[Oe List ...] Interesting article -- especially for Social Process collection -- common religion triangle and Inner life/other world and all

[Richard Alton]

Great article, Jim. Thanks,
Dick
Ps did you share this with your kids?

On Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 2:01 PM James Wiegel via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>
wrote:

> The Return of Paganism:  Maybe there actually is a genuinely
> post-Christian future for America.
>
> *By Ross Douthat <https://www.nytimes.com/by/ross-douthat>  *Opinion
> Columnist  Dec. 12, 2018
>
> Here are some generally agreed-upon facts about religious trends in the
> United States. Institutional Christianity has weakened drastically since
> the 1960s. Lots of people who once would have been lukewarm
> Christmas-and-Easter churchgoers now identify as having “no religion” or
> being “spiritual but not religious.” The mainline-Protestant establishment
> is an establishment no more. Religious belief and practice now polarizes
> our politics in a way they didn’t a few generations back.
>
> What kind of general religious reality should be discerned from all these
> facts, though, is much more uncertain, and there are various plausible
> stories about what early-21st century Americans increasingly believe. The
> simplest of these is the secularization story — in which modern societies
> inevitably put away religious ideas as they advance in wealth and science
> and reason, and the decline of institutional religion is just a predictable
> feature of a general late-modern turn away from supernatural belief.
>
> But the secularization narrative is insufficient, because even with
> America’s churches in decline, the religious impulse has hardly
> disappeared. In the early 2000s, over 40 percent of Americans answered with
> an emphatic “yes” when Gallup asked them if “a profound religious
> experience or awakening
> <https://news.gallup.com/poll/7582/religious-awakenings-bolster-americans-faith.aspx>”
> had redirected their lives; that number had doubled since the 1960s, when
> institutional religion was more vigorous. A recent Pew survey on
> secularization likewise found increases in the share of Americans who have
> regular feelings of “spiritual peace and well-being.” And the resilience of
> religious impulses and rhetoric in contemporary political movements, even
> (or especially) on the officially secular left, is an obvious feature
> <http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/andrew-sullivan-americas-new-religions.html>
> of our politics.
>
> So perhaps instead of secularization it makes sense to talk about the
> fragmentation and personalization of Christianity — to describe America as
> a nation of Christian heretics, if you will, in which traditional churches
> have been supplanted by self-help gurus and spiritual-political
> entrepreneurs. These figures cobble together pieces of the old orthodoxies,
> take out the inconvenient bits and pitch them to mass audiences that want
> part of the old-time religion but nothing too unsettling or challenging or
> ascetic. The result is a nation where Protestant awakenings have given way
> to post-Protestant wokeness, where Reinhold Niebuhr and Fulton Sheen have
> ceded pulpits to Joel Osteen and Oprah Winfrey, where the prosperity gospel
> and Christian nationalism rule the right and a social gospel denuded of
> theological content rules the left.
>
> I wrote a whole book
> <https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Bad-Religion/Ross-Douthat/9781439178331> on
> this theme, but in the years since it came out I’ve wondered if it, too,
> was incomplete. There has to come a point at which a heresy becomes simply
> post-Christian, a moment when you should just believe people who claim they
> have left the biblical world-picture behind, a context where the new
> spiritualities add up to a new religion.
>
> Which is why lately I’ve become interested in books and arguments that
> suggest that there actually is, or might be, a genuinely post-Christian
> future for America — and that the term “paganism” might be reasonably
> revived to describe the new American religion, currently struggling to be
> born.
>
> A fascinating version of this argument is put forward by Steven D. Smith,
> a law professor at the University of San Diego, in his new book, “Pagans
> and Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac.”
> Smith argues that much of what we understand as the march of secularism is
> something of an illusion, and that behind the scenes what’s actually
> happening in the modern culture war is the return of a pagan religious
> conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of
> Christianity.
>
> What is that conception? Simply this: that divinity is fundamentally
> inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are
> ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning
> and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller
> communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the
> transcendent.
