Sorry, I meant Fred DAVIS, not Fred Smith, as an example of American non-dualist experience and teaching.
3
Father Doubt That: might you allow that the decline of organized religion in the US might be accelerated by the fact that you, among others, seem more interested in palace intrigue. You, a convert, appear to be aligned with a bizarre coalition of supposedly “conservative, traditional Catholics” interested in deposing Pope Francis. They include the conspicuous “traditional conservative Catholic Steve Bannon, his three marriages and divorces evidently notwithstanding. Then there is his accomplice, Cardinal Raymond Burke, whose “dubia” questioning of the Pope you endorsed, yet whose complicity in covering up priestly sexual abuse in St. Louis remains unpunished. Cardinal Vigano makes the risible claim that Francis knowingly covered up such abuses while his avatar of “traditional conservative Catholicism,” Pope Benedict was, for decades, the man across whose desk every report of sexual abuse crossed, and then disappeared. Meanwhile, Francis was responsible for just Buenos Aires and Argentina while Ratzinger saw every accusation reported from across the entire catholic world.
That credible instances of abuse are percolating up even a quarter century after your colleague Frank Bruni cowrote “Gospel of Shame” show that the coverup was deep into the John Paul II and Benedict papacies.
Perhaps Americans are disgusted by a refusal for your chosen church to clean house, despite a more forward looking Pope?
45
Holy smokes, talk about wishful thinking! You sound like all the Democrats who are constantly saying, "Well, surely the Congress won't let President Trump get away with THAT!"
Christianity is on the way out because it makes no sense. Its basic tenet: your life is terrible here, but don't worry because it will be better after you die. If you're good. Whatever that means.
63
Ross, there already is paganism all over America. It's called personality cults in right wing evangelical religious store fronts. Oh, the communities sometimes build nice buildings and they celebrate some or all of the traditional Christian holy days. But they are pagan and political fronts for bigotry and racism. They call themselves "Christians", but they are closer to satanic cult worship than to Christ.
52
Why do you want to institutionalize it? Just let it be, bro, let it be.
35
And I say that for now, we ought to stick with St. Augustine's "Catholic" Religion, together with its well known, "Protestant" offshoots:
—
Why? Simply, because it works.
—
Oh! And no fair complaining, “about all the abuses,” that crept in over the centuries.
—
Day to day, Sunday to Sunday, year to year, millennia to millennia:
"Christianity,” as we know it has delivered a sense at least, of peace, some semblance of continuity, and a uniformly accepted worldview, for the benefit of every prince and every pauper, living and dying in the Western World.
—
Now how can you beat that?
—
It’s true:
We have no evidentiary “proof,” of God’s existence. Nor do any of us know for sure where we came from or where we’re going.
But for the purposes of practical religion, it really doesn’t matter.
—
What matters, is that we each have a fighting chance of making it through every day that comes our way. And our “good old” Christian religion, is what we use on every occasion, to make that happen.
3
Religion is organized and ritualized superstition. Many of us prefer to be responsible fo ourselves; we are atheists.
78
For anyone truly interested in the false logic behind the belief in a moralistic creator just read "Is God a Taoist?" by Raymond Smullyan, the famous logician.
http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/godTaoist.html
And for anyone interested in the mysteries of the universe just learn quantum mechanics. You will encounter truly amazing mysteries to solve therein.
27
We would do well to listen to the pagan myth about what happens to people...or societies...that try to fly too close to the sun.
14
Looking for a spiritual/religious answer or direction should not be limited to a Western view point. When studying texts from ancient Hindu traditions we find the birth and beginnings of a psychological, scientific, and spiritually based understanding of life. We are connected to life not because we believe but because we are alive.
I like the quote, "Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell and spirituality is for those who have already been there."
19
Christmas is pagan, thank God.
35
Lot’s of social science buzzwords in this article. Civic paganism? Transhumanism? What do these words mean?
12
If someone, somehow does manage to capture the true, accurate, no-foolin' whole truth, I hope it's either the Pagans or the Mormons.
In their afterlifes I may be quite surprised, but at least I won't be eternally tortured.
8
All this nonsense because weak minded people need a crutch and low information people find it easier to to believe in the supernatural than to inform themselves about science and nature. Marx was half right, religion is the opiate of the masses, it is also the picture book of the ill- and semi-literate!
40
Very little mention of Catholics and Jews. And if he is going
to talk of immanence why not mention that God is immanent
as both Aquinas (Catholic) and Spinoza(Jewish) claimed.
2
Seriously, Ross, a baby, conceived by a sky-phantom, born and placed in a sheeps' feeding trough, growing up to perform miracles, even rising from the dead, and, in the Roman version, whose mother later was determined to be born of a sky-phantom, too. And you call others "pagans"?
And I haven't even gotten to the part where the government of the US attaches an amendment to the original document that says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
Get it? This is NOT and never has been a Christian nation. Many fled your kind of doctrinism.
49
The evangelists with their hypocrisy and support of hatred and bigotry, Trump beliefs, have driven people away from religion
15
Paganism? Really? What is it that Catholics like Douthat do when they go to church? Oh yeah, the transubstatiation. And that’s based on . . . Oh yeah, literally believing you’re eating flesh and drinking blood. Where did that come from? D suggests that people need the reassurance of Jude’s-Christian beliefs, because it’s a scary world. It is for some people. Mostly those who need some fairy tale faith where ultimately they don’t have to be responsible while they’re alive and are simply afraid of what comes after life. He says nothing about those religions that hate some people so much that members torture gay people as part of a “treatment.” Hey, here’s some news. There is no Santa Clause and you don’t need god or paganism if you are a real grown up.
25
Aren’t we long overdue to outgrow our Bronze Age fairy tales? There is no evidence in support of supernatural phenomena. Religion has a history soaked in blood.
47
Oh No! Not Paganism! Isn’t that the one were they get together in dark rooms, burn candles and incense, dress up in funny costumes, and recite magical chants? God forbid!
13
Religions that posit a heaven and hell are largely responsible for the mindset of ignoring the majesty and beauty of this earth. and of degrading its ability to support us. Imagine the uplift if a wide range of people came to respect the divinity that is the earth and its systems. In fact, how else can we slow climate change, overdevelopment,and pollution without a sense of purpose that could unite us to fight the greatest battle that humanity has ever faced? Who will speak unapologetically for the earth? Could Christians and Muslims come to see that protecting this planet is the clearest way to thank God for such a wonderful gift?
23
You've got a conga line going on the head of a pin, Ross.
3
This essay is such a mess I can't believe the Times published it. First, "pagans" have been around forever. There are not more now than in many past eras. Second, since when is Christianity the only religion? Ahem, some Americans are Jewish, etc. Third, there are lots of secular atheists in this country, who think paganism is hooey. What a bizarre piece to publish in a serious newspaper. And the photos are, let's face it, just goofy.
25
Perhaps it would be useful first to define religious thinking.
Religious thinking is: 1. Hero worship + 2. Unassailable dogma + 3. criminalization of some thought.
So in for instance Christianity we have 1. Jesus (or god) + 2. redemption from sin (heaven + hell) + 3. coveting thy neighbors wife, or goods.
And herein lies the rub for 21st Century Americans. They'll do hero worship with gusto, and they'll buy into some rules but probably not unassailable dogma. Finally, they dismiss thought crime out of hand (but would make illegal some speech).
4
Reading Douthat espouse on religious and secular topics related to "philosophy" is akin to stabbing sharp needles into your eye sockets full bore.
12
All religions and political parties are by definition cults. They believe in a fantasy propagated by political leaders. Those politicians are popes, kings, priest, rabbis, witch doctors, shamans, bankers, mayors, senators, governors... As long as politicians have power they will use cults to oppress "the other". It's not even a race thing. Look at how black evangelicals rant against gay/lesbian humans. The religious magic books tell them all are god's creation yet they openly despise their fellow humans.
Why would they do this? Because they belong to an irrational cult that uses "the other" for political gain.
What scares so called conservatives is that the political cults (religions and political parties) they have used in the past are losing their grip on the free will of humans. Yes we all have a brain and we see the lying, raping, stealing, self-aggrandizement for what it is. A political farce that has slowed the progress of true believers in God.
He gave you talents, yet you waste them on war and destruction. How low will you go this time? Another world war? Another holocaust?
Just show me one major religion led by a woman. Think God's okay with that? Over half of the world's population is female and is being told by men that they are less worthy of God than a man.
I'm all for freedom of religion. I just want them to get it the hell back into church where it belongs. Because I don't want your cults involved in my government at all.
Thanks for all the fish,
Dave
21
Much as he wants to believe that Christianity is the one true religion, sui generis, surely Ross has read enough to know that the basis of the Christian resurrection is just another reworking of the dying god myth, hence Christianity has its roots in paganism.
16
Lost is another word for Paganism. Darwin got it pretty much right on the nature of the universe. Relying on the supernatural may have appeal for some. Freedom of thought, expression and religion is a good thing.
2
How about the maintenance of the Catholic institution of celibacy even after wide scale, multiple generational child sexual abuse has been revealed across the Western world? Sit down, sir, secularism isn't the problem.
11
This is just too precious:
"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” had redirected their lives."
40%...hmmm....that's about identical to the percentage of Americans who support Trump. Which leads to the question: what is the meaning, what is the value obtained by a profound religious experience? A willingness to support a man who breaks all 10 commandments on a daily basis?
I'll go with atheism, thank you.
13
Atheism, humanism and spiritual practice will eventually replace outmoded organized religions - not “paganism”. Young people are too intelligent to believe fairy tales.
11
"Don't try to talk in the footsteps of the old Masters. Seek what they sought." -- Basho (17th century Japan)
4
Religion stems from organized elites using fear of the unknown to create behavioral controls of the masses. While there are many wonderful lessons to be drawn from the multitude of mythologies, at the core neither ethnics nor unethicalness are truly created by religion. They only borrowed for their own purposes
11
The myths that now inform the thought-worlds of many Americans come from Marvel Comics, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc. People "believe" in Superman or Black Panther or Potter or Wonder Woman without actually thinking they exist in the "real world." Thus worshippers identify with and bear the tokens of their favored saint/superhero, wearing a T-shirt with his logo, buying cult images or effigies to decorate their bedrooms, reading further tales of adventure and survival, etc. It's all imaginary of course, just like Jesus.
10
I left christianity when I was in my early teens. At 76 yrs now I can attest how great and liberating that act was. For me all organized religons and christianity in particular have disgraced themselves and are woefully inadiquate to the questions even I can ask. I embraced the gods of my Greco/Roman ancesters first at an intelectual level then fully as tangible beings. Established rituals are unnecessary. When suplicating the gods first say thankyou then request the boon you desire. But be careful you just might get what you wish for as the Fates gather and cackle over your fate.
2
From your lips to God's ears.
1
It’s not paganism. It’s non-duality. The idea is the essential oneness of all things, the basis of all of which is consciousness. Consciousness underlies all. Everything happens where? In consciousness. This consciousness is united with God. You can frame it as where our finite selves intersect with God, or as the one single consciousness in which all phenomena appear, or in many other ways. This is generally understood as an “Eastern” idea, but its roots are also deep in Judaism and Christianity. Judaism is one God, who is infinite, and therefore everywhere, therefore non-dual in essence. Christianity has deep mystical traditions which show the unity of our consciousness with that of God - see Meister Eckhart; the Cloud of Unknowing; Thomas Keating; Origen; John Cassian; the Desert Fathers, etc.
The non-dual transcendent is the consciousness which is always removed from and observant of the world, including of our bodies and minds. You are aware of your mind, therefore you cannot be your mind. Instead, you are the awareness itself which the eternal witness, completely unaffected by the pain and suffering of the world. The realization of this is the ultimate realization of unity with God. This is what all religions point to. It’s the Buddhist nirvana, the Hindu “existence consciousness bliss” the Christian Kingdom of God, and the Jewish Godhead.
This is what is developing in America, (See Fred Smith for a good example of its essential Americanness).
7
So, Ross, how many people have been killed by Christians (forget the reasons why!) since, let's say, Constantine declared it as the state religion of the Roman Empire?
Some religion!
For millennia Christianity (as well as Islam, a little later) has been used a an excuse for murder and mayhem—and fraud—right down to the outright murder of doctors who perform abortions are murdered in the name of the Christian god, right here in the good old USA.
When Jerry Falwell's kid or Joel Osteen jet around the country in their own airplanes and simultaneously ask religious suckers to send him some money (for fuel?), well, its not hard to jettison any membership in an organized Christian religion. There is no good reason for anyone to be a Christian. The Golden Rule is still golden and it's something we can hang our ethics on until, well, until the end of us all.
In my opinion, organized Christian religions have a lousy, 2000 year-old track record of following what Jesus taught. (Frankly, he'd probably be a socialist today!)
So, forget paganism, or pantheism, or whatever. I'd much rather ruminate on Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" than on a bible.
It's just isn't that hard to figure out.
11
Well, maybe paganism is on the rise. I wouldn't know as I don't spend much time with superstitious people of any sort.
I will say, it's always fun as an atheist to watch religious nostalgics wrap themselves around an axle trying to assert that, no matter what is happening with declining traditional religion, it surely isn't leading to a world where (gasp!!) people just don't believe in superstition of any kind. My goodness, how ever shall we get along with out some sort of goblin around the corner?
And maybe we aren't. I suppose folks could be supplanting one form of nonsense for another. What I can tell you for sure is that it is entirely unnecessary. The "mysteries" in life are simply things we haven't figured out yet. One can be moral, happy, and kind with no fear of death without invoking the spirits. My "spiritual awakening" was the recognition 25 years ago that it's all nonsense, all of it, and the release of time and brainspace from it all was awakening, indeed.
13
How many pages am I allowed to respond?
Oh, three long paragraphs? Only the most extremely brilliant and ideally disciplined could have any hope to in this short forum. Nonetheless, fools rush in...
One of the problems with religion is that people make...a religion out of it. By that I mean whatever teachings they embrace, whatever miracles they believe in, are used to compel a rigid, doctrinaire adherence to a proscribed way of being. Everything is MUST, almost nothing is maybe.
Why is this so? For one, those who preach and promulgate NEED to have everything cast in mandatory terms. It helps them to rule. Besides, a religion that can be changed, that does not insist on some harshness, can disappear, evaporate like a passing fad.
In recent days, I have been immersed in a number of studies, one of them having to do with terrorism and its relationship to Islam. How did the horrid mistake of telling people to kill others as a religious duty come to be? How did Christians come to use the Bible to justify enslavement? How is it that Christians are focused on abortion but one million killed in Vietnam, no problem?
An explanation can be seen in the need for absolute certainty and the urgency of deriving certainty from religious texts. This is a massive and likely uncorrectable mistake. Until religion comes to the ideal that it's purpose is to serve living human beings, it will continue to fail. It must be malleable enough to serve, strong enough to keep core principles.
7
Thanks for all the patronizing self righteousness. No surprise, really; it’s the the usual Christian approach, that everyone but me is wrong. And my loving/hateful imaginary being is going to reward me in a human-created afterlife. How can you disdain a pagan recognition of the dichotomy of existence, but honor the same in your own system of beliefs? Same to you, Mr. Douthat.
7
Read the “Tenets” of the Satanic Temple. Then read the Nicene Creed. The former is a wonderfully straightforward declaration about what is possible for human beings who embrace their humanity. The latter is silly gooblygook: no one who believes it understands it, and no one who understands it actually believes it. Most people are members of an organized religion because their parents were. There is very little deep commitment, though authority figures within those faith communities often exploit basic human anxiety (e.g. fear of death) to maintain power, demand money, and many other things that show their deep corruption. So what’s good about traditional religion exactly?
7
''Here are some generally agreed-upon facts about religious trends in the United States.'' - Atheism is the fastest growing group not only in the U.S. but worldwide.
Organized religion is dead, and if anyone wants to pray to some higher power, they do not need any hierarchy to lead them.
6
What is lost in the equation is that being a follower of LORD JESUS is just that, a personal relationship with HIM. It was never about religion. Anyone whom has actually read the Bible will understand that JESUS reserved HIS strongest disapprovals for organized religion and those who religious leaders who lorded it over the people. Read John 8 for yourself. Also, there is nothing new in what Mr. Douthat has written. Man has always sought to invent GOD in his own image. Ravi Zacharias rightly defines Satan's tempting of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:4-5 as "you will be like GOD and you will define good and evil." Unfortunately, we all fall for that lie. We are not GOD. What do any of us have that is not a gift of GOD? Did any of us create our own genetics? If we did not even have any part in that, how can we claim any right to creating GOD? HE is revealed. As to those who say that followers of JESUS practice a "blind faith." I again defer to Ravi Zacharias: "our faith is a reasoned response to revealed TRUTH."
2
When the various religious groups cared more for their pedophile ministers and the reputation of their religious brand, than assisting their victims, they lost any moral and legal authority.
Since when does defending the indefensible, become the most important role of religious groups?
3
Ross, you are thinking too much. I don't think people are so much "post Christian", as "post Church". Churches have gotten away from the teachings of Jesus, and have made their own rules that members have to follow. Some of these rules don't make sense, or don't make sense anymore. And, let's face it --Sunday morning is a terrible time for religious services.
7
You wish that it were just a binary choice; you are either some form of Christian or you are Pagan. Ross, I don't believe in all of the magic that goes with Christ, but I still don't steal, murder or cut in line. I treat my fellow humans much better than most Christians do, but I am not a Pagan. Lots of us get by just fine without hollow ceremonies and we make the world a better place. Your binary choice is false, Ross. We can have all kinds of non-Christian beliefs and still not be Pagans. At times, you are so quaint.
14
I propose that Ross has a mis-emphasis on formal belief structure and that the real issue in life is whether we can be alive, curious, compassionate, and perhaps reflective as well.
5
Until I see a "pagan" hospital or charity, then I'll take it seriously as a religion, and not just a movement of people for whom Halloween is a year-round holiday.
2
While paganism- at least as you describe it- sounds kind of silly, it seems way less silly than the religions most humans follow. As the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins put it: "If you live in America, the chances are good that your next door neighbours believe the following: the Inventor of the laws of physics and Programmer of the DNA cod decided to enter the uterus of a Jewish virgin, get himself born, then deliberately had himself tortured and executed because he couldn't think of a better way o forgive the theft of an apple, committed at the instigation of a talking snake." He goes on to talk about absurdities of other religions.
Currently, the biggest noise in our country is coming from those who claim to be followers of Christ but seem to love rich guys, hate the poor and the stranger, and be in a tizzy about abortion- even though all but the last are directly opposite the Gospels and the latter is never mentioned.
Someone asked George Bernard Shaw what he thought of Christianity. He responded that it sounded like a good idea; someone should try it.
12
How odd that Mr. Douthat thinks that spiritual practices have to be labelled, uniform and fit into a box (of his own design) to count.
6
Mr. Douthat,
Do you think the mysticism of Teilhard de Chardin, Richard Rohr and other Christian theologians resolves the transcendent/immanent conflict you present at the end of your column?
1
Worldwide, there are millions if not billions, more people who experience love, gratitude, reverence, and a wise rhythm to living through pagan and other native religious experiences than Christians. Pagans can easily recognize the wisdom and healing found in individuals like Jesus, Teresa, Mary, Black Elk, and Buddha. Pagans just don’t believe that a loving and wise healer like Jesus needed to be nailed to a cross and left to die horrendously to make up for the mistakes of everyone who lived since then. Clearly Jesus pointed out repeatedly how God might be experienced through Nature.
The written works of America’s Founders and Framers reveal that they were for the most part Deists who purposely left the word “God” out of the Constitution, and who hated the forcing of religions on people as they had experienced in Europe. The American tradition of Emerson, Thoreau, Dickens, Alcott, Longfellow, Oliver, Fuller, and Whitman, all express a transcendentalism that expresses the essence of Americanism, not European Christianity.
8
Mr. Douthat, without paganism Christianity wouldn't exist.
