Earlier this year, The Atlantic published an atrocious piece about Paganism that we covered extensively. The Wild Hunt‘s editorial focused on why The Atlantic decided to publish such a piece on Paganism, and we raised a question: Why does The Atlantic, a leading magazine with extensive resources, seem to have such difficulty in locating a Pagan scholar or expert?
The major concern that we raised, and mentioned in other editorials and articles, is a rising tide of anti-Pagan rhetoric in some communities, particularly among Christian conservatives. Given the obvious hegemony of Christianity within the West, and the relatively small community of Pagans, Witches, Wiccans, Heathens, and polytheists, the language of “paganism” as a threat keeps surfacing.
That scapegoating language emerged again this weekend.
On April 4, 2024, Glenn Beck, the American conservative commentator, radio host, and CEO of Mercury Radio Arts, the parent company of his television and radio network The Blaze, interviewed John Daniel Davidson. Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist, an American online magazine and podcast co-founded by Ben Domenech and Sean Davis in September 2013, which offers coverage of politics, policy, culture, and religion from a decidedly conservative perspective.
The New York Times says that The Federalist “leans hard into the culture wars,” with some pieces that question women’s experiences in the Me Too movement and others that describe recognition of transgender identity as a “war on women.” That’s really just the beginning of their portfolio, but this article is less about The Federalist and more about Davidson’s book, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come.
“America as we know it will come to an end,” or so Davidson claims. “Instead of a republic of free citizens, we will be slaves in a pagan empire.”
Davidson, who is a Roman Catholic, asserts that our current era is fraught with anxiety, as indicated by the erosion of long-held certainties, cherished beliefs, and social cohesion. He cautions against optimism, noting a prevalent complacency towards our Christian heritage, upon which America was founded. However, he laments the inevitable decline of this Christian culture, foreseeing its replacement by a despotic regime intertwined with a new, more virulent form of paganism rooted in antipathy towards Christianity.
He warns that there is no viable escape from this trajectory. Rather, he urges his audience to brace themselves for a future where power dictates every aspect of human interaction. Traditional Christian morality will be supplanted by a state-imposed code, with violence becoming commonplace, administered by an omnipotent state and its corporate allies.
Note: The video above shows presidential candidate Donald Trump claiming that President Biden declared Easter Sunday as Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV). This statement is false. International Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV) is an annual day of recognition, celebrated around the world on March 31st. Easter is a movable Christian feast that is occasionally on March 31. That both were held on the same day this year is coincidence, nothing more.
Despite the daunting challenges he envisions ahead of American society, Davidson finds solace in history. He reminds readers that Christianity flourished within the confines of a pagan empire. He calls for courage, fortitude, and unwavering faith as Americans embark on the duty and privilege of defending Christianity and reclaiming its influence in what he predicts will be a harrowing and brutal era.
Davidson ignores the reality of history. Christianity is responsible for some of the greatest atrocities of the West, including the Crusades, the Indigenous genocide in the Americas, and the xenophobic persecution of Jews that facilitated the Holocaust. He avoids these topics because it’s convenient, and because his sales would go down if he were honest to his audience.
On Beck’s show, Davidson claimed “the idea that the future will be this secular, woke utopia is totally wrong.”
Both men insisted that the U.S. was a Christian nation, but it would no longer be such in the near future. Without Christianity as a cultural force, they claim, all the churches will become mosques or apartment buildings.
As for Americans, “we become pagan.” He describes paganism as the only alternative to Christianity. That doesn’t sound bad at all, frankly, but there’s more.
Davidson notes, “I don’t mean that we are going to have temples to Zeus and Apollo popping up in Times Square, or a surge of Witchcraft, although we are seeing that surge.”
Instead, our public life will be defined by a “pagan ethos” where “nothing is true, everything is permitted” – a quote apocryphally attributed to the Order of Assassins in the Assassin’s Creed video games, based on a novel from the 1930s, with no basis in actual Islamic thought or history. He notes that this will make religion and morality more subjective. He then suggests that pagan societies were coercive enslavers of individuals. Again, this ignores actual Biblical commentary on issues like slavery.
He and Beck identify pagan societies of the 20th century as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, both of which rejected the idea of human rights.
Davidson is clear that the paganism he refers to also involves spirituality. He notes that paganism denies spiritual reality, by which he means to say, that Christianity is the only defining authority of reality.
Beck asks if Davidson is a Christian Nationalist, with an obvious smirk suggesting that he is voicing a leftist argument. Davidson rejects the notion. He claims that Christians are not ascendant nor powerful in every metric, but instead a persecuted minority. They both argue that the U.S. Constitution is prima facie a document for a religious society, as only a Christian nation would have free speech and tolerance, human rights, and respect for everyone.
Davidson and Beck flip back and forth between lower-case paganism and upper-case Paganism, the former a description of a brutal secular world and the latter a description of the actual polytheistic theologies familiar to current practitioners. They capitalize on this ambiguity, never letting it be clear whether or not they are talking about the religious and spiritual movement the rest of us mean or whether they are indulging their paranoid fantasies about the end of Christianity. Again, this language belies the reality of history, and its use is dangerous, especially for minority religions and spiritual practices who are framed as the modern persecutors of Christians.
Despite the objective minority stance of Paganisms and Pagan-adjacent spiritualities, Davidson is stoking dangerous fires about the pagan threat.”Evil is coming,” he claims, “worse than you can imagine.” Considering we appear to be the evil he is warning against, we should be paying attention to where this rhetoric leads.
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