>
> This paganism is not materialist or atheistic; it allows for belief in
> spiritual and supernatural realities. It even accepts the possibility of an
> afterlife. But it is deliberately agnostic about final things, what awaits
> beyond the shores of this world, and it is skeptical of the idea that there
> exists some ascetic, world-denying moral standard to which we should
> aspire. Instead, it sees the purpose of religion and spirituality as more
> therapeutic, a means of seeking harmony with nature and happiness in the
> everyday — while unlike atheism, it insists that this everyday is divinely
> endowed and shaped, meaningful and not random, a place where we can truly
> hope to be at home.
>
> In popular religious practice there isn’t always a clean line between this
> “immanent” religion and the transcendent alternative offered by
> Christianity and Judaism. But clearly religious cultures can tend toward
> one option or the other, and you can build a plausible case for a “pagan”
> (by Smith’s definition) tradition in Western and American religion, which
> in his account takes two major forms.
>
> First, there is a tradition of intellectual and aesthetic pantheism that
> includes figures like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Emerson and Whitman, and that’s
> manifest in certain highbrow spiritual-but-not-religious writers today.
> Smith recruits Sam Harris, Barbara Ehrenreich and even Ronald Dworkin to
> this club; he notes that we even have an explicit framing of this tradition
> *as* paganism, in the former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman’s rich
> 2016 work
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/opinion/the-beauty-of-big-books.html?module=inline> “Confessions
> of a Born-Again Pagan.”
>
> Second, there is a civic religion that like the civic paganism of old
> makes religious and political duties identical, and treats the city of man
> as the city of God (or the gods), the place where we make heaven ourselves
> instead of waiting for the next life or the apocalypse. This immanent civic
> religion, Smith argues, is gradually replacing the more biblical form of
> civil religion that stamped American history down to the
> Protestant-Catholic-Jew 1950s. Whether in the social-justice theology of
> contemporary progressive politics or the trans-humanist projects of Silicon
> Valley, we are watching attempts to revive a religion of *this-world*, a
> new-model paganism, to “reclaim the city that Christianity wrested away
> from it centuries ago.”
>
> These descriptions are debatable, but suppose Smith is right. Is the
> combination of intellectual pantheism and a this-world-focused civil
> religion enough to declare the rebirth of paganism as a faith unto itself,
> rather than just a cultural tendency within a still-Christian order?
>
> It seems to me that the answer is *not quite*, because this new religion
> would lack a clear cultic aspect, a set of popular devotions, a practice of
> ritual and prayer of the kind that the paganism of antiquity offered in
> abundance. And that absence points to the essential weakness of a purely
> intellectualized pantheism: It invites its adherents to commune with a
> universe that offers suffering and misery in abundance, which means that it
> has a strong appeal to the privileged but a much weaker appeal to people
> who need not only sense of wonder from their spiritual lives but also,
> well, *help*.
>
> However, there are forms of modern paganism that *do* promise this help,
> that do offer ritual and observance, augury and prayer, that do promise
> that in some form gods or spirits really might exist and might offer succor
> or help if appropriately invoked. I have in mind the countless New Age
> practices that promise health and well-being and good fortune, the psychics
> and mediums who promise communication with the spirit world, and also the
> world of explicit neo-paganism, Wiccan and otherwise. Its adherents may not
> all be equally convinced of the realities that they’re trying to appeal to
> and manipulate (I don’t know how many of the witches who publicly hexed
> Brett Kavanaugh
> <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/brett-kavanaugh-hex-new-york-witches-protest-brooklyn-supreme-court-sexual-assault-a8594581.html>
> really expected it to work), but their numbers are growing rapidly; there
> may soon be more witches in the United States than members of the United
> Church of Christ.
>
> What ancient paganism did successfully was to unite this kind of popular
> supernaturalism with its own forms of highbrow pantheism and
> civil-religiosity. Thus the elites of ancient Rome might reject the myths
> about their pantheon of deities as just crude stories, but they would join
> enthusiastically in public rituals that assumed that gods or spirits could
> be appealed to, propitiated, honored, worshiped.
>
> To get a fully revived paganism in contemporary America, that’s what would
> have to happen again — the philosophers of pantheism and civil religion
> would need to build a religious bridge to the New Agers and neo-pagans, and
> together they would need to create a more fully realized cult of the
> immanent divine, an actual way to worship, not just to appreciate, the
> pantheistic order they discern.
