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@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>
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