In 325 CE/AD the Council of Nicea gave the world a Trinity of Gods in order to get as many pagans to join their new religion.
Bishops who considered that 'new' religion akin to praying to more than one God were murdered or defrocked.
The birth date of Jesus - never really know - was artificially chosen to have happened during the winter solstice - with all the evergreens and joyful former pompous pagan rituals.
6
Ross--I can't remember the last time I saw a temple dedicated to Zeus except in the history books.
This article is precisely why I hate this time of the year. It just brings out the worst in everyone.
2
Under nearly every church and cathedral floor in Europe there is an ancient pagan shrine or temple. Under the long shadow of the sun's solstice-- the pagan re-birth of the sun festival-- on approximately December 23rd the Catholics placed the birth of Christ on December 25th.
Il Papa is the pater familia, the nuns are the vestal virgins, most of the saints are amalgamated or galvanized pagan characters.
So don't feel so bad Ross. Your orthodoxy was never so orthodox as you think, and now that it is all being bulldozed beneath its own Bronze Age inability to help fix Atomic Age (or Plastic Age) human problems and is being discarded for new experiments, just remember-- what goes around, comes around.
Jesus was supposed to return after all-- Maranatha! The last words of the New Testament (or where do you put the apocrypha?) Come quickly Lord! But alas he tarried 2000 years. The children were left alone and so they did what children always do when left alone-- they forgot what the Father said and didn't play nicely. They launched persecutions and inquisitions and holy wars and pogroms and carried their "faith" to the natives with swords and muskets.
And you bemoan the loss of all that?
I used to be a born again evangelical-- before I learned all of the above-- and even so I really cannot imagine what must go inside the brain of a fellow human being who can only wrap himself in tradition and orthodoxy without, apparently, the slightest ability to perform metacognition.
8
Perchance the immanent be imminent,
That being the Eminent Domain:
An institution of Secularization,
A paganistic train,
Heretical in grain,
From dogma freed,
From Nature lain,
Harmonic deed.
And yet, the Intellect's enquiry
Commands the curious Brain
To pursue knowledge, thought and wisdom
Unto its creative chrain.
The damage done to women, men, and children in the Catholic Church on the subject of sexuality is key. Opponents of the teachings on contraception and abortion are demonized yet expected to turn a blind eye to pedophilia and the sexual relationships of priests with other adults, not to mention the disrespect toward women religious. 98 percent of women in the US use or have used contraception. This figure includes Catholics. People aren't stupid, nor will they accept a definition of spirituality that harms them.
3
Maybe the decline of organized religion is the result of people WANTING TO DO THEIR OWN THINKING, instead of just accepting dogma from an authority figure.
I can do just fine without an external set of rules and morality.
My good parents taught me right from wrong and I don't need stone tablets or a stone cube to tell me what I should be doing.
7
A. A.
All about spirituality and definitively non-religious.
"God as we understood him"
"One ultimate authority: is a loving God as may be expressed in our group conscience."
We believe in our 12 Steps "*suggested* as a program of recovery.", Unity, Recovery, Service.
God if that works for you, but never required.
40 years of recovery and a Pagan. (IMHO, a Buddhist with no work ethic!)
|-{)-
2
From the text: "...where the prosperity gospel and Christian nationalism rule the right and a social gospel denuded of theological content rules the left.
Oh, come on, Ross, the right is just as 'denuded' of theological content as your presumptive claim about the left. Simply because the Christian Right behaves in an authoritarian manner and pounds the lectern proclaiming 'God's Law' hardly convinces me of their fidelity to theology.
4
Don't forget the right wing dominionists who also want heaven on Earth, by the work of their own hands, through conquest of the Seven Mountains (of culture, politics, etc.)
This movement within Christianity is at odds with much of the Christian world, but it should be counted among the "this world" philosophies (albeit in a much more "Handmaids Tale" sort of way).
2
I read this article with a song in my head, “The Man Who Sold the World.”
This piece talks about why people are turning away from the church and turning toward secularism, other traditions, and new age spirituality. Douthat wrestles with the idea that people may hunger for an immanent spirituality rather than one based on Christianity’s God outside. He conflates it with demand for the prosperity gospel and psychic scams. Then breathes a sigh of relief in the knowledge that Christianity remains the dominant faith in America.
The song I mentioned can offer a conflicting narrative. “We passed upon a stair, spoke of what and when, although I wasn’t there, he said I was his friend, which came as a surprise, I spoke into his eyes, ‘I thought you’d died alone, a long, long time ago.’ Oh no, not me we never lost control, you’re face to face with the man who sold the world.”
In this context, every generation confronts the ideas of past generations, on the stairs. Youth have to decide whether to carry those old ideas forward, and we of the older generation act like friends to pass on our ideas. Sensing a con, some youth say, “isn’t your way of life long past?” but we say, “no, it’s still in charge.”
Both are right. To get jobs, most youth need to sell out: mimic their parents and forget saving the world. Upset? Give to charity. Some see that this route is killing us and our planet. Yet many preachers say, “Vote Trump to please God.” How is that extinction road spiritually sound?
1
I'm shocked, frankly. Ross is always so sharp, but . . . As a fan-boy of the Christian epoch, surely you know that adaptation and syncretism -- in one or another measure -- have been driving features of the Christian paradigm since Gregory the Great. The beauty of our core religious tenets, stripped of the transient aesthetic considerations that intrude age over age, is their endurance notwithstanding even radical variations in those presentational embellishments we come, over a lifetime in church, to view as inextricably linked to a core dogma. We're not moving toward paganism any more than we're moving toward communism -- ok, breathe.
Nine out of ten Christians can give clear testimony, based on witnessed and observable fact, but neither Gallup nor you and so many others now seem to care to pursue these facts. The scourge of paganism has devoured the minds of non-believers who share no common faith other than for the nonsensical mockery which begets the devil as well as anyone.
As one who drifted in and out of this confusion for 58 long confusing years, when I entered adolescence, I am happy to say I found that finally, after the long illness, reading the Bible gives me immense pleasure. I had long since discarded even the notion of reading it (if only for the wisdom printed in Proverbs) - one of 66 books of the Word that will come alive when you ask God for instruction and correction instead of vainly and foolishly hoping you'll find all your answers in the literature of science.
God is at your side when you call upon Him, and the Holy Ghost - once received - is more powerful than any street-corner god or spirit conjured up in any man's imagination, or church/religion.
I challenge anyone reading this to read, not skim, Proverbs in its entirety and not be changed by it. Come back to your Christian roots or find them. When you die, it's finished.
1
I think more and more people are realizing that organized religion causes more problems in the world than it solves. Millions of people have died as a result of having the "wrong religion in the wrong place." The concept of religion is based on a human desire to belong to a community: "I believe this so everyone else must be wrong." That's when the killing starts. I believe the world would be a much more peaceful place without any religion. Maybe other people think that too.
6
Mr. Douthat is determined to preserve the Christianity that still underlies our culture, in every permutation and combination of supernatural beings - his taxonomy is fatiguing.
What if a certain portion of people, come to understand that homo sapiens are best understood as primates, 98% common DNA with bonobos and chimpanzees. Humans have one hyper organ, something analogous to the long neck of the giraffe, that does make us different.
This brain allowed us to have first language, then something called civilization, that in time required and facilitated the capacity to conceptualize entities that organized we humans. Douthat may choose to try to preserve the inevitability of requiring such imaginary icons, that did serve it's purpose in the eons of evolution that lead to historical times, a tiny moment in the Homo Sapiens evolution, now become culture, and laws and religion.
Studies of those in advanced scientific fields shows less of a need for such mythical creature, nor is it necessary to assume that the world becomes a deity. Sadly, the power of this concept has been coopted by TrumpRepublicans, who blatantly with Trump's proclamation at the conclave of Congressional Prayer Breakfast. "I love God"
Sure he does, which is why he does unto others..... Humans can be rational, without the need for a traditional Creator in chief, or an elaborate menagerie of beings that fill the void that is left in His absence.
5
One does not need religion, or (a) religious belief, to be "good" and to do "good".
“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.” Albert Einstein
To borrow from Spinoza:
God is not some goal-oriented planner who judges things by how well they conform to his purposes. “Stuff happens” only because of Nature and its laws.
God does not perform miracles because there are no departures from the mechanics of Nature. The belief in miracles is due only to ignorance of the true causes of phenomena.
To explain why things go bump in the night to the ignorant, willful or accidental, is the topic of another conservation.
3
Mr. Douthat: this might, maybe, have come off slightly better if you had not spent the whole of your column on the late President Bush on carefully showing us who you thought the first were and who the last were and why the last had no business getting in the way of the first--pesky things like Gospels notwothstanding. I think you will be able to stir up much more vague existential dread about pagans when Christians stop attempts at legal nullification and threats of civil war.
1
It may be 'comfort that it(paganism) is not yet fully formed. On the other hand, ossified Christianity leaves me cold and has nothing on experiencing the divine within. Thou' art stardust and unto stardust thou will return.
1
Most Christian mystics have believed that the divine teaching was represented by creation itself, and that the manifestation of the visible and invisible universe is the most profound message given us.
Buddhists accept this too, we just give the universe a masculine proper personal noun, or personify suffering and enlightenment by a man nailed to a cross, or compassion by his mother. We have our own symbols of enlightenment, wisdom, and awe.
Paganism is a pejorative word used by Christians to describe lost souls. Its an entirely disrespectful term to use in describing people whom you wish to belittle (or burn), so as to elevate yourself and your own beliefs.
None of that is important.
All that matters is the sincerity with which you approach ethics, the depth of your relationship to truth, your kindness to others, and your reverence for existence.
1
People should read The Devils of Loudun, by Aldous Huxley, before they get too comfortable with the comfortable spirituality of the New Age.
1
Ross, you really didn't seem to touch on one of the major reasons for the shift away from Christianity. The weird cult like devotion evangelicals and self proclaimed religious people have to the completely immoral occupant in the Whitehouse is turning people off to Christianity in droves. Especially young people. I lament that young people will never know that we used to have a functional government or that republicans didn't always scorn science or the environment. Well, these same young people are going to forever associate modern Christianity with the party of Trump. That won't age well for Christianity.
5
The best chance for "Catholic America" is the teaching and example of Pope Francis. This teaching and example is rejected by politically conservative Catholics such as Ross Douthat. The result is that pro-Trump Catholics and evangelicals have to a large extent hijacked the religious dialogue of this country. Not surprisingly, this has led to young people from their teens to their 30s leaving and staying away in ever-growing numbers. However, the desire for the truth of human existence remains. We are not just soulless collections of atoms. We Christians just need to start acting like Christ, rather than asserting we have to truth and behaving like everybody else.
1
Ross is a millennium late and a thousand dollars short on this one: his musings on paganism are over-simplistic and ill-informed.
He has a tyro's grasp of the subject, and needs to do a few years of studying (I mean this quite literally) before he can comment intelligently on it.
To add to the confusion, not even the vast majority of modern would-be "pagans" will devote the time or effort required to do so.
For starters, suffice it to say that paganism--and pagan ideas--are not, nor have ever been, *remotely* monolithic, even along broad philosophical lines.
I'm not even going to try to navigate the comments on this one, it would be like commanding the tide.
Cut to the chase: it’s all about sex. Trust me, I do philosophical theology. And here is some history.
During the 3rd Century when Christianity gained some traction when Platonism was the ambient philosophy and the assumption was that the body, the flesh, the passions were suspect and during the Crisis of the Third Century times were bad—’the World’ was bad. So Christian contempt for the World and the Flesh sold. Now, for all the politics and conflict, the World is good and we in affluent countries, saturated by Romanticism and Freudianism, are convinced that the World and Flesh. So seekers interested in ‘spirituality’ look elsewhere, including neo-pagan alternatives.
It’s a shame, because World-denying and Flesh-denying features of Christianity that come from this history aren’t essential to Christianity, which is our culture-religion. But no matter how much we Christians say we aren’t into this anymore no one believes us. And ‘spiritual seekers’ don’t consider it. Pity, because this is our culture religion: we’re got the buildings and art, the history and the whole cultural package. And if that disappears, as currently seems likely, something invaluable will be lost.
I know far more people who practice Buddhism than paganism.
Far more who practice mystical or contemplative Christianity.
There are also quite a number of bonafide spiritual teachers who are not gurus. Ross seems to be oblivious to all that.
Ross' Christianity is completely devoid of mysticism and loaded with superego.
1
A great many heartfelt analyses of the decline of Christianity in the USA have appeared in the past couple of decades. Could it be this? Could it be that? People are spiritual but not religious. Etcetera etcetera ad nauseam.
How about this explanation? American Christianity has hijacked the gospel. To be an American Christian is to be for guns and against many other things. “Bringing good news to the poor and setting captives free?” Nah. “They”, the poor and the captives, probably deserve their situation, by the lights of today’s “Christians.”
And how about the subjugation of half the population? How about foolishness like young-earth creationism? It goes on and on. And it all has very little to do with the gospel, and about the arc of history that bends towards justice.
Practically speaking, many local churches are burdened with preserving run-down old buildings that are far too big for their dwindling numbers, useless to potential tenants, and costly to maintain. The raising of maintenance funds is wrapped in a kind of bogus piety the fools fewer and fewer people every year.
Is it any wonder many people don’t adhere to congregations? The heart of the faith is harder and harder to find.
2
What you are describing to me is actually a rise of Buddhism and Buddhistic ideas in our society as opposed to paganism.
3
Were we each able to feel connection with the earth (keep it simple: go for a walk outside wherever you are and notice where/when you feel connection and what gets in the way of connection), we would not allow the current administration to destroy the source of our lives.
Mr. Douthat shows the zeal of the newly converted. I would never presume to judge his sincerity, but he seems not to feel the same about judging those of us who, feeling abandoned by an institution we loved, but which lied to us, betrayed us, wounded some of the vulnerable among us still refuses to face up and take responsibility for the heinous crimes committed by its priests and covered up by its bishops, maybe even higher authorities. Are we heretics for seeking a path through our doubts that might lead us back to love and mercy? I’d rather be a heretic than a molester or, even worse, someone who permitted molesters to go on with their evil.
1
Who on earth would use the word "pagan" with a straight face in this day and age. The word once referred to non-Christians who by dint of some system of belief were hostile to Christians. What could it mean now? You've given a definition but with a little sophistry and a metaphysical twist or two a lot of contemporary Christianity could be interpreted so as to be subject to that definition. What is "nature" anyway? The term "pagan" suggests that non-Christians are somehow spiritually inferior or hostile to Christianity. Are the Indic religions ( Buddhism, the Jain religion (both athiestic) and Hinduism (more sophisticated and even athiestic than most Western religious thinkers are willing to admit) etc.) "pagan". There is a Hindu shrine to the Virgin Mary in Andara Pradesh. Does that make Hindus Christian. Any thinking person contemplating the world of religion in this era in which we are very aware of the immense variety of religious thought and the relatively primitive character of Christian theology will find the idea of "paganism" to be a hopelessly irretrievable artifact.
1
Nature is neither rational nor irrational. Nature is adaptive. So is generally the human race.
Religions are the placebo or the substitute that humans rely upon to provide comfort or guidance when rationality alone comes short emotionally.
All religions are largely based on mumbo-jumbo but they bring that illusion of certainty that makes us feel better about living.
Politics should be best removed from all religious beliefs because politics should definitely be rational, aiming at properly leading human societies and hopefully at improving the human condition in the short term AND in the long term. But politicians constantly play the emotional game to gain popularity and votes and therefore they tend to stray quickly from rationality.
Humans have not changed since the beginning. Religions are here to stay but in constantly evolving forms. But politics has a lot of room for improvement. Perhaps AI would be better than politicians though...
4
Approximately 75% of Americans identify as Christians and 40% attend weekly church services. Since a core belief of Christianity is loving one's neighbour, it is hard to understand why this wide-spread profession of Christian belief does not result in brotherly love and kindness toward strangers instead of bitter social division and an epidemic of mass shootings. Should the present waning influence of Christianity be regretted when even Donald Trump professes to be a Christian and so many evangelicals support him? Shouldn't we be more concerned about how people treat each other than what their religious beliefs are?
9
Interesting article.....and a few thoughts to add. I would not get too worked up about pagans. They have always been around but are in no way supplanting Christianity, Islam, Judaism or other monotheistic religions. Ross again comments on the apparent decline of mainline Christian religions and the secularization of American society. There are so many forces acting against both Christian and non-Cristian religions today that it is hard to say with certainty that one or two particular forces are responsible for the decline in the number of observant church goers. In my mind, all of the major religions are having a hard time adapting to or dealing with modernity. The rapid change in the world over the past 50 years (politically, culturally, economically) has yielded great benefits but also a good share of alienation, fear, and other negative social ills. The rate of change is also increasing, making adaptation ever harder. There is no single or simple answer to these challenges, but all of the major religions need to figure out how they can adapt to the social and cultural changes taking place around us while remaining true to their theological foundations.
Regardless of the name given, if one believes there is God who created the universe, it seems to make sense that God would be in all things, whether the heavens, the oceans or the earth.
God permeates the entire material universe as well as the spiritual world. Therefore, I as a Christian, have no issue with comprehending the Native American concept of the Great Spirit, as well as the tenets of Thomas Aquinas, and the more modern theologians.
Is that so wrong?
It certainly works for me.
12
Ross defined the pagan conception as: "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." Thoreau rather shocked the transcendentalist Emerson put the declaring (quoting from memory) "what if nature is that which we took her to be the symbol of." Or perhaps, God or gods or Being are not "inside nature" but are nature itself. And there I stand for I can do nothing else.
3
Nothing is certain but change Mr. D. How people interpret and navigate those changes, shifts from generation to generation. That's the whole enchilada.
Ross, I think you nailed it, only you didn't have to look to ancient Rome. What the New paganism has already successfully done is to unite popular supernaturalism with its own forms of highbrow pantheism and civil-religiosity. Thus the mainline Protestant elites of the US generally view as myths the Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, Transfiguration and even Resurrection, yet they continue to participate in public rituals that assume that their Trinitarian God can be appealed to, propitiated, honored etc. with their fingers crossed behind their backs.
One of the great tragedies of living in a religiously driven society is that, despite there being not a shred of evidence in connection with most of the underpinnings of religion, we allow ourselves to be pulled down by beliefs that make us worse, not better human beings.
If a political candidate for high office had every qualification possible to lead us to justice, prosperity, peace and everything else that is positive that a society could ever aspire to, but did not profess to have strong religious beliefs, that candidate would be considered unelectable.
This is the curse of religion. we are mired in a set of beliefs that have no foundation in reality, which holds us back and discourages progress by adherence to ancient and flawed ideas that have no relevance in the modern world, other than that which we blindly ascribe t them without a shred of evidence that they are true.
21
As someone who seriously tried to follow Jesus for the better part of a decade, Ross Douthat, the institutional church, and those who will not admire or approve the activism of Pope Francis (Laudato Si, helping the poor, criticizing the powerful), I'd say there's a lack of spirituality here.
Ross Douthat admires the pagan Ayn Randian (serious contradiction there) thing that has labeled itself Christianity. He seems not to appreciate that stewardship, not dominion, is a form of worship.
Using one's notion of god to affirm the selfish and successful who pursue power and wealth and don't care what happens to our hospitable home is not spiritual.
I call these "evangelicals" pagans. Or worse, the new Christian Taliban, who are bent on the parallel nastinesses that resemble male- and power-structure dominated Sharia and put women, other races, and the earth itself in peril.
23
Paganism makes sense in a world where people exploit nature to the degree that we are becoming the main agents of mass extinction including our own. Science tells us lots of things about nature but it doesn't necessarily encourage us to appreciate or love the natural world which we are part of. That's a whole different level of engagement. Paganism reorients people to the fundamental reality of our survival based on the health of our atmosphere and the plant and animal kingdoms. There is a deep, existential unease within us that can't be quelled or explained by most organized religions. Paganism touches that nerve.