>
> It seems like we’re some distance from that happening — from the
> intellectuals whom Smith describes as pagan actually donning druidic robes,
> or from Jeff Bezos playing pontifex maximus for a post-Christian civic
> cult. The 1970s, when a D.C. establishment figure like Sally Quinn was
> hexing her enemies
> <https://www.thecut.com/2017/08/sally-quinn-occult-hexes.html>, were a
> high-water mark for those kinds of experiments among elites. Now,
> occasional experiments in woke witchcraft and astrology notwithstanding,
> there’s a more elite embarrassment about the popular side of post-Christian
> spirituality.
>
> That embarrassment may not last forever; perhaps a prophet of a new
> harmonized paganism is waiting in the wings. Until then, those of us who
> still believe in a divine that made the universe rather than
> just pervading it — and who have a certain fear
> <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/> of
> what more immanent spirits have to offer us — should be able to recognize
> the outlines of a possible successor to our world-picture, while taking
> comfort that it is not yet fully formed.
>
> Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is
> the author of several books, most recently, “To Change the Church: Pope
> Francis and the Future of Catholicism.”
>
>
>
>
> COMMENT OF THE MOMENT
>
> jim kunstler commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>:
> Saratoga Springs, NY
>
> Andrew Sullivan got it right in NY Magazine this week when he noted that
> Wokesterism is the replacement du jour for Christianity. It has its sacred
> characters (identity groups) and a notion of original sin (white
> privilege), and requires sinners to apologize abjectly... but is absolutely
> unforgiving. That’s how crazy we have become.
>
> *Comments 1280
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html#commentsContainer>*
>
> LES commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> As Epictetus, the grand old man of Greco-Roman philosophy pointed out two
> thousand years ago it is one thing to talk about philosophy/region and it
> is another thing to live the teaching and seek truth.
>
> *Middleman*  Eagle WI USADec. 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> One of the principle drivers of a post-Christian future is people's need to
> experience their sexuality without the horrible schism imposed on it by the
> Christian religion. I once visited an exhibit of sexuality in art in
> Hamburg, Germany and what struck me the most about it was the sad evidence
> of how Christianity had literally driven a line through the center of the
> body, and above the navel was 'for God,' and below, the devil. People who
> chose their sexuality over church-sanctioned piety literally danced with
> the devil. Such demonization continues today, in subtler, but still
> life-destroying forms. This and Christianity's own hypocrisies about sexual
> behavior within their institutions have left many of us to walk away from
> the faith of our upbringing to find compassion and spirituality in other
> ways and other communities and fellowships.
>
> North Carolina commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> The country is moving away from organized Christianity because people are
> disillusioned, defeated, and dismayed by the total corruption of our
> religious leaders whether from the Catholic Church or the Protestant
> churches, see the Fort Worth Star Telegram's investigation into sexual
> misconduct at nearly 1,000 churches and organizations affiliated with the
> independent fundamental Baptist movement across 40 states and Canada, in
> which 168 church leaders have been “accused or convicted of committing
> sexual crimes against children.” You simply can't be a part of organized
> religion without encountering human corruption on a massive scale. And it
> is this corruption, this hypocrisy that ultimately drives people from
> churches and organized religion. That is not going to change. Instead,
> people are going to find other places to connect to the universe, their
> planet, their family and friends, and themselves to the greater and find
> God or Goddess out there away from men who are completely corrupt.
>
> Kjensen commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>Burley
> Idaho  Another pathetic attempt by Mr. Douthat to lament the decline of
> organized religion. For me it can't come fast enough. As for the resurgence
> of so-called paganism, with its new ageism, self-help gurus, revival of
> ancient religions, it's really the same old thing that is embodied in the
> popes, prophets, and the priests that Mr. Douthat wishes were still
> absolutely preeminent in our society. Yes, in my opinion, these new age
> religious movements are the same old charlatans just cut from a different
> bolt of cloth.
