It has happened again.
The New York Times has published a guest essay, this time Leighton Woodhouse’s “Donald Trump, Pagan King,” arguing that Christian moral teaching reshaped Western civilization by asserting the inherent value of the weak and countering the amoral political realism of antiquity. The piece suggests that the Trump administration’s embrace of power politics represents a return to a pre-Christian world “before morality mattered and when human actions were governed only by power.”
It is, of course, an opinion essay. But it also reflects a familiar narrative in outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post: that contemporary political disorder signals a resurgence of pre-Christian worldviews, a regression to “pagan” brutality, and a threat to the moral foundations of civilization itself. That framing does more than critique a president. It links modern Pagan identities, living minority religious communities, to a caricature of ancient savagery. Meanwhile, it often ignores the actual contemporary ideological force reshaping American politics: Christian nationalism.
By Jebulon – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46701128
Woodhouse writes that “Christianity took the Jewish God, who cared for the weak and knew the difference between good and evil, and made his message universal. It taught that all humans are God’s creation.” This statement contains historical truth. Christianity did universalize Jewish covenantal ethics. But it did so in a Hellenistic world and through Hellenistic language. Christianity is not simply unchanged biblical religion spreading outward; it is Judaism articulated through Greek metaphysics.
In other words, Judaism was Hellenized and became Christianity.
This is not a fringe claim. It is widely acknowledged in scholarship. Early Christianity emerged within Second Temple Judaism but rapidly expressed itself in Greek conceptual categories. The Gospel of John famously opens, “In the beginning was the Word,” a reference to Logos in Greek; and that word is precisely used in the early original gospel. Logos is not a Hebrew theological category; it is embedded in Greek philosophical traditions from Heraclitus to Stoicism to Platonism. Jesus is presented not only as Messiah (a Jewish concept), but as incarnate cosmic Reason, a formulation intelligible in a Greek intellectual environment.
If Christianity absorbed Greek metaphysics, then some ideas modern Christians regard as uniquely Christian are partly inherited from the pagan philosophical world. These include the concept of Logos itself, natural law theory, doctrines of the immortal soul, and elements of moral universalism. Christianity did not arise in opposition to Greek thought so much as in conversation with it.
This matters because Woodhouse’s argument relies on a sharp civilizational contrast: pagan antiquity as morally indifferent, Christian civilization as morally awakened. The claim that pagans believed their gods “favored the strong and were indifferent to the weak” is a caricature. Ancient societies were indeed hierarchical and often violent. But their religious frameworks were not morally empty. They grounded ethics differently, through honor and reciprocity, fate and cosmic balance, sacred obligation, and civic virtue.
Greek tragedy warned against hubris and portrayed divine punishment for arrogance and cruelty. Stoicism taught that all humans share in the Logos and belong to a cosmopolis—a universal human community. Roman law articulated concepts of universal legal standing that predated Christianity. Hospitality toward strangers was sacred in many polytheistic cultures, from Greece to the Norse world. Power existed, yes, but it was embedded within moral and cosmic structures.
Christianity did make two historically powerful moves. It radicalized the idea that the weak are spiritually central, that “the last shall be first.” And it institutionalized moral universalism across an empire-wide religious system. Christian morality was brought to bear at imperial scale. That was transformative. But transformation is not invention ex nihilo. Christianity did not introduce morality into a previously amoral world; it reframed moral worth through theological anthropology and deployed it through imperial structures.
Nor does the historical record support the idea that Christian civilization consistently restrained power. Medieval Christendom was brutal. Biblical narratives themselves include conquest accounts such as the Battle of Jericho, where total destruction, herem (the Hebrew term for something devoted to destruction) was commanded. Christian theology was invoked to justify the Crusades, the persecution of Jews, the colonization of the Americas, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Many Christian societies practiced slavery for more than 1,800 years after Christ. The abolition of slavery emerged from a convergence of Christian reformers, Enlightenment thinkers, enslaved people’s resistance, and economic shifts. To attribute human equality solely to Christianity erases plural sources of moral development.
The historian Tom Holland’s influential book Dominion argues that Western moral instincts derive from Christianity. His thesis deserves engagement. But it is debated precisely because Western moral frameworks draw from Jewish ethics, Greek philosophy, Roman law, Enlightenment rationalism, and modern political movements. Human dignity is a cumulative inheritance.
When contemporary commentators describe authoritarian politics as “pagan,” they risk reinforcing an exclusionary narrative: that Christianity civilized power, while paganism represented brute force. That binary not only oversimplifies history; it marginalizes living religious minorities. Modern Pagans are not echoes of Melos. They are practitioners of religious traditions that emphasize interdependence, reciprocity, reverence for land and ancestors, and the sacredness of community. Many explicitly warn against hubris, domination, and imbalance.
A Pagan response to political realism does not deny that power exists. It acknowledges that power operates within a sacred web. Strength divorced from reciprocity becomes hubris. Hubris invites collapse. Empires fall. The land endures. Ancestors watch. Even gods in some mythologies are subject to fate. Unchecked power destroys itself. That insight does not belong to one religion.
If the concern is that American political life is abandoning moral restraint, that is a legitimate debate. But framing that abandonment as a return to paganism misidentifies both history and present reality. The more pressing ideological current in American politics is not a revival of ancient polytheism; it is a form of Christian nationalism that fuses state power with religious identity.
Critique strongman politics. Debate moral realism. Defend human dignity. But do so without turning “pagan” into shorthand for barbarism. Such language not only misrepresents a living religious community; it also fuels anxieties about Pagan spirituality at a time when Christian nationalism is ascendant and myths of widespread Christian persecution dominate public discourse.
Civilization’s moral vocabulary is more entangled, more plural, and more complex than a single religious origin story allows. And those of us who inherit polytheistic traditions are not standing outside the moral conversation. We have always been part of it.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.