16
Well, the winter solstice festival we now call "Christmas" was a pagan celebration thousands of years before Christianity came along. Even early Christians didn't recognize it until about 400 years after the birth of Jesus, when the 25th of December was chosen over a spring alternative. It wasn't until the 19th century that Clement Clarke Moore and Thomas Nast created the now-familiar figure of St. Nick (Santa) as a symbol of the season, and Christmas finally became a legal holiday in the state of New York in 1849. It was soon "commercialized" by Thomas Edison (lights), and retailers FW Woolworth, and FAO Schwartz (tree ornaments).
So, yeah, post-Christianity is definitely a thing.
16
@jim emerson: many of what we identify as Christmas rituals came directly from the 19th century -- way before Edison or Woolworth or FAO Schwartz. They exploited this customs, but did not invent them. Most of them are alive and well in things like "A Christmas Carol" and "The Nutcracker".
BTW: I have no dog in this race, being a Jew.
2
The shift from Christianity is more to do with a movement towards secularism than paganism, mostly because it is the only truly tolerant and logical approach to our communal lives. I am no more interested in paganism than I am in Christianity or any other religion.
9
"Paganism"? No. "Skepticism"? Yes. In the year 2018, after decades of advancements in genetic research leading to science having decoded DNA and mapped the genomes of humans and animals, we now can say that the "Theory of Evolution" is equally as validated as the "Theory of Gravity". All living organisms on Earth, yes, including humans, share a single-celled common ancestor from which we all evolved. But this truth is incompatible with any literal biblical based branch of Christianity, in particular with Evangelicalism. So as society's knowledge base advances, it follows that strictly faith-based religion shrinks.
9
Read William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and you will find a perfect expression of the religious response to the earth and by extension to the universe. So much more real than imagining divinity in human form!
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. T
8
Each individual moral and spiritual compass dwells within, not without. More people are understanding such. Look no further than organized religious leaders for moral and spiritual bankruptcy.
7
When I see these sorts of comment either from Douthat or Brooks, I sense that they are trying to convince or pander to 5 judges on the Supreme Court, who could, with a stroke of a pen, require public schools to provide a christian education. That's the Federalist Society argument. While its reasoning is suspect, it has a hold on at least 3 judges up there. The Court would really like to tear down one of the pillars of our country: the wall of separation of church and state, which, as I read the 1st A, is clearly stated therein. But religion has a way of fogging the mind - even the minds of those whose minds shouldn't be fogged and whose minds should be unbiased. But religion has a way . . .
9
If this is really a working definition of paganism then I guess I'm a pagan. I'm also a scientist so I'll never go for the sacrifice-to-the-pagan-gods ritual stuff. I find the wonders of physics, chemistry, and biology to be so astonishing that they are miraculous and worth seeking fuller communion.
"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."
10
Before the columnist made me apologize for not being a WASP, now I have to apologize for being a Catholic? I have friends of all sorts of religions or non-religions and they are lovely people and I do not denigrate then for their faiths. This is a wildly offensive column, but not surprising. My priest is far more accepting than this columnist.
11
I am so glad you mentioned Emerson.
I feel that many of the "spiritual but not religious" people in the US are basically people who are striving to live out the project Emerson wrote about in his great essay, "Nature" -- but they just do not know it yet.
Such a bold project! "The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes Note. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Note Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship."
5
If the intent, goal, process and outcome for an individual, and his or her organized or random group, is to make a menschlich difference, which makes a temporary or more permanent and sustainable needed difference,for individuals, the systems which foster, enable and empower equitable wellbeing, and prevent or minimize types of unnecessary pains,
what is the function of labeling it as being a specific religion, or as paganism? In what ways, if any, can/will that affect one’s created and experienced identity, labeled identity attributed by others to the person, as well as behaviors which may be role-associated in a range of experiences, contexts, activities, environments? Do the dimensions of menschlichkeit change as the label changes?
Spiritualism has no scientific basis, but it fills the emotional need that many people have.
Humans have difficulty coming to terms with our own mortality and the finality of existence which comes with death.
Our own egocentricity means a difficulty in coming to terms with own huge lack of importance in the cosmos.
We are born of nature, and survive because it. It is a beautiful, dare I say even a spiritual thing to be just a part of it, and that is enough, so rejoice in the obvious, for it is all around.
4
The characterization of non- Judeo-Christian beliefs as "paganism " bothers me. There is so much in all of their holy books that qualify as sheer superstition that to draw a distinction between traditional, American centered religions and the implied absurdity of " pagans " begs the question. ( the logical fallacy ). Douthat reminds me more and more of William F. Buckley, a charlatan who used his vocabulary to impress the less educated, and ,of course, himself.
11
@andy b
Thank you so much for your succinct takedown of William Buckley, a faux-intellectual racist mediocrity who has been elevated to the pantheon of conservatism, along with Saint Ronnie and many others.
3
There is another option beyond the ones Mr. Douthat mentioned, for people who are disillusioned with the developmentally arrested presentation of Christianity found in many churches today. I suggest either of the following two monks and their enlightened organizations, Richard Rohr (Center for Action and Contemplation) and Laurence Freeman (World Community for Christian Meditation) if you are looking to walk the path that Jesus blazed and would like some help with that practice.
7
Yes, there are a number of actual Christian-Christians, who tend to be mois, friars, and nuns.
They seem to be the last ones who dedicate their lives 24/7 to the word of Jesus to guide souls, unlike the venal political-religionists, like Rev. Huckabee and the "Baby Christian" enthusiasts working their congregations for $$$$$.
1
"traditional churches have been supplanted by self-help gurus and spiritual-political entrepreneurs..."
I don't really see the distinction between what came before and what is now. What were traditional churches founded on but contemporary equivalent of self-help gurus and spiritual-political entrepreneurs? What was every medieval priest telling peasants to endure their present hardship because it translates some future actualization of their hopes and dreams in heaven besides a self-help guru? What was every monarch from Roman Emperor Constantine to Tsar Nicholas II, all of whom claimed their divine right to rule from God, but a spiritual-political entrepreneur?
8
A thoughtful piece, but there isn't much to surprise here. Look at the state of major religions: American christianity has uprooted itself from the teachings of Jesus and become an extreme political ideology. The Catholic Church - well, that's a no-brainer. Islam is slow to condemn terrorism, and its fundamentalists are hardly role models.
But it's also science, which is a more modern, and I'd argue, more sophisticated belief system. Religion had a monopoly on explaining the Big Questions, but science has more convincing explanations. That's why religions are afraid of it. It can drive them to obsolescence.
But it can't prove that there is no god(s) because you can't prove a negative. So I don't blame people for hedging their bets, or strongly believing. But over the centuries, all religions have been weaponised at some time or another. That primitive urge continues, into a time when we should know better. Religion and faith might come back if joining a religion was more like joining a community than enlisting in an occupying force.
Where religion gets me is the notion of faith. They preach that one has to have faith, but faith is totally optional. You can come up with your own reasons to have it and if you don't have it, you don't have it. But those who don't are demonised (literally) and that's disrespectful, inhuman, and unfair. That's not a good marketing strategy, and the market is speaking.
8
Since when did paganism leave us, especially at this time of the year. Got a Christmas tree in the living room? A wreath on the mailbox or front door? A poinsettia on the table? Then you are perpetuating pagan practices. It’s no accident that religions emphasize green and light, symbols of life, at this the darkest time of the year. Likewise the penchant for oscillation under the mistletoe. We’re still pagan and I love it!
6
I wrote a (bad) term-paper ethnography on a Neo-Pagan group as an undergrad. In my more spiritual moments, I do actually think of myself as a Spinozian pantheist. This article is deeply, deeply silly.
Mr. Douthat touches on a number of interesting concepts, but fundamentally is blinded by his religious essentialism that says that what a religion is is what western Christianity looks like. It's the kind of essentialism that allowed missionaries and colonialists to declare that the colonized, everywhere, had "no religion." It's the kind of essentialism that sees widespread moral agreement (I've never understood the argument that using "woke" was cultural appropriation before this column) and thinks it MUST be religion, because atheism MUST be at odds with the idea that the world is "a place where we can truly hope to be at home."
Silicon Valley Space Utopianism, The Dialectic Science of Marxist-Leninism, and American Civil Religion all share space with what has been traditionally the role of the church, but that does not make them religions - none postulate a relationship between man and the cosmos. Things change. The ruler of the land was a living god, until he was appointed by god, until he maybe had god's favor, until she didn't mention god at all in her campaign.
I suspect the religious impulse will be with mankind until we stop existing. But the expressions of those impulses will not be confined by the forms of religion's past.
8
Considering how grotesquely abusive the Right Wing has been towards the teachings of Christ, is it any wonder that many are turning away, and looking for answers elsewhere?
Christianity has done terrible things to America in the last 30-35 years. It’s all been done by the loudest and most fervent Christians out there... who perpetuate their obscenities and grotesque actions as “doing God’s Work.”
When the monstrosity that is Trump is lauded by Christians as “the great hope we have been waiting for,” it’s time to go elsewhere!
If Christianity tumbles in the US, it will be “Trump Christians” and their ilk, who are to blame.
13
I thought this was a great article and not provocative just for the sake of it.
The numbers tell the tail and the Times has had articles on it as well. Millenials see through the hypocrisy that organized religion has on issues like guns, gays, race, and immigration and they don't like it. Good.
It can't be all that surprising either when see a President as morally bankrupt as Trump fervently supported by the Christian Right. The child sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church has been so cataclysmic and enduring in terms of the cover-up that it has driven people away from the church.
I agree people have a need for spiritual connection.
In response to the moral and ethical implosion of traditional institutions, people are embarking on their own personal quests for their own truth.
It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Still more unintended consequences of Trump.
3
A commenter below suggested that paganism really IS a formal religion in America, albeit one without a name, because it centers on the earth, as many of us do.
I agree. Let's come up with a name for this relgiion.
So now, what are the goodies that every other church gets in America? What comes to mind first is tax breaks and incentives, plus continual free press when politicians are forced to mention us at every holiday and in every commemorative speech.
Better still, though--freedom of religion is protected in its practice here. That might mean that we could use those tax breaks and donations to actually save the earth, yes?
2
As I’ve said before take away the tax exempt status from the religious industrial complex and these discussions will disappear. Follow the money.
14
@Frank Diamond: Subsidizing people who claim to know what God thinks lends credibility to their claims and facilitates their scams.
I agree with Kjensen's comments below. The human race has been a slave to the superstitious teaching of religions for most of history and it will continue. It's a shame. For five years, I've been liberated from the religious baggage my parents put on me and I couldn't be happier.
6
It’s not a new religion it’s no religion. And nobody gets to characterize, define or name me. I can read and interpret the Bible by myself, if I would even care to. Go define yourself.
7
The New Testament, on which Christianity is supposed to be based, is all about the pain and necessity of breaking away from religious leadership that emphasizes rules and rituals over the commandment to love your God and to love your neighbor. And ... much of it is addressed to the Jews who were struggling with the idea that all people could be Christians, not just the descendants of the 12 tribes.
The actual message is needed, always. It's radical, it speaks truth to power, it upends that status quo. This sad article is another attempt to whitewash what Christianity should be about.
4
Agreed. So much of American Christianity is about serving the dogma of a specific sect instead of the teachings of Christ. About a faith that serves man not God.
3
Poppycock from top to bottom. One can't speak of "paganism" without automatically assuming a Christian-centrist world view, which itself is fundamentally flawed because neither Christianity nor Christians have ever been the warm, creamy center of the universe that they always tell themselves is their place and their right (see any newspaper for more information). For one to speak of a "return to paganism" means one instantly establishes a hierarchy of religion, which places Christianity at the top and at the center of all else. To attempt to use this language and maintain enough of an emotional/intellectual distance from the subject as to render a reasonable prediction of the future is an oxymoron. It's like Santa Claus trying to pass off as an unbiased expert of global warming by explaining climate change in terms of "elves".
4
Now that the Evilgelical Hypochristians have become part of the most despised administarion in the history of our country, it is no surprise that people may be turning to an alternative vision.
5
Well, for nearly two years, thousands of witches, pagans, and other magic practitioners have been casting a binding spell on Donald Trump, along with those who abet him. And it seems like it's working pretty well (we also participated in the Kavanaugh hexing—sometimes these things take time).
Where you see "elite embarrassment," we see growing numbers of progressive spiritual people focusing their energies on political goals through ritual actions under what has become broadly known as the #MagicResistance. After all, when you've marched, emailed, called Congress, and gotten out the vote, what can it hurt to take some time to perform a ritual that affirms your ideals and goals? If nothing else, it sure feels good to light a stubby orange candle and burn a photo of Donald Trump while calling upon gods, elements, and ancestors.
6
Try describing the US as what it is - a SECULAR nation.
There. Fixed it for you.
10
American Indians? Indian Americans? the Entire Wall Street?
Timothy McVeigh? Thomas Mortan in Piilgrim times? Donald Trump? The Jewish population? Africans slaves? Bertrand Russel? Albert Einstein? Bhuddists? Islamists? The separation of church and state does not deny the church of Mammon, to which Douthat is a congregant. We now PAY private religious schools with public dollars.
3
Power corrupts.
Look all over the world and any form of organize d religion , even with 100 followers to 2 billion followers, all are corrupted due to organization.
Why Moses, Jesus or Mohammad era religion was not corrupted, because it has no organizational foundation , hence no power. Once foundation laid corruption started.
You cannot be happily accept while priests, Imams and rabbi's molesting children , or Imams spewing killing orders for innocent people etc.
There is no solution for this corruption, many person belong to institutional religion because of seeking power.
3
@su: If the story about Jesus and the temple money-changers is true, he must have believed that what the Pharisees sold there, sacrificial animals they would eat on behalf of God for relief of the supplicant from some hardship, was fraudulent.
Well, the fact that evangelicals have sold out their souls, beliefs and religion for the Satan in the White House is sure not conducive to increased Sunday attendance or new membership, especially by the millenials. Trump is only "religious" when money or votes are on the table.
9
Intelligent adults do not need to believe in fairy tales or in fantastic gods in the sky running the show. We now have science and reality.
Religion has not made men good and decent. Indeed, religious men have given us rape, slavery, sexism, racism, inequality, the rape of children, perpetual warfare, nuclear weapons, income inequality, starving chldren. Rather, it is time for humanity to grow up and find the natural goodness within and to make a better world where the earth and her lifeforms can live in peace.
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." Dennis Diderot
6
Ross Douthat, don’t Dou That, not again. Your piece on the decline of Christianity, with its slam at those you call the Christian left is full of historical, factual errors, all too typical of you. No theological content in leftist Christians? Sir, have you ever heard of the Sermon on the Mount and taken it seriously? You embody the problems presented by enthusiastic converts who have little knowledge of, and experience in, the group they theologically espouse, as you have repeatedly demonstrated in print.
4
...And where's the last place people look for spiritual awareness? Inside themselves. That's what's wrong with the religions; they're a hopeless, contradictory mix of pedantic, dictatorial, and often largely irrelevant "beliefs" imposed on people.
In the religions, there are no spiritual or other experiences, just oppressive/repressive dogmas and chronic hypocrisies claiming to be spiritual "authorities" with no basis whatever. There's no honesty, no wonder, no actual thought, simply foaming at the mouth judgmental garbage.
Religion has become the home of hate, the cathedral of cruelty, and the ideology of ignorance. Where do you look for the devil? In a church, of course. Things were much more fun, and the actual spiritual reasoning was much more advanced, with the "pagan" cultures.
Christianity has never produced a real philosopher, just people like Locke, taking the absurdities to their distasteful conclusions, like "no free will" and other obscenities. Goodbye religions, and good riddance to your decadence and dishonesty.
5
What is the big deal about a "post-Christian" America? There are other religions current in the USA. The future of Christianity - or any other inanity - is irrelevant. Vote for T-Rump while saying "faith and family? Really?
Paul got it wrong, and so did Augustine and Luther. Jesus and The Beatitudes got it right. Without "works" all is just empty words.
5
White Evangelicals have gone a long way in driving rejection of Christianity. Any group that condones Donald; with all his many many adulterous relationships and lies; is not anything a thinking ; feeling person would want to be involved in. Yes to paganism; no to megachurches and white evangelicals. Ray Sipe
7
Can you name any religion that is not racist? How many female catholic priests? How many female leaders of any major religion?
Impossible to do since they all claim to have "the final answer" from the main MAN in charge. They all claim to have a "bible/torah/koran" of magic from ancient history that tells them so. So do witches.
Gee, seems religious leadership sure looks like POLITICAL leadership. Full of male angst and aggression.
Religions have been used throughout recorded history to divide and conquer "the other". The other being women, children, brown/white/black/...skin.
Confederate traitors even used "the good book" to justify slavery and outright treason. Yet those fine white christian leaders erected monuments to those fine CHRISTIAN TRAITORS to both the United States Constitution and their own god. Even today they proudly proclaim Lee, Davis... as heroes of the "lost cause". The cause was lost as soon as they committed their souls to doing evil.
So we now have a bunch of witches going to our catholic, baptist, morman, jewish, muslim... churches. They don't believe in reality only what their "magic books" tell them. Actually they don't even believe that because they'll support a racist, misogynist, lying thief at the voting booth. Cults do have political power.
If heaven is full of religious nuts then I don't want to be a part of that hateful group. I'll join the vast majority of humans and refuse to buy your "magic" lies.
Thanks for the fish,
Dave
8
How many? This many. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women_rabbis
Denis Diderot "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"
Getting closer every year!
Maybe we'll live long enough to see the adsurdist thinking represented by The Evangelists to be reduced to irrelevence.
Then we can tackle the existential issues confronting us absent any influence from their Bronze Age worldview.
4
Christianity is our national nightmare. If there is any hope it would be in Americans waking up.
3
just read charles taylor's "A Secular Age" instead of this nonsense
Please note...it is the "christians" who seem to find a need to attach a name to those with belief systems different then theirs.
Ross, when did your religious buddies stop believing in the 9th Commandment?
Ross, how did "prayer" get perverted from giving thanks, to asking for something?
Ross, what is the true christian religious sect?
Ross, its all nonsense. You argue about meaningless drivel as if it has any relevance to life.
Try volunteering at the Food Bank next time you feel the urge to share via writing. It will mean more.
2
So what spurred Douthat to write this lengthy meander was apparently those witches who put a hex on Brett Kavanaugh, possibly convincing him to preserve Roe v. Wade.
Religion is the bane to humanity. I suggest you shove it.
4
You live...you die...the end.
4
I don't know whether Douhat considers Yoga to be paganism but it is becoming very popular in the US and many people practice it daily or frequently during the week. It does incorporate religious practices and thought but doesn't' demand its practitioner accept the spiritual aspects of the practice. Unlike the sedentary way that Christians pray, Yoga offers improvement through movement, which can help people physically, no matter what their spiritual beliefs may be.
The term pagan is used here with what seems to be rather obvious disdain. The term, after all, was always used to mean not Christian and meant to imply people outside the norms of civilized society. Labeling individuals or groups as pagan succeeds in suggest something akin to barbarian hordes surging against the barricades, while reserving the term religion for more civilized believers.
This is rooted in the fact that most religions are engaged in an existential struggle to win and keep converts in order to increase their prestige and influence. One of the usual tactics for this is to suggest that “we’re” right and everyone else is wrong, thus cementing allegiance while propagandizing against the competition.
Religion isn’t, however, something imposed externally on humans. Rather, it is an effect of social organization. It serves the purpose of attaching a meaning to one’s culture, while, more importantly, inculcating the values of social cooperation. Putting aside one’s needs to promote the needs of the group is what allow humans to live together. We call that morality and religion cloaks it in a veil of divine origination, but it actually comes from within humans. It is baked into our software.
The reality is, despite thousands of years of trying, no religion has any real idea about the nature of god, the source of creation, or what happens when we die.
It seems to me the better ideal of faith is to admit we don’t know and hope than to simply make things up.