>
> Ron commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> FloridaDec. 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Douthat uses the term “paganism” to describe various New Age and Wicca
> movements, but he says almost nothing about the paganism of the Religious
> Right. Was Nazism, with its symbolism, mass gatherings, and return to a
> “greater” Teutonic past, pagan? Undoubtedly. And why was it essentially
> pagan and anti-Christian? Because it exalted the nation state and its
> leader above all moral considerations. Does that sound familiar? Do we see
> that today? Donald Trump and his millions of faux Christian, evangelical
> followers are the real pagans of our time. (Note that Trump even refused—or
> was unable—to recite the Apostles' Creed at G. H. W. Bush’s funeral.)
>
> doughboy commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Wilkes-Barre, PA  Douthat’s continued use of pagan hides the origin of
> that term. When Christianity received the official backing of the Roman
> emperors, it turned on all other religions. Their attacks on Roman, Greek,
> Egyptian, etc religion introduced the term pagan to undercut these
> practices. Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age and Charles Freeman’s The
> Closing of the Western Mind details the harm that this zealotry did. The
> murder and dismemberment of Hypatia in Alexandria in 415 and the closing of
> Athens’ Academy in 532 are but two illustrations. The Italian physicist
> Carlo Rovelli wrote, “The anti-intellectual violence of the Christianized
> Roman Empire managed to suffocate almost every development of rational
> thought for many centuries.” This trend did not end in the early centuries.
> The execution of Giordano Bruno in 1600 and the Inquisition continued the
> suppression. Blaise Pascal wrote, “Men never do evil so completely and
> cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” This animus
> remains today whenever atheists protest religious symbols on public land.
> How many members of Congress are declared atheists? “Pagans” are neither
> ignorant nor stupid. Symmachus, in the face of the Christian onslaught,
> challenged the new faith when he said, “We see the same stars, the sky is
> shared by all, the same world surrounds us. What does it matter what wisdom
> a person uses to seek for the truth?”
>
> Kaye commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Connecticut
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
>  I grew up second-gen in a Neopagan religion. Like most second-gen
> individuals in new religious movements, I tend to be more conservative
> (religiously, not politically) than people who are converts because I was
> raised in an environment where there were correct and incorrect ways of
> doing worship. This article assumes that "paganism" is a mercurial thing
> that is just "not Christianity." The term paganism is still sometimes used
> as a religious slur in opinion pieces describing a person's lack of
> morality, and the term is adapted to fit ideas ranging from atheistic
> pan(en)theism to the New Age movement. I rarely ever use the term — I call
> myself a polytheist. While like a Roman elite I don't believe in the
> literal truth of myths, I believe in gods. Almost all of my worship is
> conducted in the home. Another correction: "explicit neo-paganism" offers
> help and sense-making practices. Wicca has a moral code based on
> non-harming. Polytheist revivalist religions like Hellenism, Asatru,
> Religio Romana, and Kemetism draw from the wealth of philosophical and
> moral writings in antiquity to offer grounding and solutions to devotees
> regardless of the issues they are confronting in their lives. We have a
> resurgence of people in both Pagan Studies (ex: Chas Clifton) and
> philosophy (ex: Edward P. Butler, who does polytheologies and engages in
> dialogue with ancient writers like Proclus and Iamblichus). Neopagan
> movements are not bereft of 201- and 301-level sense-making practices at
> all.
>
> dogma vat commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Washington, DCDec. 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html> Interesting
> commentary, but a bit over my head. However, I'll say this- modern life is
> making us weak, lonely people. Too many choices, too much freedom and
> opportunity, along with the eradication of our Judeo-Christian identity has
> decimated families and enabled our culture to be filled by grunting,
> flatulent creatures like our current president on the right and woke
> religious zealots on the left. These folks are turning the established
> order of decency upside down and turning this country into the idiocracy
> many have feared. We need religion because the alternative seems to be
> Donald Trump or wokeness or something else that is totally incoherent.
>
> Walter L. Maroney commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Manchester NH  A couple of fundamental misunderstandings here, Ross.
