagans under the bus?”
The article is “The Return of the Pagans,” written by Rabbi Wolpe, a leading scholar in conservative Judaism who is the Max Webb Senior Rabbi Emeritus of Sinai Temple, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, and a weekly columnist for the New York Jewish Week and weekly Torah columnist for the Jerusalem Post. Wolpe has been named “The Most Influential Rabbi in America” by Newsweek and one of the 50 Most Influential Jews in the World by the Jerusalem Post.
Wolpe’s scholarship has centered mostly on biblical criticism, the scholarly examination and analysis of the Bible, with the goal of understanding its origins, composition, historical context, and meaning. He has also provided reflections on the role of religion in public discourse, including debates with proponents of atheism.
It is not clear how the editorial board of the Atlantic arrived on Wolpe as a scholar on Paganism, modern or classical. That lack of familiarity is glaring in the article. “Most ancient pagan belief systems were built around ritual and magic, coercive practices intended to achieve a beneficial result,” he writes. “They centered the self. The revolutionary contribution of monotheism was its insistence that the principal concern of God is, instead, how people treat one another.”
Such a statement has plenty of troubles just on the facts – many attested ancient pagan rituals were explicitly focused on the health of the community and correct relations between people, and modern Paganism is thoroughly invested in these issues also. But Wolpe goes further: the article commingles Paganism with wealth and greed while also conflating it with the actions of former U.S. President Donald Trump and ubiquitous billionaire Elon Musk.
“On the left,” writes Wolpe to make this concrete, “there are the world-worshippers, who elevate nature to the summit of sanctity. On the right, you see the worship of force in the forms of wealth, political power, and tribal solidarity. In other words, the paganism of the left is a kind of pantheism, and the paganism of the right is a kind of idolatry. Hug a tree or a dollar bill, and the pagan in you shines through.”
In the same issue of The Atlantic as Wolpe’s essay is another piece, Tim Alberta’s “The Only Thing More Dangerous Than Authoritarianism: The forces of Christian nationalism are now ascendant both inside the Church and inside the Republican Party.” The article settles on redemptive possibilities of Christmas for Christians, despite the aggressive forms of Christianity currently popular on the Right. This article does not mention Paganism, and it is important to underscore that. But as part of the same collection of ruminations on the Christmas season, it’s clear that they are of a piece: together they make clear The Atlantic‘s elevation of a particular monotheistic view of the world.
This issue of The Atlantic never mentions monotheism as a wellspring of patriarchy, or how it has been central to autocracy and abuse for millennia.
There’s never a mention of how the histories of greed-centered capitalism and the spread of monotheism are intimately intertwined.
There’s never a mention of how monotheism undermines social morality and empathy.
It’s all very safe and avoidant, offering the audience something potentially transgressive but never self-incriminating.
Wolpe’s views are his and, frankly, I would not expect something different from an apologist of his faith – or in this case, clustering of faiths – under monotheism. I don’t expect to get a Cajun martini at Starbucks.
Which brings us back to the editorial board of The Atlantic. Since 1903, when it published its first article on Paganism, the magazine has engaged in this compulsive and disordered behavior, trying to find something wrong with Paganism and seeking opinions from people who aren’t actual experts on the topic – much less Pagan themselves. (“But the pagan still wore his undyed woolen tunic, drove his gray oxen afield, made his hobbling rhymes, clipped his final syllables, ran his verbs and pronouns together, and worshiped the Dii patrii indigetes very much as his representative upon the same soil does to the present day,” wrote Harriet Waters Preston in the simply-titled “Paganism.”)
The Pagan community is not devoid of prominent voices and the scholarly community is not devoid of researchers on Paganism.
Yet they don’t make it to the pages of The Atlantic. My guess is that Wolpe is correct in highlighting money as a factor here. Offering high-profile guests a high-profile platform is more likely to result in donations and subscriptions. So does affirming prejudices about a minority group.
Pagans have been subjected to, and continue to be subjected to, persecution from monotheists. Wolpe even acknowledges that: “As a Jew, I am not likely to overlook the cruelties of religious people to one another throughout the centuries.” Yet, the article implies that Paganism leads to arrogance, pride, and bestial actions. That only through the author’s individual god “we can return to being human.”
We can simply coexist as humans without dehumanizing.
The Atlantic has offered that the article be shared as a gift or linked to. Both help them with revenue, and I am not especially interested in helping fund our community’s own denigration. But I’m sure anyone interested can find it on the Web. We’ll use APA formatting:
- Wolpe, D. (2023, December 25). The return of the pagans. The Atlantic.
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