Surely Mr. Douthat is aware that use of the term "paganism" has long been and still is highly pejorative in Christian societies. In previous centuries, the term was used as justification for destroying the classic Greek and Roman cultural heritage and for much cruelty, such as burning of "witches" and war on other cultures. Today the term is used to suggest the ridiculous superstitious nature of paganism compared to the coherrent intellectual content of Christianity. Obviously, both systems include equally ridiculous superstition, but Christianity merely enjoys the advantage of familiarity and childhood indoctinatine in our culture. Thus, Mr. Douthat is (perhaps unconsciously) relying on this usage to project a superior image of his faith.
3
Religion of any kind is by far the ugliest and deadliest invention of humanity. The Earth without us will be the so called “heaven” or wherever else organized religions call their ultimate purpose for being (the place where the “saved” will “live” in eternity - except they won’t get that chance to screw some “place” up again thank goodness).
1
What is the point of starting a new religion or reverting to a previous one? Why not simply realize that we're in this thing until it's over. Do your best to be the best person you can be, because nobody gets out alive, and we have an ethical responsibility to make this as pleasant as possible. There are no gods, no devils, no heaven, and no hell. We are on the honor system.
2
Something is happening, for sure... people are leaving organized Christianity in droves, and no wonder. To be honest, I expected Douthat to SLAM these "new/old" Pagan practices; actually he seems almost resigned to the changes. Is it possible Ross's even a little curious about Wicca practices, witches, hexes, etc., as I am? The fundamental idea that God, or gods, or Being is contained in the world, as opposed to something supernatural outside the world, is specifically interesting to me. (I even put some of those ideas in a recent children's book I wrote, "Miriam: The Witch of Glen Park." Start questioning early?!) Beyond that, every step people take to at least question the religious practice passed down to them from their parents... I mean, how could that be a bad thing?
1
Interesting effort, Ross, but has a major failure in one regard. Your insistence that this possible return to the ages of witches (Salem is burning) doesn't acknowledge the beliefs of the American Indian tribes from long before the arrival of the white settler in North America. Those beliefs were centered on the pantheistic rules of nature and respect for it -- truly pagan as they were told by the slaughtering hordes who claimed the tribes were savages despite the advancement of their civilizations. The more things change...
5
Freud distinguished a sense of spirituality and trancendence of the human spirit in “Civilization and its Discontents” with the stories told by organized religions. The first he labeled a personal “oceanic feeling” . For Freud , the second was a delusion.
Paganism, and the deism of the Enlightenment philosophes both interpret nature as the work of a divine spirit while denying an omnisicient, omnipotent ,and protective God who watches over us and rewards virtue and and punishes individual vice.
Whether ones prime mover is the big bang or a Divine will, everyone seeks to understand what seems incomprehensible.
"... 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 description is not only concordant with what Ross identifies as "paganism" but also with much of Western Zen Buddhist practice as well... only Zen offers the spiritual discipline, sense of rootedness in tradition, ritual, liturgy, and communal aspect of practice missing in much of what Ross describes here.
1
I have reported to the Church of the River alone on a regular basis all my life. Five miles into a wilderness, fly rod in hand and the fish are tasty too. One person's church is another person's river.
1
I find it difficult to believe that anyone can really think that any of this stuff is actually important.
7
You live. You die. Good bye?
The thing about paganism is that it can only really flourish in a polis (or functional equivalent). It needs a continuum of family gods, gods of the group of families called the clan, gods of the group of clans called the tribe, and finally the god of the city – an interlocking network of individuals and groups united and differentiated by blood, hierarchy, and allegiance. Citizenship, loyalty to the state, and loyalty to the gods coincided. The great advantage of Christianity is that it could flourish in the absence of that kind of socially rich and grounded polis identity, and was especially well-adapted to far-flung empires.
What looks superficially like paganism (the witches and wizards and tree-worshippers and other such stuff) isn't really paganism at all. It's just individual self-expression and entertainment – just another form in which secularization takes place. The world is drifting in the "direction" predicted by Nietzsche: a world of "ultimate men" who ask nothing from life except security, comfort, and as much distracting entertainment as possible. What's called paganism is just an element of the service-entertainment industry.
Mr. Douthat, you seem to miss one of the fundamental issues with organized religion of any flavour. That is the "need to create a more fully realized cult" with pertinent rituals and a necessary hierarchy of leaders. Therein lies the downfall of your own church, men in robes that sexually abuse little boys. The whole point of modern pantheism is to form a fact based world view that allows for an appreciation of the inherent beauty of which we are a small part and to avoid the pitfalls of religious organization. The rituals can entail anything that provides for communion with the wholeness and with other human beings. We do not need another group of men or women in gilded robes.
2
I think there are basically a lot of people around whose ancestors used to dance around bonfires and who still feel the pull of harvest time and mid-winter parties. Where Fundamentalist Christians and other people, whether religious or atheist, went wrong was to try to shame people out of feeling connections of this sort to the natural world and to their communities.
1
Ross, thank you for this piece. It's generating many great comments. I think you stuck your neck out in writing it, and I appreciate that.
2
Please don't insult and oversimplify the thinking of those who are not as orthodox in their beliefs as you are. If the "old time religion" has given way in my life, it's given way not to Joel Osteen, whom I cannot stand, but Frederick Buechner, Madeline L'Engle, and Karen Armstrong--all writers who wrestle with and are profoundly affected by their faith.
2
Despite the attempt to re-write history, all Pagan religions were race and culture-based. There was not "one" Pagan religion, but many.
Because of this, the advocates of certain "modern" Pagan religions, such as Seana Fenner's "Odinism", find themselves banned from most internet forums and cyber-stalked into a peripatetic media existence.
Well, I’d first like to note that Brett Kavanaugh needs no additional hexing beyond his own. I think he needs lots of help and I wish him well. “Wish” being a sentiment rather than a religious invocation to action of bearded gods or unformed sprites.
The pursuit of happiness and overlapping pursuit of meaning are American birthrights. Specificaly. Finding happiness and meaning in the world rather than waiting for, or finding them in the transcendent “other” is a lesson of existentialism, epicureanism, Nietsche and perhaps stoicism and even Deiism.
Religiosity or spirituality are not conditions precedent for us to marvel at the wonder of creation and existence or to find value and joy in the immanent world. Indeed, turning water into wine seems a small miracle next to photosynthesis and life itself. Good absent religion is possible.
It is incorrect of Mr. Douthat to conflate religious impulse with the ability to find wonder and meaning in the magnificence of the world. I also think a closer reading of the Gallup question he cites distinguishes a “religious experience” from a non-religious “awakening.” Mr. Douthat conflates the two and finds increased religious “impulses.”
“Post-Christian” or “heretical Christians” would really apply to all who “believe” in a heliocentric solar system, a spherical world or that children’s health issues are god’s punishment for the illicit sex and the venereal disease of their parents.
Still, where do I sign up for paganism?
2
“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.” For me, this is the crux of the problem with his argument. There are few pagans, or universalists, or goddess lovers that i know that need or want “cultic worship” yes, of course there are some in every tradition that may want that. “Pagans, and those I know who have left the Christian denominations want to celebrate the immanace of the divine, as apart of themselves and all life, not worship something outside of themselves that exists somewhere else...they want to protect the natural world, and help to solve global poverty, social, and environmental issues. In my opinion, Christianity is one of many mythologies. It happens to be waning, like many old myths did. Use whatever myth you want to make sense of life , the world and your place in it, as long as you harm no others. If the world is to survive climate change and the rest of the ills that are related to it, a new mythos must be born..... I see it coming in paganism, ecopsychology, archetypal psychology, environmentalism, and globalism. I only regret I will be long dead before it fully manifests.
1
I looked for mention of Islam and Buddhism. None. There’s only a passing reference to Judaism, too. America is not post-Christian. It never was a monolithic Christian nation.
2
“There is nothing more
negative than the result
of the critical study of the
life of Jesus. The Jesus
of Nazareth who came
forward publicly as the
Messiah, who preached the
Kingdom of God, who
founded the Kingdom of
Heaven upon earth, and
died to give his work its
final consecration, never
had any existence.”
—ALBERT SCHWEITZER
(1875-1965), French physician,
philosopher and humanitarian,
in The Quest of the
Historical Jesus
1
Why, Ross, are we stigmatizing or denigrating those trying to live outside a world of punitive religious cultures?
Could you find a MORE loaded word than "pagan"? The whole thesis of this article is contaminated beyond any logical thought, by the assumption of that bias. Mr Douthat starts out by painting himself into a corner..
1
Slurs about non-Catholic citizens are not acceptable. Paganism indeed. What a joke.
There are other reasons why neo-paganism is probably not about to sweep the nation:
1) The Supreme Court is made up of 6 Catholics and 3 Jews
2) The Republican Party has built its power base on fundamentalist and prosperity gospel mega-churches, their venal and power-hungry pastors, and their deep ties to ethno-nationalist movements in the state of Israel
3) US political media, as here, is complacently and sometimes pro-actively seen to promote the Judeo-Christian worldview as if civilization depended on it
1
This is all Greek to me. I do not understand religion at all. It is just a bunch of nonsense to me.
1
It seems a bit crazy to think that Christianity is on the ropes in America. What IS on the ropes in America is the "Old Timey" paternalistic religious systems of the past: "Believe because I told you so, and I will hurt you if you resist." A Christianity of compulsion is worthless. Is it true, or is it not true, and how can we tell?
The great number of agnostics who put some hope in science and reason to try and understand the world around them are not godless in the sense of caring nothing about spiritual matters. They just want a reason to believe, but Mike Pence and the supporters of Donald Trump are not particularly convincing.
If there were Christians running around doing miracles like those recorded in the bible, I'm pretty sure there would be a lot more Christians.
The gospels tell us to love our neighbors and to share with the poor, but the Evangelical Leaders of America seems to have little interest in that.
I'm reminded of a certain passage from the book of Revelations:
“ ‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. "
2
"a genuinely post-Christian future for America — and that the term “paganism” might be reasonably revived to describe the new American religion"?
Why not dredge up the term barbarians (you know, from "barbari," those outside the light of civilization as you recognize it). That has the same sort of glibly pejorative tone you're seeking with your "paganism."
But why no mention of all those worshiping at the temple of Mammon and devoting themselves to serving the great golden idol of greed, avarice, and rampant "grab-it-all-ism"? Isn't that a "faith" that most of your supported subscribe to anyway? Money, wealth, and power, at all costs. And of course NEVER enough for them!
While you're nattering about some fabricated paganism, characterized by "secularization," "popular religion," and pop culture, REAL evangelical "religion" gets a free pass -- along with its tolerance for hate and even hate-mongering, political and social extremism, and hypocritical toleration for the immoral, anti-religious, anti-human decency outrages of Trump and his gang.
Why so silent about that disturbing aspect of "religion"?
Surely this use of religion as a cloak for views, beliefs, and actions so contrary to any true religious sensibilities or moral teachings is of more consequences that some lazy church-goers, or ones whose religion is tinsel-covered?
1
Yoga on every corner has now replaced a church on every corner.
If this is really a thing in the US, then why did they have to resort to a photo of pagans in England?
I think this is a great idea, Ross, and I know just where to start.
On a day in the news where we learn that the Pope made 2 of his Cardinals leave the fancy table for raping children (an entirely proportional punishment, eh Catholic?) I'd like to make a couple of observations.
1) Imagine, say, Iran or China, or some other sovereign nation had inserted 100s or even 1000s of sleeper agent child rapists into our country and let them run wild for decade upon decade, protecting them, covering up their crimes, then slipping them back into the population, all while distracting us with many meals on wheels or free flu shots to homeless people programs as the justifiable tradeoff, whenever one of these countless atrocities was uncovered. Some might consider this an ongoing act of war. (How many meals on wheels deliveries absolves a child rape. What's the exact exchange rate there?)
2) The Vatican, it so happens, is a sovereign nation.
Just sayin.
2
Tell me why believing in something invisible, magical and untrue is better than believing in something else invisible, magical and untrue? Why should fantasies, make beliefs and invisible friends be taken seriously? This is no evolution, it’s idiocy and ignorance.
No human should feel good and fulfilled by being ignorant of facts and science. Believing in invisible friends is going back to the Middle Ages, regardless of the rituals that take you there.
3
Reply to
walter Maroney. "Under God". See Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address from Nov. 1863. "...we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have anew birth of freedom...."
Pagan??? Please!! Give me a break!
Men have been repackaging gods since the dawn of man.
2
Maybe Jesus was just a misunderstood pagan....
@Billy
No, Jesus was not pagan. Jesus was Jewish. Christianity was born out of paganism, beginning with Christmas, the pagan festival to celebrate the Winter Solstice, or the start of another cycle where days are longer and warmer.
Early Christians couldn’t convince anyone, so they adopted and adapted the pagan celebration of light.
Jesus; if he even existed at all, which is unlikely; is more likely to have been a floridly psychotic Schizophrenic.
Well that was the strangest thing I'd ever read in the paper of record. Until, that is, I saw the voluminous comments of readers who were highly engaged by this bizarre stream of words and ready for debate. What a world this is.
1
"Paganism" was, above all else, pluralistic--a sort of pick-n-choose buffet of gods, demigods, oracles,etc. In the late Roman Empire, the only compulsory worship was a yearly sacrifice to the emperor--which is why Christians insistence that only THEIR man-god and his father could be venerated got them prosecuted--and which then trapped them into a fatal attachment to state power.
That was a world-historic tragedy. Today's statist-religion is, predictably, farce. History moves in arcs; the one started by the apocalyptic rabbi in Jerusalem (quickly mangled and, essentially, franchised by St. Paul) is nearing its sell-by date. So, for that matter is the state to which religion has long attached itself like a carbuncle--supplanted by, well...God knows what.
So the Emperor is taking off his formal new clothes for his leisure new clothes. But he's still naked. Religion is a load of old cobblers; all of it. Mainline Christian, fundamentalist, revivalist, charismatic, pagan, neo-pagan, whatever. You're all equally wrong.
1
Paganism is as bad is all the rest, a foolish and irrational pursuit. Freedom from religious belief is the true enlightenment, being a good person just for the sake of being a good person. Paganism is just as nonsensical and unnecessary as Christianity.
Great, more delusions to crowd out critical thinking.
Religion, Christianity has stayed the same for the most part.
Society became more godless.
It was led to believe abortion was ok, then good, then great, then should be free.
Thousands of years of marriage is one man and one woman, was
Trashed.
There are 2 genders became hateful.
Sex without love or commitment became a virtue.
Get rid of the old with euthanasia, a good solution and the death penalty for mass killers was a terrible way to treat thevtruly evil.
Paganism was Nazis, Moa’s China, Stalins Russia, Pol Pots Cambodia and look what it wrought.
@Bill Walsh
Until around the year 1100, the Catholic church permitted divorce and remarriage.
Judaism historically permitted polygamy. Islam still does.
Thus, of the 3 western monotheistic faiths, marriage between one man and one woman is 1000 years old.
1
There are many things wrong with this comment. Here are some of them:
1. Nobody thinks abortion is great. At best, it's a necessary but miserable medical procedure like going to the dentist to have rotting teeth pulled. More often, it's a heartbreaking situation in which there is no good way out but a choice had to be made.
2. There's a difference between gender and sex. There are indeed only two sexes ( and hermaphrodites, but those aren't common and are rarely fully functional), but gender roles are arbitrarily assigned to people with certain sets of genitals. There's no reason people need to chain themselves to those roles if they don't want to.
3. I know that the "marriage is between one man and one woman" thing is mostly used to argue against gay marriage, but no matter how you look at it, you're wrong. Homosexual relationships have existed in a multitude of cultures for eons, and polygamy has been around for just as long. There are even instances of it in the Bible you love so much.
4. Fascists aren't pagan, they're either atheistic or effectively worship the regime figurehead.
2
There's a lot of insight in this article, but the use of the word "woke" is just plain wrong in so many ways.
Why not just drop the whole comedic refrain, Ross?
1
Dude, you need to Abide.
"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."
A pretty good description of what happened at the formation of Christianity.
3
Douthat has what for me is a very odd point of view concerning his topic but he addresses an interesting, and, I think, important social phenomenon. Organised Christian religions are collapsing for lots of good reasons. Contrary to Douhat, not all secularism is disguised pantheism. Some, particularly if they are well enough off not to be constantly threatened with economic stress, can shake off our evolutionarily inherited spiritualist impulses and pay attention to the realities which science is revealing about the human condition. When the condtions of economic security are not met then people tend to cling to those ancient impulses in one form or another. The contrast between Europe and the US in that regard is notable. With many social democratic regimes providing more security in Europe than in the US, true secularism is more prevalent in Europe. If we can avoid the various disasters which currently threaten humanity and raise the general level of prosperity and security, we can anticipate that true secularism, not superstitious paganism, will grow. That it is possible is demonstrated by the example of China, which, though not without faults, has raised hundreds of millions out of poverty and is almost entirely secular. That is the most hopeful direction for humanity in my opinion: Neither new paganism nor a return to the old transcendent supersitions but growth of true secularism based on evidence based scientific understanding of the human condition.
2
For me, in the modern world a secular Buddhism, stripped of cultural accretions, not built on creeds and belief, and pointedly concerned with this world and not the improvable next makes the most sense. It's growing in the West. It doesn't conflict with science and quantum physics, nor have all the unanswerable metaphysical questions raised by creator god myth making. Though 25 centuries old, it's fundamental teachings stand the test of time.
1
This makes a lot of sense, except that it runs against the zeitgeist. Despite all the wonderful material and social advances of the past few centuries, people are remarkably upset and pessimistic about the world as it is. There's just too much violence, poverty, and pollution still around. We've developed high expectations for how everything should be. So it's going to be tough for pagan prophets to convince people to give up on their transcendent hopes and focus on divinity pervading the world as it is.
The latest fad on the plate is Mindfulness. I would think you can be, urg, mindful without all the mantra-filled meditation or uncomfortable yoga poses. If mediation does something for you, then meditate. If yoga does, then do yoga. Even if it's playing golf, more power to you! With all these things, realize that they are the icing and not the cake.
2
And that is just religion in America! What about the rest of 5he world?
So many wars fought , so many genocides committed, on the basis of religious differences.
Jefferson not only severed the ties between Church and State, but’s also, implicitly, by having the State do the severing, made the State Supreme over any one religion. No religion that was affiliated with a country’s government ever took the first step of separating church from state
That is why the US had so many more denominations than any other country.
It’s amazing how many different religions the US has. And, as Douthat shows, new ones are being formed every day.
That is the nub of it. Jefferson might have had a hunch that, without a formal tie between religion and the government, religion would dissipate and fragment itself, almost making a mockery of ourselves, with all the different shapes and sizes of our spiritual beliefs.
But across time, not centuries, but millennia, it takes human culture a long time to discern the power and presence of the Dicine. Traditions help cultures store and pass down divine truths that humanity had to learn the hard way.
I wish, toward Peace on Earth, more humans would reach out to learn what common elements of the Divine can be found in every religion.
Whatever is going on in US paganism and such notwithstanding, I feel a new ecumenism across the world’s cultural heritage religions could help reduce tensions between countries.
Has it occurred to you, Ross, that a modern, increasingly educated population is rejecting Christianity and finding that there is no need for a substitution?
I do not see a rise of "Paganism" (a term you clearly chose to be pejorative) but a decline of Christianity; Europe shook off Christianity years ago.
11
"Paganism" is a 2,000 year old epithet referring to anything not otherwise Christian or heretical. It's not, and never has been, a religious tradition or coherent set of beliefs.
What Mr. Douthat is describing is religious consumerism; or rather the marketing of religion as a consumer product. The 'faith' is neo-liberalism and the "free market." The god is Mammon. It describes all but a small portion of Evangelicals, and any church that advertises "contemporary" worship or installs a labyrinth in the Narthex.
Consumer capitalism is a force that seeks to destabilize and destroy authentic social institutions by creating a mass of atomized individuals each seeking some form of self-actualization. It promises liberation while chaining human beings to an endless treadmill of addictive consumption. It's corrupted religion, filled our oceans with plastic, denuded our forests and driven a host of species into extinction. It's warming the planet beyond the point it can sustain human life while its high-priests fatuously pray for the coming of a new kingdom on Mars.