> First, we are not supposed to be a Christian Nation. Our founders conceived
> of our polity as determinedly secular. It was not until the Great
> Awakenings of the early to mid 1800s that Christianity assumed the
> character of a shibboleth in our public discourse. And the "Under God" and
> "In God We Trust" memes are Twentieth Century inventions, which have only
> been part of our national fabric for about 70 of our nearly 250 year
> history. Second, for all your talk of heresy, you miss the obvious fact
> that American Evangelical Protestantism, with its Prosperity Gospel
> doctrine and its perverse twisting of the doctrine of election into an us
> vs. them political/social context (we are the elect on Earth, all others
> are hellbound) is itself the foremost Christian heresy of our time.
>
> Jocelyn commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Vista, CA  There are many troubling aspects to this essay, but perhaps
> the most troubling is the author’s assertion that what paganism (and this
> term, as applied to the wide range of practices and beliefs referred to
> here, is not unproblematic) may appeal to the wealthy and well-off, but
> what those who are impoverised and suffering need is help. I was nodding
> along until it became clear that what he meant by “help” is belief in
> divine intervention and/or an afterlife. This completely misses the point
> that an understanding of the world as infused with divinity calls - in
> fact, obligates - us to take better care of it and one another.
> Christianity has not historically done a good job of this, and has,
> unfortunately, used promises of heaven and threats of hell to keep people
> from seeking a more harmonious relationship with one another and the planet
> as a whole in this lifetime. To judge what he calls paganism through the
> lens of Christianity both misses the point, and attempts to colonize the
> term and practices associated with it, turning them into just another
> Christian sect.
>
> Emma commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Indiana
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html> There
> is this interesting notion at the end of the article -- that there is
> comfort that the "old way" dictated by the Bible and its interpretation
> have not been eclipsed by paganism. I find the opposite comforting. The old
> way, which served a specific societal master and has been used in every era
> as a cudgel against racial, religious (ironically), and sexual minorities,
> was not wholly positive. It should be comforting that the essence of
> spirituality in the global north is being reworked in a more equitable
> fashion. You will probably find that today's spiritual adherents are
> unwittingly closer to the teachings of Jesus than the religious zealots
> that claim to be so godly in their actions.
>
> LJ commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> MA  Overlooked in your essay is the individualizing of spiritual
> practices—so Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus may attend a meditation or
> “satsang” group together, for example. Or non-Jews adopt Kabbalah
> traditions, etc. People are cobbling together practices from various
> religions and activities to express and develop their spiritual sides (even
> Non-believers can appreciate a walk on the beach....) The commonality all
> the “great” religions share is that the foundation is Love, and that all we
> are here to “get,” whether Christian, Atheist, Agnostic, Muslim, Humanist,
> Capitalist, Marxist, etc., is to love one another. That is the sum total of
> the Game of Life.
>
> jim kunstler commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Saratoga Springs, NY
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Andrew Sullivan got it right in NY Magazine this week when he noted that
> Wokesterism is the replacement du jour for Christianity. It has its sacred
> characters (identity groups) and a notion of original sin (white
> privilege), and requires sinners to apologize abjectly... but is absolutely
> unforgiving. That’s how crazy we have become.
>
> Androculus commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Far Left
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Don't worry, Ross, Catholicism and paganism can exist side by side, as
> they have for centuries in New Orleans. Good Catholics here, without
> conflict or contradiction, can also practice Voodoo, because the two
> religions compliment each other. In fact, they are so interrelated that the
> saints of one (Virgin Mary, St. Patrick ) are seen as the gods and
> goddesses of the other (Maitress Erzuli, Dambala Wedo). Just let people be,
> Ross; they can figure out what makes them happy or gives them comfort.
>
> Joseph Huben commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Upstate NY
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Pagan? Witches? Neither existed as concepts before Christianity and the
> “demonization” of all beliefs or ways of life that was not “Christian” as
> defined by “Christians”. Is Douthat condemning or demonizing or belittling
> all non-Christians? Are all Hindus or Buddhists or Taoists pagans? They all
> pre-dated Christianity and were designated pagan by early “Church Fathers”.
