America’s Stunning Embrace Of Paganism Signals The End Of This Country As We Know It

The following essay is adapted from the author’s new book, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come.

It’s hard to survey the state of our country and not conclude that something is very wrong in America. I don’t just mean with our economy or the border or rampant crime in our cities, but with our basic grasp on reality itself.

Our cultural and political elite now insist that men can become women, and vice versa, and that even children can consent to what they euphemistically call “gender-affirming care.” In a perfect inversion of reason and common sense, some Democratic lawmakers now want laws on the books forcing parents to affirm their child’s “gender identity” on the pain of having the child taken from them by the state for abuse.

Abortion, which was once reluctantly defended only on the basis that it should be “safe, legal, and rare,” is now championed as a positive good, even at later stages of pregnancy. Abortion advocates now insist the only difference between an unborn child with rights and one without them is the mother’s desire, or not, to carry the pregnancy to term.

But even less contentious issues are now up for grabs, like mass rape. After Hamas terrorists filmed themselves raping and murdering Israeli women on Oct. 7, boasting about their savagery to a watching world, vast swaths of the America left still cannot bring themselves to condemn Hamas. The same progressive college students who insist that the mere presence of a conservative speaker on campus makes them “unsafe” are unable to condemn one of the worst instances of mass rape in modern history. Some even declare openly that they stand in solidarity with the Hamas rapists.

Pagan America

What is happening? Put bluntly, America is becoming pagan. That doesn’t necessarily mean a sudden surge in people worshipping Zeus or Apollo (although modern forms of witchcraft are on the rise). Rather it means an embrace of a fundamentally pagan worldview that rejects both transcendent moral truth and objective reality and insists instead that truth is relative, and reality is what we will it to be.

Recall that ancient pagans ascribed sacred or divine status to the here and now, to things or activities, even to human beings if they were powerful enough (like a pharaoh or a Roman emperor). They rejected the notion of an omnipotent, transcendent God — and all that the existence of God would imply. Hasan i-Sabbah, the ninth-century Arab warlord whose group gave us the word “assassins,” summed up the pagan ethos in his famous last words: Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

In other words, the radical moral relativism we see everywhere today represents a thoroughly post-Christian worldview that is best understood as the return of paganism, which, as the Romans well understood, is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith. Christianity after all does not allow for such relativism but insists on hard definitions of truth and what is — and is not — sacred and divine…