Religions have their historical origin in an era where science was primitive, and the understanding of how things work was largely not understood. Today, we have a much better understanding of the "how". But "why" the universe exists remains a total mystery, at least to me.
In the body of this article is included a comment by a reader, who asks why one needs to choose a religion, and can't one just 'exist spiritually'?
The answer is of course you can exist spiritually on your own, but it requires more effort, and you won't get many of the benefits. It requires effort because "feeling spiritual" is just that: a feeling. Feeling spiritual is identical in kind to feeling happy or angry or melancholic. Like all emotions, you can make yourself feel it if you want, or others can induce it in you. The latter is just easier.
Behind the quasi-intellectual theological arguments used to hide this fact, spiritualists are simply those who allow their emotions to control their lives, which is one key to why 'Reason' is anathema to them, and why they are so quick to react - and overreact - emotionally to the world. If you want to exist spiritually, there is your goal.
You won't get the benefits because the only 'real' thing organized religion offers is community, which your individualism denies. The fundamental difference between a 'cult' and a 'religion' is political power, which is why your personal 'spiritualism' will not give you standing among others who are doing exactly what you are doing, but in larger groups.
@E. Cripe
You missed something important. There are many instances where people come together to honor and celebrate spirituality, in community, WITHOUT dogma or institutional religion. Your post assumes that it's an either or...organized religion or solitary spirituality which you liken basically to narcissism.
We humans are spiritual beings...we are capable of experiencing the numinous, of being wowed by the mystery, and of experiencing our connectedness as more than an idea but an actual full body experience.
Religion is an invention of the mind. Spirituality can be direct experience...no intercessor, no dogma.
4
@Baruch
I miss many important things, but I never posited an either/or in this regard. I simply noted that what we call 'spirituality' is just another emotion, which acts like every other emotion we have. Attempts to carve out some kind of exception to the feeling of spirituality, as though it is different in kind to other emotions, or is somehow proof of 'something Else' going on in humans, is to accept the most remarkable conclusion before you even start. We humans are emotional beings. I can feel sad at the plight of a fictional character on a tv show, but that emotion indicates nothing 'else' outside of me, and certainly not that the tv character is real.
Every example you gave is rooted in emotion. How do you know you are experiencing the numinous? Because you feel like you are. What are the feelings of awe, or pride, or belonging? Emotions. How do you know you are experiencing our connectedness? Because you feel like you are.
Spirituality is an invention of the mind, as it is mischaracterizing an emotion as something else. Religion comes into being when spiritualists in groups gain political power. Groups of spiritualists without political power are referred to as 'cults'.
There are plenty of us atheists out here who don't find much purpose in discussing the existence of God. For most of us, the question is not very interesting. Why waste the energy on a claim that is unprovable? (We might discuss specific claims of religion that are provable or falsifiable. Sadly for religion, the conclusions are not very supportive.)
That said, believing in something larger than oneself is healthy for the individual and the society. I suspect paganism and New Age beliefs and other formal or informal spiritual belief systems fulfill this need. It's just that for many, the foundational stories and dubious moralities of Christianity and other religions are no longer attractive.
For my part, I find the world as it is, the mind-boggling nature of the quantum mechanical world, or the breathtaking beauty of General Relativity as it describes the cosmos, to be more than large enough. And the real world filled with more mysteries and actual truths than any foundational religious document I've ever read (and yes, I have read the Bible and the Koran and other writings).
Narrative is the petri dish of the humanities: We create compelling organisms, provide the nutrients and the conditions, then the story seems to unfold into truthful conclusions. But they're just stories that we've crafted, not proof of anything.
It's an unfortunate quality of the human intellect that we are so willing to believe compelling stories over actual evidence.
4
Don't fall for Mr. Douthat's line. According to christians, Christianity has been under siege (hence the enduring martyrdom myth) for over 1800 years, during which time, the entire religion (well, at least its more extreme practitioners, who have represented a varying percentage over the centuries) has decided it needs to give some 'payback' even though it's practiced by 1/3 of the planet, making it the largest religion on the globe.
Paganism (or any other faith for that matter) is just another way for people to try to understand things that they can't yet explain. That's the purpose of religion in the first place. If we could explain everything in the universe, there'd be no need for it. (as a side note, this is why science is peer reviewed - so someone can't just assert something then walk away from it as though it were an assailable truth)
In reality, what you believe is meaningless beside how you treat other people. Religion is neither good nor evil; how it is practiced is. I can point to examples of devout people of all religions who did great good in the world and to equally devout people in the same religion who did nothing but cause harm.
8
I believe the world enlightened in pure form without requiring any extra description( without religious, spiritiual, etc) is the remedy for what we can call in general , ailment in faith or belief.
One must achieve the status of enlightened and should not feel anxiety for this reason.
All the rest is frivolous details where mind stuck and never come out.
I am a naturalist. Being immersed in the natural world away from artificial constructs as much as possible while simply being alive to look in wonder at the infinitely available parts of natural order brings me peace and a deep spiritual fulfillment.
Sometimes I'll hitch a ride UP at The First Church Of The Chairlift, where I am a deacon.
2
My initial reaction to the title for this column made me think Mr. Douthat was engaging in the conservatives' habit of negatively branding anything against them. His column pursues an intellectual basis for branding non-Christians "pagans" but it still will be, and perhaps is intended to be, an epithet.
The column also misses the group of what I suspect is the largest among the non-Christians: Those who believe in a higher power but do not take their beliefs any further. Such people realize there is no way to know what God is or is like and don't think about it further. Call them Theists.
4
I don’t know about you, but I find great spirituality in the scientific method and the music of Mozart.
No god necessary.
5
Perhaps what is needed is a better Christianity that is less superstitious and more ethical. Popular beliefs in an omnipotent yet personal God are too easily undermined by science and psychology. While the precept of loving your neighbor couldn't be more needed. Too many hold that the latter depends on the former despite humanity's long history of disproof. A starting point might be Daniel Maguire's book "Christianity without God: Moving beyond the Dogmas and Retrieving the Epic Moral Narrative"
1
Rather than toss words back and forth through cyberspace, how about DOING something? We become our actions and decisions. May they be grounded in Wisdom. Look at the work of Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in NYC; the organization Bread for the World with its statistics on hunger in the USA and its decades-long track record of improving Congressional thought and action to make life less miserable for the poor in the USA and many other places, the fine work of Amnesty International in fulfilling the Prophet Isaiah's words, echoed by Christ, about freeing the bound captives, this last organization having been run by a Presbyterian minister during the Cold War! That's three organizations for starters, long supported by worshipping Christians.
This country educates women because some people in the 19th century (and a few earlier) finally realized that Jesus Christ, when teaching, allowed women to sit at His feet and absorb the message along with the men, a radical change. ('Radical' means 'at the root.')
Kindly realize that Christians in this country have helped end the Vietnam War; marched with a later-martyred theologian in a movement we label "The Civil Rights Movement" and out of God's deep Love for human beings founded hospitals, underground railroads, hospices, food banks, fire departments, schools where there were none. Yes, we Christians are imperfect, and we "see but in a mirror dimly," but I'd not want to live in a USA that wrote us off.
2
Individual Christians are NOT the organized behemoths of the structured power centers of organized religion
They are, perhaps representative of the Pharisees
@Dsmith
Every organization, to get anything accomplished, whether it's purchasing food for flooded island nations after a hurricane, or printing teaching material, or working with the jobless and homeless, must have a hierarchy, and hopefully with it a system of checks and balances.
Give me Paganism, or give me complete indifference. Holiday Ennui, Ross ???
2
That was a thought-provoking read, thank you. As the agnostic son of a pastor, the role of religion and the path of our country my dad and I discuss relatively often. And yet, this piece provided me more insight and food for thought.
The sneering, false prejudice of the columnist is shocking even though so often repeated. Not my priest, this columnist, thankfully.
Phooey.
8
No two humans believe the same thing. Perhaps we should dream of a future where people are judged on their actions and not their affiliations.
5
Oh Ross, just chillax about Pagans, will you?
5
Religion is based on fear and ignorance. Fearful, ignorant people believe in somebody's made up mumbo jumbo myths. They do irrational and unspeakable things in the name of their religion while denigrating women and children, ignoring the poor and denying foreigners and everybody who doesn't sufficiently believe.
Human beings always have been brainwashed into believing the prevailing religious myths to explain fearsome natural phenomena. Now our culture manipulates us through a religion-media-business mess; we are coerced into believing we are a Christian nation, into celebrating religious holidays, while, at the same time, driving capitalism and propping up businesses that make the useless mostly plastic crap that accompanies religious holidays.
This manipulation has dumbed down and homogenized the culture. It's too hard to think for yourself, go against the grain, against family that celebrates its religion, against friends, cowowrkers, Sometimes, it's dangerous to one's health to go against the mob.
Our politicians support policies advancing religion to keep power and position. If those they represent want death and destruction, that's what they support; if they want a world filled with beanie babies, that's what they shall have; should the voters ever become majority atheists, politicians will find themselves atheists too.
And best wishes to a cat in hell. Not that I believe in hell, mind you.
5
From Rome to the Bible Belt, the message of Christianity is simple: believe in Jesus and you will float up to heaven. It really doesn’t matter what else you do or don’t do. A veritable license for murder and mayhem, yes? Besides, if you don’t believe, you’ll burn in hell.
With all due respect, Sir, this is evil and awful, and its acceptance by 70% of the American population has its consequences, none of them good. Indeed, adherence to Christianity continues to be the strongest predictor of virtually every kind of socially irresponsible behavior that can be measured:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/how-religious-is-your-state/?state=alabama
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States
https://www.zippia.com/research/divorce-by-30-by-state/
The spread of Christianity was the greatest social catastrophe the world has ever seen, and it continues to be America’s single greatest social problem today. By comparison, Paganism would be, well, a godsend.
11
I am back in the US from Brazil. In both countries I have been horrified at the role that hate plays in religion. Especially, those Christians who take the bible literally but don't follow its words. The hate that they spew in politics - both in the US elections of 2016 and this year's election in Brazil - has totally turned me away. I have been studying different Pagan ideas and am espousing Paganism in general as i try to decide which path to follow. I find more love among my Pagan friends, more tolerance and understanding. I have not found any yet who correspond to the negative ideas of casting bad "spells" on others.To the contrary, they seem more likely to forgive and accept.
5
Why are we having this discussion now? Religious leaders (the Pope for one, other clergy for Muslims, some of the well known rabbis, Protestant clergy, etc.) have driven people away from organized religion by refusing to acknowledge the reality of life today and in the past.
Do we really need a religion or group of religions that demonize people who are not heterosexual, that tell families women have no right to control their reproductive lives, who consider themselves to be the final word on God while persecuting all others? For all directives Christianity has about being kind to the other, about charity, about love, it seems that the one that stands out the most is to hurt and kill those who are not Christian or not Christian enough.
As a lesbian I resent being told that I'm not good enough for God or that I can't love another woman if I want to. As a Jew I don't find it very comfortable to hear a minister preach that God doesn't hear the prayer of any Jew. Wasn't Jesus Jewish? As a woman it's incomprehensible to me that I'm supposed to accept that, according to some sects, my body and my sex is a continuing source of impure thoughts for the male. If men can't control themselves in the presence of women that's not a woman's fault.
Religion is one of the most divisive activities/belief systems in existence. We have fought wars over religions. we've murdered people for their religion. I will confess that I do not understand how burning saved anyone's soul.
10
It seems necessary that any religion or system or belief must account for creation in all its elegance and complexity. The monotheistic faiths attempt to do so.
Paganism(s) don't appear to face this most basic of questions.
1
From my view, a weakness of many churches is their reliance on certainty. I, for example, was driven from Christianity due to many of its practitioners’ insistence that The Bible is a literal account of creation and a “handbook for living.” To me, it takes more than faith to believe those things. Yet I take great comfort in the larger themes of human imperfection, repentance, grace and redemption found in Christianity — and many other faiths. I also find great spiritual awareness while in nature.
I welcome concepts of religion that value spiritual experience while allowing room for doubt, uncertainty and ultimately mystery. The word “paganism” will offend many, but as described here, it does seem to offer a way to integrate key ideas of the world’s great religions without the insistence on what many of us see as unwarranted belief.
4
It would seem that Mr. Douthat has presented a false dichotomy--that Christianity is transcendent and Paganism is immanent. The basis of Ignatian spirituality(you know, the Jesuits) is finding God in all things. In other words, God is not "out there", but all around us. Mr. Douthat's description of Christianity seems to omit this. If his perception is shared by the general populace, then maybe that explains the purported rise of Paganism.
Christianity is no better or worse than any other system of dogma that I am aware of. All of them have the good, the bad and the ugly.
The underappreciated issue with the current state of Christianity is its dogmatic insistence of it being the only true path, and of the concept of non-believers who would burn in hell.
In my - non-scholarly and rather cursory - reading of the bible history and Christ himself, this does not seem to be the primary thrust of what Bible purports to teach.
This "issue" wasn't a big deal when travel and communication was slow and you lived in a cocoon without ever having to interact someone with a different dogma.
As an outsider, but well wisher for the good parts of Christianity I hope Christians find it in their heart to fix this fatal flaw.
5
While this topic interests me greatly (churches are strongly impacted by these cultural trends), there is a lack of intellectual rigor to many claims about the future of U.S. religion. For example, Andy Crouch pointed out only a minority of churchgoing evangelical Christians support Trump, which is ignored by the popular press (and this article).
Many current "trends" seem to have more to do with people wanting to be "different" than with any real understanidng of the neo-paganism or New Ageism lables they adopt. None of the ancient, pagan religions allowed for any sort of individual expression apart from the cult, but that is what the majority claims attracts them.
Studies on U.S. devotees of Eastern traditions find incredily anti-spiritual impacts such as increased feelings of superiority, more judgmental views, and increased excluxivity, despite opposite results in cultures of origin.
The exciting (and rapidly growing) developments in U.S. religion are communities who define "church" or "synagogue" or "mosque" differently, matching high theology and high text critique with radical commitments to transformative lifestyles and actions. As civic relgion fades and it becomes less popular (in some areas unpopular) to follow the major world religions, these covenanting communities will carry our spirituality forward in unimagined ways. Elsewhere, the concept of "religion" may indeed continue to dumb down to no beneficial end.
2
A teddy bear rules all. Wind the bear up and all you will hear is wind. Wind seems to be everywhere, on our planet, Mars, and other planets. We can ignore the teddy bear and cringe or we can marvel. Wind is beautiful to hear, but really, says nothing. It consoles, but does not explain.
It is possible that profound corruption will lead to the gradual disappearance of American Christian churches: the repeated sex scandals in the Catholic Church (which aren't confined to the US) and the degeneration of Protestant Christianity into camps representing the anti-Christian Prosperity Gospel and Us-versus-Them Christian nationalism, centered on America's "unique" relationship to God-in-History. It is likely that these degraded churches will have few genuinely "Christian" or spiritual adherents in future, because they are spiritually bankrupt.
However, post-Christian "paganism," the belief that spirituality is immanent in the world rather than an attainment of transcendence - the ideal of renouncing the world, found both in Christianity and Buddhism - would have its own problems. Post-Christian America would, I believe, increasingly resemble post-1945 Japan, in which transcendent religion (in this case, Buddhism) plays a limited if not peripheral role in people's lives and "the World" is deeply accepted and celebrated, however cruel or unjust it may be. For America's future, a genuine Christian revival would be far better than a "worldly" paganism that accepts and rejoices in the world "as it is."
Paganism seems more like a step backwards, into the mire of superstition. Putting hexes on people, or praying to the rain god? Even Christianity is not so foolish as to believe in such hogwash. As flawed as the Judeo-Christian tradition is, it was already a massive intellectual improvement over what came before, when everything in nature was controlled by a different God, grisly sacrifices were common, and all manner of bad decisions were made to solve problems by appeasing Gods, rather than with logic and science. At least monotheism streamlined all of that into only one being to worship, and jettisoned most of the more egregious forms of superstition and often cruelty that was built into Pagan rituals. On the contrary, it is atheism that is becoming ascendant in the western world. Finding meaning and beauty in nature, or feeling spiritually enlightened by what is around us in the world are not Paganism. They are a normal part of being alive that does not need to be ascribed to a religion. And while they may feel mystical, most of us know that they can be explained by psychology and neuroscience. The lush, beautiful forest makes us feel a connection to the divine because our brains evolved to feel that way, because it was good for our survival in the past. More people are admitting that and accepting it, without having to give up one iota of the joy they feel. When you are truly at peace with the Universe, you have no need for religion of any kind.
2
No label needed. We are moving toward a universal spirituality aptly in parts of this piece. The defect of all religions is their insularity, their inevitable particularity. The spirituality that is emerging is mirrored by the understanding I shared getting out of the elevator my building yesterday with two hardscrabble workers on our maintenance crew. The essence was all nodding to the back and forth whose essential message was oneness. This is is a product of our cyber awakening which few have seen as the reason, but it is. And no existing religion can hope to defeat an awareness that is positive, individual centered and universal at the same time. And which recognizes that practice is intensely inward and experiential. Consciousness is seen as a universal phenomenon and its inexplicability is not a problem. Many if asked would say "nothing" and mean "if you don't understand, don't ask".
1
"Religious belief and practice now polarizes our politics in a way they didn’t a few generations back."
Which explains why, when I was growing up in the 60s, my town had a swim club, and a Catholic swim club, and a Jewish swim club. In the decade where the first Catholic President spent a few years in office after opposition included mention of what some assumed would be obvious fealty to the Pope.
It's a little less so now, except for the blatant dog-whistle approach so useful to rally the base against Muslims, wars on Christmas, etc.
I think more people nowadays have less concern about associating with people who aren't in the same faith (or lack of). The blatant anti-Them types get a louder platform, exaggerating their numbers.
At least, I like to think so in this season of "engage in traditional Northern Hemisphere winter-based celebration of choice"
1
The acolytes of Gravitation will never yield to the devotees of Electromagnetism—which doesn’t even address the narrower disputes between the adherents of Strong Nuclear God and Weak Nuclear God. It’s true that some have posited a so-called theory of everything, but it would take a great man to convince the masses of something so arcane—but he will come.
5
What I hope for is an awakening into a consciousness wherein spiritualism, supernaturalism, religiosity need not apply. Wherein we understand we are alone on earth, it is the only planet we will ever have, and all people are our neighbors, so we better start caring for it, and them.
Not to put too fine a point on it, and apologies if I bruise anyone's feelings, but I think religion is nothing more than a power struggle between fantasists who are equally afraid of living or dying.
3
This article and discussion bring two things to mind:
1) Beliefs, practices, and religion that seek to make life more amenable on this earth can be scientific or superstitious and they may or may not reflect ultimate truth.
2) The search for ultimate truth(God) is not within the domain of belief, practice, or religion; it is experiential.
As a consequence, if one does not seek the truth that sets one free; the truth is anything you want it to be.
2
Rather than "pagan," I think many people would like to consider themselves animists, in that every object in nature has its own figurative spirit that "animates" it. Trees, dandelions, rocks, oceans - all are suffused with "spirits" leant credence only by our unceasing wonder at the inexplicable miracles of nature of which our universe is composed.
3
"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."
It's funny to me that you're criticizing these people for avoiding anything too "challenging or ascetic". After all, the sentence I quoted is a perfect description of Christianity's origins if you simply replace "these figures" with "Jesus Christ". He offered the people a version of Judaism that was more accessible, free as it was from the "challenging" and "ascetic" laws of the Torah. After his death, of course, his followers changed the theology to accommodate him as a prophet, but its origins remain quite visible. So don't be so contemptuous of those who diverge from institutional Christianity. After all, everyone is someone else's heretic.