> “modern societies inevitably put away religious ideas as they advance in
> wealth and science and reason, and the decline of institutional religion is
> just a predictable feature of a general late-modern turn away from
> supernatural belief.” Supernatural belief is protected by the First
> Amendment. So is “putting away religious ideas” in favor of science and
> reason. Could the clinging to “religious ideas” be the real problem? In the
> world today we all recognize that religious fervor is the source of global
> terror. And where denial of science and reason are incited to prevent
> remedies to global warming, poverty, hunger and disease they have the
> “unintended” consequences we live with? Marx said religion is the opiate of
> the people. He was wrong. Religion is the enemy of reason and science and
> the exploited wedge that justifies savage cruelty.
>
> Dave commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Boston
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> As a scholar of Religious Studies, I’m sorry to report that it’s my
> opinion that Mr. Douthat’s propositions are rather uninformed. He is
> captivated by a picture of religions as a set of discrete beliefs about the
> nature of the divine or supernatural. This way of thinking about religion
> is a product of 19th century taxonomies, a mode that still has a lot of
> popular pull today but that is generally discredited in scholarship. More
> troublingly, he seems to think that it makes sense to speak about what “we
> Americans” believe, relying upon an uncritical assessment of vaguely worded
> polls. The United States is and always has been composed of an incredible
> diversity of beliefs, making such generalizations about allegedly epochal
> shifts extremely difficult to make with any accuracy. More often than not,
> these kind of generalizations reflect the preoccupations of the one making
> them, rather than anything about the actual state of affairs.
>
> David Patin commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Bloomington, IN
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> To the list of religious trends in the United States in Douthat’s first
> paragraph I would have added a political party that teams up with a
> religious denomination to force the tenets of that faith on everyone else.
> Yet it isn’t just forcing the tenets of their faith on everyone else, it’s
> also declaring that anyone who doesn’t agree with their dogma is somehow
> less American than they are. And from some of the more extreme members of
> this Republican/Religious Party, those who don’t believe just like them are
> bringing about the decline of the United States. That this forcing of faith
> on others might possibly be contributing to the secularization of the
> United States somehow Ross Douthat can’t imagine.
>
> esp commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> ILL
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Confusing. Does one have to choose between "religion" or paganism? Can't
> one just "be". Be spiritual, yet not have a tag, like "religious" or pagan?
> Can't people exist spiritually without reading "self-help" books, or
> reading a religious text like the Bible or worshiping nature. Or perhaps
> people could find some things helpful in "self-help" books, a religious
> text, and/or a walk in nature. Wisdom can be found in all of these without
> having to be "religious" or "pagan"? Do we need to worship something?
>
> Ellen commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Williamburg
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> One of the benefits of paganism is that most forms of it are nature and
> earth centered in belief. In a time of climate change provoked by neglect
> and abuse of our shared environment, we could use more religion that offers
> respect for Mother Earth and the natural processes that have allowed living
> forms to largely thrive until our time.
>
> candideinnc commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> spring hope, n.c.
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> I chuckled at the characterization of the burgeoning secularists in
> America as being the gullible victims of "self-help gurus and
> spiritual-political entrepreneurs." Oh my goodness, no, Mr. Douthat! We do
> not need shamans and priests to encourage us to be skeptics. We are
> actually capable of rational thought, all under our own power. We are not
> little children who are indoctrinated with the superstition that if we are
> good little boys and girls, we will go up in the sky back in the arms of
> Mommy and Daddy, all under the benevolent supervision of the great, long
> bearded patriarch sky daddy. We are fully capable of distinguishing between
> fables and reality under our own power.
>
> PJ commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Salt Lake City
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Thank you Mr. Douthat for another challenging and interesting read. I too
> think about the decline of Christianity in the United States, but have not
> come across a lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting the rise of paganism. No
> doubt you are better versed in theological studies than I am, but I would
> bet I interact with far more individuals than you do as I work as an ER
> clinical social worker. I rarely meet individuals who claim to be Pagan,
> though I have met 1 or 2 Wiccans over the course of many years. I meet many
> individuals who express spirituality and also disdain for organized
> religion of any sort. The fact that they search for God in nature, the
> universe, and not inside a church, does not mean they are Pagan - which
> would be traditionally defined as believing in many Gods. I rarely meet
> individuals who believe in many Gods... The more likely hypothesis, I
> believe, is that people are being pushed out of Protestant, Mormon,
> Catholic, and other Christian churches because those religions continue to
> line up more with the political right, their values and prejudices, than
> the values and teachings of Jesus Christ. I long for the fellowship of
> religion, the ceremonies and rituals, but I will not pay tithes to any
> church that excludes people because of their identity, and is loyal to the
> political right. A kind man once told me: "if there were a true church of
> Christ in our midst, there wouldn't be people dying in our streets from the
> cold". There are...