3
There are two things this article and discussion bring to mind:
1) religions or beliefs that seek to make life more amenable on earth can be scientific or superstitious and may not seek nor reflect the search for ultimate truth
2) The search for ultimate truth ( God) is metaphysical and is not within the domain of religion or belief; it is experiential.
As a consequence, if the truth one seeks is not the truth that sets one free, then the truth can be anything you want it to be.
Witchcraft is probably the oldest spiritual belief in the world, and is perhaps the easiest to accept, because it holds that we are a part of nature, not separate from it. To me, spirituality is stronger today than it has been at any other time in my life, because more people are seeking a way of connecting with Nature than ever before.
Personally, I think that spirituality is about how we interact with each other, as well as with Nature, because we are a part of Nature. I don't think of spirituality as being worship, or devotion, but of sensing our togetherness, our being a part of something greater than ourselves, but made up of us. Being aware of each other, and of our individual needs, is more spiritual to me than prayer.
We are of this world, our energy comes from that which surrounds us, I believe, and understanding that we need each other is essential to finding peace with ourselves. I do not mourn the passing of Christianity, I mourn the feeling of closeness that came from participating in group activities.
Because pagan beliefs tend not to be highly structured, there are fewer opportunities to share, to be involved. The great challenge that I see is learning how to have community with other pagans.
1
Christianity is declining in the US because the people who run the organizations have been exposed as charlatans and thieves, often more interested in leveraging the suffering of their followers for monetary and political gain than actually practicing what they preach.
All these spiritual traditions - paganism, Christianity, Buddhism, yoga - they all point to the same fundamental human experience; they're always originally about cultivating an internal transcendental state, and they get coopted by the manipulators amongst us.
This is why Eastern stuff is gaining such traction in the West - the basics simply give you tools to use towards spirituality, without the social engineering, cynicism, greed. Of course you can find the so-called yogis and monks who take advantage of others, but the fundamental texts essentially tell you not to trust people like that, and they don't have anything like The Church(tm) to flog you into compliance.
3
When I saw the title of this piece, I thought the essay was going to be about Voodoo economics, science denial, lack of critical thinking, tribal politics, degradation fact based reasoning, and intellectual and social myopia. It is appropriate that paganism is on the rise because we have reverted to a medieval country driven by a President and a party are proud of their ignorance.
As for organized religion, there are plenty of good thoughtful people, but their voices tend to be obliterated by the self servers, and sanctimonious who have long perverted their religion for there own goals.
4
Although I am not religious or Republican, I have always admired the philosophical excursions that the brilliant mind of Ross Douthat takes us on. In his latest prescient essay the “coming” of paganism offers a glimmer of hope, that in this dark world, a new theism devoid of monetary value, could embrace everyone and help the helpless.
1
Could this possibly have anything to do with any other religion? Are there other religions doing the same?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about?
8
That is the line of the day.
3
The modern Unitarian Universalist church, with its Christian roots, philosophical underpinnings, and pagan-friendly congregations and General Assembly may be the bridge you're looking for. The UU principles call for protection of the natural world, social justice, and respect for the "inherent worth and dignity" of all persons.
6
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm way past the point of interested in analyses of how the religion industry in the United States can stay "relevant." That of course excludes paganism or any other spiritual philiosophy, which is a far more ad hoc process than putting a crack addict on TV as a preacher. I have nothing against any spiritual philosophy that any individual wants to practice. What I object to is religion as organized crime.
After more than six decades of watching institutional churches make excuses for raping children, murdering African Americans, hating Jews, and arguing to put everyone they don't like to death, it's occurred to me that the most transparent fraud in the history of our nation is in front of my eyes.
America doesn't have a "new" post-Christian future, because it's already had a long post-Christian past. For me Trump was the last straw, as we watched the ubiquitous crypto-atheist "Evangelicals" embrace the talking stick of absolute power, their last gasp to chain me to their fascist cross. Well boys, we're pushing back. America hasn't been "Christian" for hundreds of years. I'm joining those Millennials, in their recognition of the farce.
10
Paganism would be worse, if you can imagine anything worse than the theocratic movement in America being pushed by the christian right.
3
Mr. Douthat,
Prosperity Gospel or adulterated New Age Gibberish masquerading as Eastern Wisdom merely change the forms of Transcendence. There is a strong tendency in American life to not think beliefs through and most New Religious folk are simple substituting one form of silly belief structure for another.
On the other hand, Immanentism is also inherent in Post-Vatican II Catholicism. How many of the Rhine-region periti who went to Rome in 1962 for the Second Vatican Council were influenced by Teilhard de Chardin and other Process Theologians? We are slowly moving to a world more influenced by Pelagius and less so by Augustine. And this is a wonderful thing. The Hellenistic hatred of the body (the soma-sema pun) doomed the West to 2000 years of yearning to transcend the world. Our plastic choked oceans and melting glaciers are the consequence of Transcendence.
In moving to a post-Christian or post-religious world, there is no need to practice worship. One only needs to acknowledge and appreciate the commonality of all that exists in the world and in Nature, including in humankind.
5
This was an interesting essay, Ross. I benefited from it. Thank you. I come from a family of six generations of mainstream protestant ministers in America (upper Midwest and west coast). (I am not a minster, but I did attend some years of seminary and studied classics as and undergrad.) Of course, we are a bit confused and saddened by the huge drop in numbers of attendance, but we are not disheartened and find as much joy in our work in the vineyard as ever. Plenty of need in the world. And, in a way, we see this next stage of history as a gift. Without political or cultural power, Christians are more easily able to love than to cajole and capable of less harm.
As for beliefs, the many clergy in my family were never sure what exactly their brothers and sisters in the pews believed about the divine. What the faithful actually believe is often a mystery to clergy. I think if we focus on the belief of people, we can end up chasing our tails. Whether people believe the divine is imminent or transcendental is really far out there.
I think we need to focus on practice. What are people doing? Why did they go to church and why do they not now? Many are enjoying not feeling compelled to go to church. Beyond that, we don't know for sure. I know that many of hope that church can become relevant to many people again some day, and, if it is, we will be there for them. There have always been pagans among us.
1
An excellent article but the word "pagan" is problematic. It conjures up images of witches and Wiccan rituals (as portrayed in your opening picture).
There is a growing movement among some Christians and other groups towards an Earth Spirituality. It is part of a New Cosmology developed by Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist , Thomas Berry, a cultural historian, Brian Swimme, a mathematical cosmologist, and many others. What is "new" is our awareness that the universe/Earth story and the human story is a single story . We are part of the Earth and the Universe.
Though the New Cosmologists respect the Bible, they believe that the primary source of divine revelation is Earth and the Universe. As Berry put it, "If we lived on the moon with its harsh and austere environment we would have no awareness of the Divine. Our sense of a divine presence comes from our awareness of the beauty and bounty of Earth. Since we are earthlings and part of Earth what we are doing to Earth we are doing to ourselves."
As Teilhard noted "We are not human beings on a spiritual journey, we are spiritual beings on a human journey."
Mr. Douthat, thanks for the article.
The Founding Fathers were more closely aligned to paganism through their practice of Deism, which is in essence "God in nature." Also, such thinkers cast more than a curious eye at those Christian believers who put aside the cause of "Reason" - also part of that age's zeitgeist - while practicing their faith. Thomas Jefferson railed against the Biblical literalism of his time, imploring Americans to use their reason when reading Biblical myths.
3
"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."
Kudos, Ross. You just described Christianity in a nutshell.
2
Douthat makes many assumptions about the character of America and the broad acceptance of Christianity. He seems to be viewing his idea of Christianity through a fixed lens, as something that doesn't change and shouldn't change. Douthat fails to take into account some major social upheavals over the past hundred years that have drastically changed the global climate - multiple waves of feminism and sexual liberation, a broader embrace of non-Christian immigrants, and, most importantly - The Information Age!
What Douthat is calling "paganism" stems from the abundance of new information that is now literally at our fingertips. Christianity spent a thousand years working very hard to all but erase all other notions of religion on the planet. Vast libraries of information were burned and buried. The internet has allowed people to begin to uncover much of what has been lost, since so much anthropology and archaeology has been popularized and packaged for the internet-raised generations.
"Gurus" have been an American concept since the roaring 20s, coming into the main stream through acts like the Beatles in the 60s. This later embrace of Eastern philosophies and practices can be seen as a backlash again the "Christian American" state that by the 60s, in the eyes of many, had become a warmongering nation. The entire cold war can be seen as a 20th century crusade in which "Christian America" fought against a tide of communism that dictated religion as "the opiate of the masses."
One religion's as good as the next, I suppose. Some may be more environmentally sound than the others?
1
@skimish
Have a look at the Psalms, sacred to Jews, Moslems and Christians. So many of the Psalms are "green". "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof..." etc.
At this time, organized religion is doing far more harm than good. In addition to electing and continuing to support Trump, the conservative Christian religions continue to exhort 'traditional' roles (marriage and children) at a time when we face overpopulation, environmental collapse and climate change. The Evangelicals long for 'end times' and while the Pope claims to accept climate change, he hasn't attempted to ameliorate the RCC position on birth control or praised those who are trying to avoid the traditional lifestyle.
4
Over population? The US population growth rate is 0.7% the lowest US population growth rate in 85 years! In the next 20 years the last of the baby boomers will have died off. The US economy can’t grow if the US population is stagnant and growing older.
1
@Donald Matson Please remember that the environment and the world extends beyond this U.S. society. And the economy cannot continue to grow like a cancer. The*world* is overpopulated, and there are too many poor people living in squalor and misery and too many rich people (that's us!) consuming and consuming.
1
The Nicene Creed of AD 327 starts by asserting "one God," aka, the Father, and goes on a few words later to name two other gods, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. By the year AD 400, Mary was being called "the Mother of God." Four "gods" -- this is "monotheism"?
This "new religion" was an evolutionary reworking of Roman polytheism (paganism) that provided a new set of names for the old Roman gods, and borrowed their iconography.
This new world was also filled with lesser gods who could be petitioned for help in prayer: archangels, martyrs, saints. My Cuban grandmother regularly prayed to St. James, and the Virgin is the center of an immense mother goddess cult inside Catholicism. Roman Catholicism was always a "pagan" religion with polytheistic roots in Roman religion.
All these deities lived on "the other side of the sky," literally. Heaven was a realm just beyond the circling bowl of the fixed stars. Interestingly, there are still some fundamentalists who believe in this fairy tale universe.
Plato, the Pope and Douthat to the contrary, man is an inseparable part of the body of the world and the universe. "We are the world," not as a metaphor, but as a physical/biological reality. The "immanentalist" seeks to experience that fundamental unity that binds everything and all beings together.
Talking about "God" in this culture simply obscures the religious quest with bad ancient science and false transcendentalist metaphysics. Let them go, Ross, they're not helping.
1
@Al Tarheeli You are incorrect with regards to the Nicene Creed.
"Lord Jesus Christ" -- "being of one substance with the Father"
Trinitarianism fits within the definition of monotheism.
1
Organized religion, the one that Ross Douthat so often extols, is dead. There is no resurgence of Paganism. One photo of a hundred homespun druids meeting in the rain in Britain is not a movement. The harm done by organized religion to each and every one of us is what has thrust a stake through its heart. And about time.
9
I believe humans are very part of the natural world. It ebbs and flows are our ebbs and flows. I don't consider myself a pagan, I consider myself a scientist. Our intimate ties to the natural world are not a belief they are a studied reality. No pagan gobbledygook or a new religion or belief system required
4
With all the seriousness of a sophomore paper in religious studies, Douthat perseveres in the deception and frivolity of supernatural spiritualism. It has been the time course of science and rational thought which has humanized the beast of religion, and a return to pagan thought is a laughable premise. Afterlife mythologies were created and persist to please adherents to faith or to give succor to those whose lives are miserable in a real world, period.
4
"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” had redirected their lives; that number had doubled since the 1960s.."
OMG. Twice the number of witches since the 60's and that was 15 years ago!
Am I being fair to Mr Douthat? Well, I concede that the pursuit to understand the macro beliefs (and their evolution) of our society and our "world is getting smaller" neighbors is a worthwhile endeavor.
I take issue with "..but suppose (Law Professor Stephen D.) Smith is right."
Right about? "...modern culture war is the return of a pagan religious conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity"?
Yeah, I guess our current divisions have nothing to do with an autocratic Trump and a Republican Party erasing democracy. As usual, it's all about giving the base another War on Christmas. This time, it's the Salem witches that got away and are again rising. Vote Republican, right Mr Douthat?
Why are the photos in this piece depicting Wiccans and dreadlocked hippies?
Imagery like this makes 'paganism' (or really agnosticism) look like occult practices. When in reality it looks like the majority of Americans who simply go to work, take care of their families, and are content without needing a morality lesson from the Christian churches. Nor any other ritual for that matter.
4
Some "new" American religions "struggle to be born" precisely because they are Pagan and based on race and culture. This means that they not only are racially exclusive, but- gasp!- close their doors to the LGBT communities.
Freedom of speech, freedom of religion?
When it comes to the "rights" of certain well-funded advocacy groups, that's just some people talkin'.
One struggles to be sympathetic to the compulsion to believe in the absence of knowledge.
"...those of us who still believe in a divine that made the universe rather than just pervading it"
"...rather than just..."?! The writer cannot conceive "both-and" but is limited to "either-or" intellectualized dichotomies? His "divine" must needs be only immanent OR transcendent, as if they were mutually exclusive? How paltry, to be so limited as to build truly prejudicial social narratives on such thin, futile conjecture. After all, "infinite" INCLUDES "finite", no?
Perhaps the universe was not "made" as a material artifact, a pot made by an immaterial celestial potter in a far-distant past, but is a now-and-only existing, infinitely complex, living event featuring an exquisite, indivisible synergy of being and knowing, with "divine" as the name we give our ignorance.
Juggling "pagan" and "christian", "spiritual" and "religious" gets really tired. Is this not David Brooks' obsession with social dualism clothed in Catholic raiment? Does one require an "out-group", paganism, to comfort and reassure oneself with "in-group", status? IOW, is social identity reified and so absolute, or arbitrary and contingent, itself a vaporous artifact of mind at play?
What am I, Ross?
3
Regardless of humankind's choices and beliefs, one person, the person of Jesus Christ, identified our problem, and that is that the heart of the problem is the problem of the heart. Historically, failure to acknowledge objective moral law and the reality of a moral law giver, God, and a personal relationship with God, leads to leads to unhappiness and unfulfillment at best and murder and mayhem at the worst. Those truly Christian, know where they are from, know why they are here, know what is right and what is wrong, and know where they are going when they die. True Christians are loving, joyous, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle and self-controlled because of a relationship with the Creator, God.
I ask that doubters give the faith, the Christian faith a try. It's not dogma, neither is it a system or a philosophy. It's a relationship that bears fruit.
3
@sam ogilvie
By the same token, we could ask the religious to give rational thought a try.
2
@sam ogilvie So you say. Many of us do not agree and don't to "give it a try."
1
“Moral law and god, the moral law giver”?
You mean like the god, the “moral law giver”, who impregnated a virgin without her consent while she slept with her husband? The same god who then “sacrificed” the young woman’s son? Judeo-Christian religions are based on immoral behavior and white male domination.
2
The author's analysis is correct.
The State and Civic based religions of the Middle East and Greece and Rome were susceptible to the same shortcomings as their successor religions. Mystery cults were often running rackets to fool the gullible and had to be shut down by the authority.
Whatever the religion, cult, spirituality none answers the question, "What's it all about?"
Christianity is a religion of the incarnation. A core message, therefore, is that God is immanent not merely transcendent.
Mr. Douthat's characterization of Christianity as one that sees God operating exclusively from 'outside the world' rather than from within it, is a false assertion.
Moreover, there are a growing number of Christians today reclaiming the ancient and apostolic affirmation of bodily life as the very place in which God is pleased to dwell--such as in a poor young woman of color named Mary, and also in a lowly feeding trough in Bethlehem.
1
Ross, the Catechism for the Catholic Church recites the pursuit of social justice as a goal for all Catholics. How is it that you see "social justice" as some progressive form of paganism? You seem tormented in this column. Perhaps you are a victim of the dualism that was introduced into the Judeo-Christian era of the early church by the Greeks. Smell the roses. It's all good.
2
If one is looking for a general theory that explains the state of religious belief and practice in the US it would have to take account of neurotransmitters and brain function ( with or without the ingestion of chemicals that alter mood and perception) which is the physical substrate of all human experience and thought, the practice of childhood indoctrination that propel myths and belief systems forward, social structures that push people towards or away from participation in organized religion and individual experience that either validates or discredits doctrine and practice. It's an undertaking beyond Ross' ability and the scope of his engagement by the NYT.
What this analysis fails to recognize is that classical paganism, like Christianity today, was essentially political—the Greek gods were gods of the Greek polis, the city-state, and the Roman gods were gods of the city of Rome. Not for nothing was the Roman emperor also Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest, a title stolen by the popes when Christianity sold out to the Roman Empire. By going back to “paganism,” ironically people today are rejecting the politicized Christianity of today and adopting a non-political religion similar to the original Christianity that rejected the political paganism of emperor-worship. If Christianity is to survive and have a truly spiritual impact in the present world, it must take the same path: reject the empty rituals of the corrupt and politicized sects of “evangelical” Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, and return to the original, revolutionary spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and the Jesus who drove the capitalists out of the temple, setting an example that the priests have never understood, so they have always been afraid to follow.
2
Actually, humans do not “need” organized religion, at all. It was brought about by the fear and wonder primitive humans had of an unfathomable universe. As it organized and grew, those seeking power to control others took it to the increasingly absurd levels it’s achieved today.
There’s a reason early Christian barbarians destroyed the Library at Alexandria; the poor weren’t educated in medieval times; madrassas are the educational system of rural Islam; evangelicals have been fighting hard and dirty to destroy secular public schools and create separate religious schools. The Truth shall set you free and that knowledge is power.
The antidote has always been education. When science-based education explains why the universe is the way it is, humans have a remarkable ability to accept it, adapt, and be at peace. It happened to me. The first major crack in my childhood faith was the fact that Adam was offered all of Eden EXCEPT the Tree of Knowledge. Why? It also wasn’t lost on me that the one brave enough to touch it was Eve and women have been thus vilified ever since. It was pretty much downhill from there for my faith.
Why is it that the higher the level of education achieved, the more likely one is to be atheist or, at most, agnostic? The answer is education. Wonder, ritual, and reason to live are human traits that will continue into a new era based on science and reality. Read Carl Sagan and you may finally figure out that there’s no need for god or religion, at all.
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@left coast finch
1000 upvotes!
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@Bucketomeat
[blush] Thank you! xoxo
For those who are inclined to believe in a deity(ies), the only concrete manifestation of IT is in nature (it's presumed handy-work). Every rock, every tree, every living thing, every star in the sky, represents God, because He created it. So all Creation encloses within it the spirit of God. Thus Nature is sacred (the core argument for Paganism).
Most reasonable people think of the Bible as a book of fables in support of certain moral principles. I would argue that very few, actually believe that God has spoken to anyone. If he has, it's through His Creation, only. He did not hand down stone tablets to anyone.
However, were does that leave us when it come to the core reason for the existence of any religion, which is moral guidance?
Paganism is weak in this area. Nature can not be used to guide us. In Nature, the strong live, the weak perish, the thief gets rich, the honest loses out. The old rule of the Jungle.
This is the reason that all organized religion must have an anthropomorphic center. So, that it establishes a moral order. This very point, it's anthropomorphism, is it's weakness. No reasonable person can believe in a God created in the image of Men.
All of that leaves many of us in a limbo when it comes to what to believe, so we chose to believe whatever we want. Not a satisfactory answer.
1
Without a Deity we are stuck with our own guilt so wrote Nietzsche. Did I spell his name right? Probably not.
Religion began to run into trouble in the middle ages.Christian and Islamic doctrines offered no solution for the biggest threat to our existence at the time......disease. The germ theory of disease came from science.Religious belief would not lead us to the invention of most of the science-based technologies we depend upon today.Curie,Newton, and Einstein were not priests.This does not mean that religion has no place in our lives.We just have to realize that,like our constitution,religious beliefs have to change with the times.We can't pretend we're living two thousand years ago and young people instinctively know it.The next scientific discovery that will lead to our survival if acted upon, is climate change.Prayer might make us feel more comfortable about our place in the afterlife but what about our children here on earth.
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As I watch the evangelical movement pay obeisance to Donald Trump, with 80% of white evangelicals backing him, I honestly wonder whether a movement away from Christianity isn't a good thing. Evangelicals have badly corrupted the notion of what it is to be a Christian even as its leaders continue with their hypocrisies. We have various charlatans peddling the "prosperity gospel" which holds that financial success is a sign of God's favor and what better way to endure God's favor than to donate to your favorite evangelist?
Going back to more mainstream entities, we have a Catholic Church that has in essence operated as a criminal conspiracy over decades to conceal widespread sexual abuse.
I'm one of those dwindling members of a mainline denomination and I find Christianity to be a fairly important part of my life. But what works for me as a private individual does not seem to be working for American society in the aggregate. Pulling Christian religion out of the public sphere in no way would infringe upon my right to practice it in my own private sphere. This is, incidentally, exactly what the founders intended. Instead, we have over 40 or so years allowed "Christianity" to creep into the public sphere creating great divisiveness over social issues.
5
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.
152
@LES. That's a good comment. It's also another thing to live the values and seek truth without the need for religion in the first place. Religion has no monopoly on constructive value systems.
19
As members of an alleged secular republic, US citizens should be free to practice, or not, any form or spirituality that suits them. This freedom should also extend to gender self-identification and lifestyle, as long as this behavior is constitutional.
I use the term constitutional instead of lawful because religious zealots, especially those in the country's state and federal legislatures, can't resist attempting to pass legislation designed to foist their religious and "moral" views on the rest of us while criminalizing non-conforming behavior.
Paradoxical since most of these types also claim to be staunch libertarians.
2
"a nation of Christian heretics, if you will, in which traditional churches have been supplanted by self-help gurus and spiritual-political entrepreneurs"
Or by our own direct experience of the world, our own diverse reading and listening, and our own deep thinking and conversation. That's the point, really: church hierarchies don't need replacing, and most of us don't need or want a guru, whether wise and sincere or garish and money-grubbing.
That's your great fear, isn't it? That humans can figure out that they can figure out how to live without bosses. And that amidst all this hysteria about how empty everybody's lives supposedly are, we are in fact the most self-actualized and spiritually engaged generations in the planet's history. So far.
3
The universe and life itself are the great mysteries, and searching for and imposing a structure on it is what human beings do with pretty much everything. It's what separates us from all other creatures. We imagine structures that don't yet exist, and then make them real by creating and living within them. God is not real. The word "God" is so open to interpretation that it describes a concept, not a real being. But religion is real. Just because it is created by people doesn't make it any less real than democracy or any other structure we envisage, create, and then willingly live within it's strictures. And it will remain real until it loses its last adherents, at which point the "structure" will disappear.
1
"..recognize the outlines of a possible successor to our world-picture, while taking comfort that it is not yet fully formed."? Not much tolerance for other beliefs, have you?
It seems to me that more wars, crusades, and personal atrocities have been committed in the name of religion than any other reason. And they virtually ALL are in direct opposition to the almost universal and pervading instruction to love one another.
Seeing and connecting to the divine all around us seems like a far more harmonious, loving perspective. After all, who knows the Divine cannot exist in everyone and everything around us, yet also have created all?
2
"Spiritual but not religious" is a rest stop on the road to atheism, or at least agnosticism, not paganism. The path to "spirituality" for non-believers can be found in using things like meditation and self-reflection to find inner peace, not in incantations to the four compass points.
2
@Joe G Certainly agree with your observation, having seen this be true in my atheism groups. "Spiritual but not religious," overall, does tend to mean at first a god belief but not a formal religious structure.
Absence of literal belief in the biblical miracle stories does not mean that they must be abandoned. One can find great comfort in those inherited stories by interpreting them as metaphorical — insights into higher truths that can be expressed in no literal way.
They can be used ceremonially and in meditative practice to great effect. Actively imagining those stories, visualizing them mentally as though one were there as a live observer, can have a very calming effect on emotions. That practice can be therapeutic and nourishing psychically when used privately, or when used as a shared experience with others.
Actively imagining a mentoring Christ, invisibly offering words of courage and confidence can have significant effect. Some of us, in fact, suspect that the original authors wrote those great works of literary art with just those thoughts in mind. It may have been others who decided to take that rich metaphorical art as literal history and to demand that others do so as well.
Literal believers can be accepted tolerantly as fellow congregants, but they must learn to accept the rest of us as well, just as tolerantly.
1
Sorry, Mr. Douthat, but religion represents the childhood of the human race, and Americans are not going backwards. We now know that science and history are better quides than mythology or scriptures. The children of God are getting off their knees and standing up like grown up women and men . . . .
The biggest phenomenon ignored by Mr. Douthat is that 20 million Americans are practicing Yoga every day. From exercises for health, they will develop into meditation and eventually become Enlightened masters. In times to come, the deep "spiritual" experiences associated only with religion in the past will be supplanted by a scientific mysticism based on the science of psychology and deep experiences accessible to everyone through the use of psychedelics.
4
I suppose that humans will always seek explanations for things they don't understand, will always want the comfort of a being 'in loco parentis' to watch over them and make tough decisions, and will deny death.
Religion answered these desires when it was still possible to believe in magical sky beings that looked over us. But because our progressing knowledge makes that impossible, we seek newer, more secular, explanations.
While I don't want to question any particular person's beliefs, I suspect that a lot of people that adopt belief systems, religious or secular, are simply afraid to face the reality of a knowable universe.
4
What we are seeing certainly does have its roots in the past. It claims to speak truth to power but places the power of the collective, through government, ahead of the freedom and self determination of the individual. It’s a trip back in time, before the enlightenment, when the state, monarch, religious leader, etc held preeminence over everything and everyone. It may have a more polished and modern spin, but it’s the same philosophy. The whispers of this are becoming shouts. They take the form of rebellion against free speech and individualism. Rebuttal of its core beliefs is tantamount to heresy.
The president just nominated a candidate for Attorney General who believes we should be a Christian nation ruled by the Christian Bible. Before expounding grand theories of “post-Christian” civic cults and the role of religion in western civilization, maybe Mr. Douthat could come out from hiding behind behind the barn and take a pass at that one. It would be liberating to find our place in the spiritual and natural worlds. At the moment, frankly, I’d rather be sure of my place as a citizen in the American judicial system. It ain’t looking good.
6
@ADN I'm with ya, as a life-long atheist who never knew until I was an adult that there were Christians who weren't Catholic.
The sooner people step away from superstitions and work with reason (as a group- what they do at home is their business) the better. I shudder at the sight of a cross.
3
@Ilene Bilenky
I’m not a committed atheist but there are days when I think we should print this on a postcard and mail it once a week to everybody in Congress and on the federal bench. Also Mr. Douthat.
John Adams: "The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
3
@Ilene Bilenky The religion that creates repression can be anything from Christianity to Paganism. It can be the religion of the state. True secularism requires a limited government that places no religion, including itself, as the ruler of the people.
2
This piece accurately captures the diminishing influence of organized Christianity, but the new movements can't be united under the pagan (or likely any other) label. The old classical pagan religions formed in tribal societies and were part of the group identity of large core constituencies that developed them into the civic pagan practice of the Greeks and Romans. I suspect the next reshaping of religion will be more intertwined with upcoming political and economic upheaval rather than being a union of post-Christian movements.
1
Probably the reason that this lapsed-Catholic has embraced a modified version of Buddhism, is the Buddhist notion of focusing on the here and now and not some hoped for after life.
The very Buddhist ideal that we are, as individuals, day by day-even minute by minute, responsible for our own happiness, sense of completeness and ethical choices makes complete sense to someone like me that is repelled by the moral bankruptcy that I see our national political and religious leadership displaying of late. And to make matters even more confusing for me, many of them do this under the cover of religious self righteousness, and with the bizarre argument that our country continues to act under the best impulses of our Judeo-Christian foundations, under this type of laisez-faire leadership.
So, the Buddhist ideal of living your beliefs without the benefit of counting on the forgiveness of your selfishness, willful ignorance or amoral acts, if only you accept a particular deity, is not only refreshing to me but helps focus my mind and behavior during these confusing times.
4
Thank you for another interesting, thoughtful essay.
If you have not yet read it, I highly recommend Ken Wilber's recent tome "The Religion of Tomorrow." It's awfully long and polysyllabic, but it's a profound exploration of the theme you have discussed here.
My short version of the punchline: as our technologies and cultures evolve, so does our collective understanding of spirituality. Our religions evolve too. Wilber (and I) see the current neo-paganisms not so much as a return to an older world order, but as part of an evolution to the next stage in world history.
BTW, as I read your op-ed piece I was mentally substituting the word "panentheism" in a number of places you used the word "pantheism." God is immanent AND transcendent. Both at the same time. Wilber has a lot to say about this.
If you do read his book, I would be VERY interested in your take.
1
The myth-busting forces of The Enlightenment, empiricism, and science have “secularized” our world. There's no turning back.
Counter-intuitive truths are on the rise in increasingly pluralistic societies. Monolithic religions suffer identity crises the same way racial and ethnic groups do, confronted by dogmas that make less and less sense to average people.
By definition dogmas are unprovable. They conflict with those of other belief systems, rendering either one true or all false. This is unavoidable.
Douthat cannot see beyond the filters of his faith and defines the world dualistically between religious and non-religious. The latter threaten the former, like an insurrection against God Himself, which Christians label as paganism. The problem, however, is dogma, not non-religiousness.
Non-believers shouldn’t be reduced to being against the sacred or transcendent in life; they’ve experienced firsthand the shortcomings of dogma. That doesn’t make them pagan or New Age, but rather, transcendent — able to see beyond the limitations of an unprovable certitude that’s invariably held together by guilt and fear. They are the transcendent, courageous ones.
When it comes to knowing what’s true, the non-religious person is comparatively humble, and courageous enough to live with the attendant uncertainty, in itself a kind of sacred, existential space, to be revered, not prejudged as incapable of spiritual, intuitive feeling.
4
Churches and religion are not the same thing.
If institutional Christianity, and especially Catholicism, actually applied their teaching and dogmas to their own behavior, they would be more believable as arbiters of ethical behavior. Instead, they gave themselves a pass, and fouled their moral authority for several generations.
For all his many mistakes, this is the one thing most people, especially the lapsed and non-affiliated find refreshing about Francis. At least he is trying. That makes his mistakes livable.
The mistakes most Judeo-Christian-Islamic authorities keep repeating is to err on the side of compulsion vs. compliance. If you want compliant obedience to moral authority, you have to earn it.
If ever there was a false equivalence offered anywhere - Joel Osteen and Oprah Winfrey?????
3
Proof yet again that when your only tool is a hammer the entire world develops nail-like properties. Mr. Douthat dismisses atheism out of hand as some irrelevant aberration. In fact, despite continuing discrimination and hatred of atheism generally, more and more people are ditching supernaturalism. The Gods have little left to do now, so why have them around? The silly attempt to link new age religions, mere repackaged supernatural ideology, to secular humanist atheism doesn't reflect reality or pass logical muster. People have found out how to live fulfilled, meaningful, and moral lives without all the mumbo jumbo. One you're free you never go back.
5
What the world needs now is the dharma.
Buddhism is a science of mind with high ethical standards and is congruent with modern science
I LOVE this pagan movement and understand it's appeal, especially to those of us of European origin. I encourage people to also try mindfulness and practice Right Thought, Right Speech and Right Action as outlined by Buddha.
1
overall a nice article. I would emphasize one thing that the article dances around but never seems to make clear. For some of us (at least yours truly), going within the created world leads to transcendence--there is not an end point, but emergence into a nonmaterial reality that holds and pervades the physical. Modern physics has told us clearly that when we dive into the fundamental structure of matter we enter a world that is mysterious, elusive, wholly different from the macro world. What is that realm? I don't know, but I do know it is there, "licking its chops" as someone once said.
2
Language. It fails. Paganism as a word implies a set of beliefs that can be articulated. In the same way that Christianity implies articulable beliefs. Except that the beliefs as almost as wide and disparate as would be found among 10 random people calling themselves pagans.
In Christianity there are trinitarians who believe Jesus was a god. There are untarian Christians who don’t believe that. There are Christians who believe in the magic of transubstantiation; there are Christians who say that’s magical thinking.
Religions need to do the following. Bind people together into some kind of group where important affinities are shared. Groups that are manageable in size, that create self-help communities. For a religion to have power it needs to make for persuasive articulations of meaning in life.
Grey religions that are lacking in emotive power, in presenting persuasive response to life’s deepest challenges, that don’t provide enough strength of communal life can not continue.
Evangelicals seem hot to trot because they put on good shows, clearly define who is outside the group, have easily identifiable enemies and are happy to truck in hatred in order to us fear to create their identity.
But as the emptiness implicit in emphasis on exclusion, material success become clear even those will dissipate.
1
The new Pope is Jordan B. Peterson, per the latest book by Vox Day, _Jordanetics_, exploring Peterson's genesis and impact.
Being dependent on “The Einstein Bible” rather than “The King James Bible,” I’ve become a Secular Humanist Pantheist (SHP) instead on an atheist.
SHP-ism enables one to have a god, without any need for the supernatural. And, with such an awareness of God, one can run for President, and win ( as the demagogue Trump has demonstrated).
And, having the same God as Einstein (and Spinoza) provides legitimacy for being a SHPer,
1
The essential dilemma in your piece is the you use the word paganism to describe the possible replacement to Christianity.
Paganism as a word was introduced and used to describe that which is not Christian and with a derogatory connotation.
This is clearly part of your connotation also.
"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..."
Ross, who wants to join another cult or walk on your bridge?
What if, instead, some of us wanted to see a Star Trek-evolutionary process in which we helped science and spirituality coexist in the commons.
There are many of us who have yet to be measured who are more believers in or just open to this Process. All religions are welcome as long as they don't impose their personal
religious beliefs on the commons.
Your article did not reach us.
4
Thank you. I have been converted. Previously, Odin in charge of Valhalla was my choice. Who could argue with spending eternity in Medieval halls, daily drinking, eating, fighting and, of course, wenching, only to awake the next day with all limbs reattached and ready to go at it again?
But following this article, I stumbled across Mithras again. How could I have forgotten?
2
Religion has brought human division, war, and suffering throughout history. Christianity is a political force, used by people to advance their personal and national geopolitical interests, namely land and riches. A Catholic priest told me that we need suffering and should accept it as an offering to God. I differ, you are not a pagan by avoiding religion and attempting to alleviate human suffering using good governance. Don’t put Christ in Christmas, put Jesus’ principles & actions back in governments to alleviate human misery. Care for the sick and poor.
3
When pollution, the politics of greed, and climate change come together to take us back to the stone age, we will once again embrace some sort of religion, as solace for what we have lost.
3
My recollection is that Douthat is Catholic. Papists used to be considered pagan by a whole lot of Protestants. I suspect they don’t think about it so much these days.
2
Duh, Americans spend more hours watching Game of Thrones (or its ilk ) each week than attending church, or even having conversation with another human being.
3
How very Christian to observe man moving beyond Christianity back to the future of paganism and so hang the trappings of religion on it to make it "safe" just as early Christians arranged their holidays to coincide with pagan celebrations, e.g., why not move the celebration of Christ's birth to December so Christmas could coincide with the Saturnalia, or bringing in a tree during the winter solstice and decorating it with light? Is this annual tree worship a pagan, Christian, or Jewish ritual? Or is this trend you see simply what happens when a more mature and better educated people simply put childish religious notions in the same drawer with Santa Claus? Santa does exist, but he's no jolly old elf coming down your chimney. Wither God? You might as well call her the laws of physics and the natural order. So as you stand in wonder contemplating the starry heaven above and the moral law within, it's OK to hedge your bets and decorate that tree with light to remind yourself that spring will come again.
As I recently learned, the word “pagan” was created by Christians as a pejorative term for non-believers, notwithstanding their long history of classical contributions to the world’s culture. Welcome back!
Ross, what’s wrong with individualism? I think that what is motivating your despondency over our contemporary religious reality is an ultimate desire for a unifying authoritarianism. You don’t seem to be comfortable at all with the notion that religions are essentially an outgrowth of a fundamental individual human yearning for a spiritual affirmation, and leaving it at that. You seem to think that this yearning is only validated when it is embraced by an historically dominating formalized collective authority - a Religion.
If the dominant formalized historically validated religions hadn’t messed up so much they might still be attractive. It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion. What’s important is that the essential spiritual yearning is alive and well, whatever form it takes. The river flows. Lighten up!
2
@Mark Binford
Sorry about your wrong guess. THIS is what you remember from your political indoctrination back at college?
Religion is all about ANSWERS.
Life -
fate -
karma shows up at everyone's door sooner or later and the outrageousness of it all demands an answer.
Finally, the LAST idea that the world of violence and conquest would EVER believe is the ultimate answer:
the Creator's one child is sacrificed so that all who recognize & repent of their sins and call upon Christ to save them are relieved of having to deal with what mankind came up with on its own.
Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac, but didn't need to. That awful price to be paid was reserved for God himself.
1
@L'osservatore
Why you yellin' at poor Mark?
1
The binary future of existence beyond the grave that Christianity foists on its adherents (and on those who, over the ages, were never exposed to the Christian myth and who, by that lack of exposure have only a single eternity of agony awaiting) is its own strongest argument against the Abrahamic religions.
i am a pagan, thank you for the relatively kind portrayal of Pagans
as people who see diety as immanent in the Universe.
The metaphor of the Goddess giving birth to the universe has always appealed to me more than the "old white man with a beard and an attitude problem" great artificer idea of diety this is what my culture taught me.
We are everywhere. and we vote!
blessed be, Cheryl G
@Cheryl
Where did you get the idea that the Old Testament refers to GOD as an "old white man with a beard"? That image just is not in the OT at all.
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.
300
@Middleman - yeah, the Catholic handling of abuse is emblematic. The pedophilia appears to happen in any situation of power around children, but who thinks the massive, business-as-usual coverup for decades would have been possible if the entire power structure wasn't top-to-bottom nothing but men who vowed celibacy?
Simply, how many bishops or cardinals who had their own families would have tolerated the horrible idea of a coverup of child abuse "for the good" of anything?
17
@Middleman
Such demonization is not at all “subtler”. It’s been a screaming siren of pulpit-pounding tantrumming since the start of the sexual revolution that’s only increased in its frantic desperation. Witness the unhinged reaction of the religious right since it was politically empowered by Reagan; the communal flip-out of Republicans at Clinton’s actions (which pales incredibly in comparison to Trump), the scorched-earth war in response to marriage equality and trans-gender bathrooms all of which culminated in the literal Devil’s bargain evangelical Christians made with the most amoral corrupt president in American history all because of sex as it’s practiced by those who are not white cis-gendered heterosexual Christian males.
I’m sorry, maybe because I experienced the full brunt of an evangelical upbringing that has attuned my ability to instantly spot it all over the landscape for the last 30 years, but Christian sexual demonization has been as subtle as a freight train hitting this country every single time it attempts to evolve.
24
Christianity was bound to lose its
influence after many of its pronouncements
were repudiated by science and the reason
demolished the miracles. However, secularists
also worship new deities- money and power.
If they feel emptiness,inhaling and exhaling
or drinking will soothe the anxieties for a while.
Now it is the president or some ultra rich businessman or hedge fund manager who have become the object of adulation rather than God of Christianity.
@s.khan White Evangelicals who adore Trump, believe in the 'prosperity gospel' and claim the earth is theirs to pollute and ravage are more anti Christian than non believers.
Mr Douthat, Thank you for your thoughts on the disappearance of christianity from the US.