>
> reaylward commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> st simons island, ga
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Douthat misidentifies what's happening to religious, in particular
> Christian, institutions: it isn't a rise in secularization but
> sectarianism, the sectarianism practiced by the growing movement of
> independent evangelical churches. One is either a member and believer, or
> one isn't really a Christian. These churches are usually led by a highly
> charismatic minister, a cultish figure who determines the beliefs and
> practices to be followed and who has unquestioned authority, both as the
> result of his or her charisma and the absence of any hierarchy above him or
> her to which to answer. The only authority above the minister is God, and
> the minister is the mediator between the minister and his followers. These
> are by far the fastest growing Christian churches, and their increasing
> numbers come at the expense of mainline protestant churches (Methodist,
> Presbyterian, etc.). It's not a big leap from such cultish churches to a
> political cult, which helps explain Trump's overwhelming popularity and
> support among the members.
>
> Didier commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Charleston, WV
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Perform this experiment. Over the next few months, visit several mainline
> Protestant churches where you live. Don't worry; they will welcome you.
> But, what you will generally see are older congregations, empty pews, and
> large structures in need of repair. The membership of mainline Protestant
> churches and particularly regular church attendance is cratering. I read an
> article recently that said, demographically, there are only about 23
> Easters left for mainline Protestant churches. But, as I've sat in many of
> those churches for the last few years and looked around, and heard the few
> left decrying their decline, something has occurred to me. What if this
> isn't what God wants? What if hierarchical organizations and large
> buildings were a mistake? Something that satisfied human aspirations, but
> not spiritual ones. There will always be those, like me, whose lives are,
> in part, a search for the divine, but it is time to look and listen and
> reevaluate what it means to be a searcher. I will still go to church
> because it is there I find something -- even if it is one I have never
> attended before -- that I cannot personally find elsewhere. But, I do not
> begrudge those who choose a different path. I celebrate the journey, the
> search for the divine.
>
> Norwester commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Seattle
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Douthat suggests that Judeo-Christian religions offer "help" where
> paganism does not, in a "universe that offers suffering and misery in
> abundance." Christianity may offer opium to sufferers, but it does nothing
> to allay suffering and misery in any permanent way. No religion does. As
> Harris says, only when we recognize that there is no supernatural solution
> and we humans are accountable for solving our own problems will we actually
> band together and solve them. In the mean time, we'll throw bones at the
> poor, fight over magic books, fail in stewardship of our planet and waste
> time, money and resources on superstition, incense and prayer, none of
> which have any real benefit whatsoever.
>
> Paul commented December 12
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Richmond VA
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html>
> Call me a pagan, but the idea of a divine that pervades the universe
> strikes me as much more meaningful and profound than the notion that this
> is all the result of the snap some celestial magician’s fingers. If we
> don’t seek the divine within us and all things, we’ll never find the divine
> without. Relying on an external divinity, though, leads inevitably to the
> widespread practice of what Niebuhr called “bad religion” — religion that
> reserves the ultimate sanction for itself. That road starts with the
> Crusades and leads remorselessly to 9/11.
>
>
> Jim Wiegel <http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=123>
>
> “That which consumes me is not man, nor the earth, nor the heavens, but
> the flame which consumes man, earth, and sky."  Nikos Kazantzakis
>
> 401 North Beverly Way,Tolleson, Arizona 85353
>
> 623-363-3277
>
> jfwiegel at yahoo.com <marilyn.oyler at gmail.com>
>
> www.partnersinparticipation.com
>
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-- 
Richard H. T. Alton
One Earth Film Fest ( OEFF)
Green Community Connections
Interfaith Green Network
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