I remember as a child in the early 1960s joining a Boy Scout troop at a local Protestant church. Unfortunately I was a catholic at that time. The troop made me and my brother feel very comfortable. We were the only catholics there. When the troop would go on camping trips the scout leader, Reverend Bill would put my brother and I in a car and take us to a local catholic church for mass on Sunday. When we returned to the camping site after mass the Reverend would hold services for the other scouts. My brother and I attended that service too.
The next Sunday we attended mass at our usual church. During the mass the priest spoke to the congregation about the heretics in the group who joined Boy Scouts at the protestant church. He called my parents names and said as a family we were all going to hell. Unfortunately for the priest my father was sitting there too. My father took my brother and I and marched us out of the church. He later returned to the rectory and had a visit with the priest. The priest had a few facial bruise after that visit. A few months later the church started their own Boy Scout troop and demanded that we leave the other troop and join the catholic troop. We refused and never set foot in a catholic church again. Who really needs that type of religion/discrimination?
3
Can't think of one consequence of discarding the whole religious institutional mindgame sham.
We have secular morals. We did prior to organized religion, we have for centuries, and hopefully we will tomorrow.
The Handmaids Tale is of course an eternal threat, particularly at this moment of r/wing evangelical oppression.
1
It may very well be that the next great Renaissance come about with the slow dropping away back to the ancient Greeks. It was the ancient Greeks that gave us Western Civilization, not the Christians. The Theists that wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of these United States admired the Greeks more than they admired any hallowed Christian thought. It seems that it is truly America's Manifest Destiny to slowly let the scales fall from our eyes, to remove the log rather than the dust mote, to find the ease of going through the eye of a needle, to not be the first one to cast a stone, to walk amongst the sick and poor and to heal them.
I will gladly take a Paganism that walks with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, with a God manifest on Earth, to the Yaweh that sent the Walking Man to his good servant Job, or to watch the rising of the beast from the ocean in the West.
It seems that the Greek Enlightenment and the stopping of the Furies by Athena at the behest of Apollo is a good path. The nee-Eumenides are placated and not destroyed.
Perhaps the Furies that have been unleashed upon the Manifesting America will be placated by a single-voting jurist whom all agree to take the judgement. The Furies were tireless, but their chase of Orestes caused the birth of Justice. Christianity took its best from these stories, and its worst from the will to slaughter the lamb of Abraham.
As the founder of a Christian organization for LGBTQ people in NYC, I see a different narrative. The Bible is a story about a God who dwells in the midst of a persecuted people, promising them deliverance and salvation from their oppressors. Straight, which Christian America may have lost that narrative 50 years ago, but a shared journey of persecution that unites people to rely on Jesus to deliver us from our oppressors is alive and thriving among queer Christians. As God told Elijah, there's always a remnant that hasn't bent the knee to the god of wealth.
1
It's not so much paganism the country, especially the elites, are moving towards.
Rather, a climate apocalypse cult.
1
All these people with profound religious experiences are testament to Man’s propensity to lie to himself/herself just to feel better.
1
Also all of the evil produced by organized religion comes not from belief in god, but from faith in Sacred Texts. Most of the incoherencies come from faith in the contradictory concept called "the supernatural". Removing these elements from Theism and you have few significant impacts on the practice of religion and still retain what I call Naturalistic Theism. More on this below.
https://www.academia.edu/35251245/Naturalistic_Theism
The top two things that Americans worship are money and their electronic devices.
2
Why must people who believe in Abrahamic religions put others belief systems in a box? You cannot classify all other belief systems as Pagan! Why not give mutual respect? Why the condescending tone? If your belief system is appealing and satisfies the needs of the people than you don't have to force it down people's throats, people will naturally be attracted to it. But Christianity and Islam have a history of going to war, forcing conversion at the sword or through bribery.
Why are you threatened by belief systems where people are voluntarily going to them and are naturally attracted to them? People are leaving the Christian faith because it is authoritarian and they don't agree with many of the practices of the church. It's as simple as that. Live and let live.
Regardless of what label(s) you attach to the current spiritual climate, I would much rather have what we have today than what I experienced growing up in the Bible Belt. The people of the so called "Pagan" belief systems are much kinder, peaceful, and less judgemental than the community I grew up in. I'd much rather hear a sermon from Oprah than any evangelical priest.
2
The inability to burn pagans and other heretics inevitably leads to paganism, and heresy in general. The concept of orthodoxy and heresy is the defining characteristic of Christianity. In all other respects it is pagan. Judaism and Islam are pagan in all respects except their prohibition of worshiping any idols other than their scriptures.
This is basically nothing more than a revolution against monotheism, and it's about time.
Politics has always been an excuse for religion and vice versa. No wonder our history is replete with wars, murders, butchery, genocide and man's inhumanity to man. I agree with my atheist nephew who simply said religion kills. And I am a catholic raised in Benedictine and Jesuit schools. I have considered atheism but looking at the human condition, at this point, I have to sadly say it doesn't make a difference.
1
Ross, Ross, Ross. Someday you and your fellow Christians will come to understand that Judaism and Christianity are *very* different, especially with respect to such things as an afterlife.
Then you wouldn't write things like "In popular religious practice there isn’t always a clean line between this “immanent” religion and the transcendent alternative offered by Christianity and Judaism"
2
These labels of "Christian, Pagan, Atheist or Agnostic" are just more means to quantify people into neat little boxes and to shun the reality of ambiguity that pervades life.
As for the decline of Christianity in the U.S., look no further than the 1980's and the 'unholy marriage' of Fundamentalism with the GOP. Attempts by some on the Right to legislate their religious beliefs and bigotries, have chanced more people from organized religion than 'Satan' himself.
1
I believe that Ross Douthat has thoughtfully tried to take the measure of organized religion in the United States. His ability
to think abstractly and incisively about such powerful societal
trends is impressive.
I only wish he would have made a distinction between the
"emotional" and the "spiritual" in his insights. For example,
would the recent Pew survey he cites in which Americans are more frequently experiencing "spiritual peace and well being"
have had a significantly different result if it had measured "emotional peace and well being"?
I believe not.
I find that many Americans, and that includes me, often use "spiritual" and "emotional" interchangeably--as virtual synonyms.
When we say we're seeking spiritual well being, aren't we
often--if we're being honest--really seeking emotional well being?
1
Thank you, Ross Douthat for an objective look at Christianity and paganism. Judeo-Christian religions require faith in an invisible God. Faith is a belief in something for which there is no evidence, and Jesus Christ identified faith as a virtue. While I would not worship anything, I like the idea of worshiping nature. There is abundant evidence that nature exists. You can see a tree.
2
@P. J. Brown: Believing things without evidence can make one very vulnerable to paranoia and con artists.
2
A Credo that expresses belief in a supernatural entity needs to have a preamble: "I am human, and am therefore incapable of knowing the mind an ineffable Entity. Nonetheless, this is what I believe:" With such a preamble, we wouldn't feel existentially threatened by fellow human with different (or no) credos.
@Joseph H
Modern people do not feel threatened by someone's religious credo so much as by what this credo dictates when it come to how we are supposed to live.
For instance, I do feel threatened by religions that dictate that women are inferior and must be controlled. I would not want to see such faiths gain momentum.
1
@Joseph H: This is how I sort the sheep from the goats. Goats never claim to know what an all-knowing being thinks. Sheep live to be sheared.
To quote the late Tom Petty, "You can believe what you want to believe."
Wake me up if and when anyone proposes express governmental recognition of a given belief or belief system; until then I'll leave it to Douthat and others to be concerned about who is or isn't dancing on the head of which pin. I don't mind anyone arguing that public policy or private action should include a particular "right thing to do," whether based in religion or secular considerations, but any claim that any belief system alone necessitates a particular policy or action is out of bounds.
@Eric Blair: In engineering, whatever one believes won't work if it defies the laws of physics.
Ross is unfair to the past when he describes pagan elites rejecting the deities but putting on a public show of belief. This is a "some of them felt this way" thing, not characteristic of the group as is presented here. If it had been, Christianization would have been much more rapid and easy and would not have taken the centuries of theological trench warfare that it did.
It is of course a rehash of Gibbon's quote (often varied and misattributed to actual Romans): "The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful."
Gibbon is not terribly fair here (being terribly fair is not one of his distinguishing characteristics in general). It would be fairer to ascribe a lot more sincerity to Roman religious beliefs, elite or otherwise. And in any case, even if some prominent Roman pagans may have been insincere, many more were not. One need only look at pagans who persisted long after Christianity had become obviously the winning team - a persistence that was OVERrepresented in elite circles, not UNDERrepresented.
(It strikes me as I write this that this criticism - to look for a kind of zeitgeist belief and assign it uncritically to an entire group - might fairly be made of some of Ross's modern assertions too)
@Sean: Before Constantine, Roman religion was a collective public superstition.
A belief in a transcendent or immanent God is tied to a belief in the meaning of life. If one does not believe that life has a meaning and is also absurd, one normally does not believe in the former.
Animals do not have the behavioral repertoire for language or thought. Except for that, humans are similar to animals. Animals do not think about the meaning of life and,like humans, they also die.
Humans can fear sickness, pain, and the approach of death, but it makes no sense to fear death itself.
All this is evidence for the claim that secularization will continue to spread.
@Diogenes
The more we know about animals, the more we gain respect for their capacity for thinking and understanding of reality and I hesitate to declaim what the inner thoughts of an oyster, an octopus, a bat, or the current president of the USA might believe. They are each something of a mystery.
1
@Diogenes
Humans differ from animals in that they have an Ego and a brain that is far larger proportionate to body mass.
But that ego is illusory, thus they are just deluded animals with a bigger brain: freaks of nature.
1
@Diogenes: Only humans are capable of accumulating and passing on a growing body of real and abstract knowledge and experience that transcends all individual lives. Modern atheistic Judaism treats our "purpose" to be explorers, caretakers and builders of this cumulative human process. We die, but live on in what we have added to the future.
1
Interesting essay, but I disagree that the left's social gospel is "denuded of theological content." On the contrary, it comes straight out of The New Testament. Jesus talks constantly about the centrality of charity, helping the poor, while insisting the rich elites can't enter the kingdom of Heaven.
Oh, and in the list of forefathers of modern pantheism, Wordsworth should be included. Late in life, when Wordsworth became cranky and conservative, he denied that the poetry he'd written as a young man was pantheistic. But "Tintern Abbey" is the most eloquent expression of the belief that God inheres in Nature.
1
Mr. Douthat, I found your statement that "prosperity gospel and Christian nationalism rule the right and a social gospel denuded of theological content rules the left" to be out of date.
My understanding from recent Pew Forum studies is that while religious beliefs and education are indeed negatively correlated, traditional Christian religious attendance and observation are positively correlated with education.
Given the shifts happening on "the right" at the moment as college educated Americans, especially women, flee the Republican Party - your old comparisons of right and left appear less and less applicable today.
Would you rewrite this column looking at Urban, suburban and rural populations? Or college educated vs high school educated? How would your perspective change?
There is another path towards a post-Christian spirituality that this article doesn't cover - finding a spiritual center from the world and universe we know through science.
The idea is simple on the surface. We can take the story of the origin of the universe, from the big bang to evolution of humans, as our own sacred origin story. The late Thomas Berry wrote extensively on this topic and has inspired numerous other writers such as Mary Evelyn Tucker, Brian Thomas Swimme, and Michael Dowd to explore this idea in some depth.
Through this story, we can find spiritual connections in literally everything else in the entire universe. Holding this perspective in mind, we can understand how a single breath of air connects us through photosynthesis to the plants on earth and the fires burning in the sun.
4
The IMMINENCE of the Devine while underplayed by a premodern understanding of the cosmos, and orthodoxy (God out there),- it has always been apart of the Christian tradition. It's the meaning of the INCARNATION. I recently heard a pastor say "the incarnation started with the Big Bang. More Christians are understanding the Cosmic Mary (more that the historical Mary) to NATURE. There definitely is a renewed interest in "feminine spirituality" among my diverse friends, men and women that is connected to the "here and now", the aliveness and inter-connectiveness and wonder of Nature.
Theologian, Wendle Weeks, in The Powers That Be, connects polytheism (gods and goddesses) with the very observable energies (archetypes) that can or do rule our lives,--an aspect of C.G.Jung's philosophy and psychology as well. As such we need as individuals and communities a Power -LOVE- that supersedes the other powers. Love is what we are and why we're here.
1
Yes, Christianity has to change. Derived from Whitehead, panentheism replaces the external, transcendental deity with an inner voice who calls us forward. It's harmonious with Christian faith, with science, with determinism, and with moral responsibility. Agreeing with Ross that paganism wants to reinstate nature worship, I am surprised that he did not discuss alternative, new directions within institutional Christianity.
2
@Ivan Light: We are evolved social animals. Random encounters can be occasions of mutual understanding and shared comradeship, without contesting territoriality.
I believe Mr. Douthat misses another trend that should be part of this discussion, the relentless social fragmentation that bedevils western culture accompanying the very rapid changes in global economies, media and social norms.
2
@Dave Aldridge: The technology of communication has never been better and continues to improve every day. One expects that some kind of survival of the fittest ideas process should develop.
I never would have thought I would live to see the day when a president would refuse to recite the Apostles' Creed.
1
@dsws
I don't know that Mr. Trump refused to recite the Apostle's Creedl; more likely, he simply didn't recognize what was going on when the Creed was being recited. The only church he actually attends worships the Trinity of me, me, me. He's as demanding of personal loyalty as much as the Old Testament God.
@dsws: Do you have a religious test of eligibility to serve in US public offices?
2
@Che Beauchard: Trump, and the other mourners, had been given a program that included the words of the creed so that those who wanted to say it could do so even if they were not familiar with it.
Public prayer always poses difficult questions of etiquette.
My god, or perhaps gods, is Ross Douthat obsessed with religion, or what? As though there's not enough going on with current events. What guilty thing plagues the man's conscience that he dwells on the topic incessantly, apparently the confession booth and reciting Hail Mary X number of times isn't getting the job done.
Judaism struggled with eradicating paganism practically from the get-go. That's why the Torah contains incessant warnings to avoid idol worship and only worship the ONE, directly addressed by the 2nd and 3rd of the ten commandments. It wasn't sufficient, the prophets of the Old Testament were constantly warning the people of the dire consequences of idol worship.
But did anyone explain to Pope Ross that it really doesn't get any more pagan than Catholicism? A virgin mortal female impregnated by a male immortal sky god, with the resultant offspring stuck in the purgatory of being neither fully divine nor mortal, but somewhere in between? Sorry Douthat, that's Pagan Storytelling 101. Interesting how he forgot to mention that paganism is generally a lot more welcoming to females than Christianity (or Islam). Mother Earth and all that superstitious nonsense. And Gaia will have the last laugh.
3
@drdeanster: Moses took the name of God in vain to legitimize his other nine commandments. People will believe a burning bush, but not another human being.
When you use religion for evil, like evangelicals and other christians have done throughout history, you are on the wrong side of humanity. Paganism is hardly the other option. Douthat and his ilk are responsible for this black or white polarization going on now by nonsense of this article.
3
This article reveals who R Douthat has one thing in his head:Beleive,beleive.Or you´re one of us or you´re one of them.But many of us don´t care about that .We´re just plane atheist and don´t beleive in crazy things.
1
@raymond jolicoeur: Religion loops people into a tautology that rationalizes propagating the unbelievable with the expectation of post-mortal rewards for having done it.
Who cares? Surely Mr. Douthat could've spent the time it took to write this on more productive pursuits? Cleaning his attic? Sorting socks? That type of thing...
Some of us know we do not need a made up fairy tale to behave like a decent human being. And isn't that really the crutch people use to justify all the horrors that go with organized religion? That it somehow makes them a better person despite its flaws? I don't help those less fortunate than me because of a fantasy figure named Jesus. I do it because I am human, and so are they.
2
Why waste your time and effort believing in an imaginary supernatural being or force, whether part of nature or transcendent. Life is beautiful, fulfilling, and infinity fascinating without fairy tails and made of gods. Find meaning without fakery!
Organized religion just gives other people who are frequent less moral and caring control of your life.
1
Organized Christianity, and though I am much less familiar with other faiths, probably those as well have lost much popular following due to increasingly obvious and systemic problems becoming common knowledge. Sexual misconduct, financial self dealing, denial of observable facts and science, pandering to the worst impulses of both the clergy and their followers to name but a few.
Personally I have not stopped being Christian. Rather, the churches I've found appear to have done so instead.
2
Paganism... sure, for the few.
Though the withdrawal from existing Christian religions for many is that it lacks any resonance, explanatory power, or persuasiveness and puts you in close proximity of some people who have to suspend valued aspects of rational thought and disavow existing knowledge to fit their world view. Substituting one supernatural transcendent belief system for another metaphysical one may yield a subjectivity that is less delusional and more connected to natural processes, but for those of us whose 'spiritual' experiences were easily replicated by recreational drugs. we know that the trick is in your mind.
2
To esp in Illinois.
The simple answer to your question is, sure, you can choose a superficial, unreflective approach to the questions Ross Douthat is trying to understand and discuss more fully and completely. But people who prefer to "just be" instead of trying to understand what being is all about, are unlikely to convince people afflicted with a relentless enjoyment, yes enjoyment, of thinking.
1
Rather than say, "A social gospel denuded of theological content rules the left," better is: "An inclusive social gospel debunked of theological content rules the left.
Is not Human Potential equivalent to Spirituality? And doesn't Being Good lead most directly to "feel good"? They're certainly better than the non-specific programmed guilt feeling that Catholicism relies on, although it once had its place.
Theological content is mere trappings of high priesthood, a corporate institution that arrogated to itself the divine right to tell the People what's what, for profit. Is not the Catholic Church (they of the Inquisition and more) the second richest church?
Catholic priests stepped between humans and G-d, and charged for it. When Catholics look up, they do not see G-d. They see priests all the way down.
Whereas Congregationalist Protestants of the WASP persuasion see each other and themselves, and freely judge degrees of integrity with Masonic precision and without reference to a priesthood.
Indeed, the mainline-WASP Establishment gracefully stepped aside as its ideals (summarized as: Do unto others as...) were less religious than egalitarian - because all souls under the Sun are equal.
And so it is natural that the universal Great Awakenings will continue as we each Awake and free ourselves from layered orthodoxy and corporate control.
The true religious impulse is toward radical freedom; thus it is necessarily heretical, which is of the Good.
2
Paganism is just another religion.
There are plenty of people who are moral and unspiritual non-theists.
1
I have to say I’m surprised that the comments are not more in line with the rebellion against John Lennon’s anti-Christian statements years ago. I can only guess that the religious right doesn’t much read the NY Times. Or perhaps their comments will show up later in the day. As for Emerson, he seems just an extension of Wordsworth and Coleridge. And I see them as sort of non-denominational Gnostics. Sort of like George Harrison, though he is most often associated w Eastern beliefs. Yes, I’m a Beatles fan. Anyway, Gnosticism doesn’t preclude religion. For example, the eminent Yale professor Harold Bloom considers himself to be a Gnostic Jew.
2
And not a moment too soon! This country and so-called Western civilization in general has been the warped product of patriarchal, monotheistic. pleasure-denying desert religions starting with Judaism and proceeding through Christianity and Islam. They've all been a pox on humanity, operating as a priestly caste cover for unlimited greed and cruelty. They depended for their legitimacy on a denial of the Goddess and her legacy of a hundred thousand years or more of humanity's sacred connection to the Earth, not to mention a sane, healthy relationship between men and women. Enough's enough!
1
Dear Ross,
Before you take on the task of writing a column along these lines, you might want to do a little bit of basic reading. Have you ever had a look at William James?
Very sloppy thinking ... Your interest in religion outstrips your intellectual accomplishments.
3
Douthat is seemingly ignorant of Quakers, Unitarians and the Masonic movement, the last where the Reformed found their ritual
In my long post-Catholic atheist days, I used to read Mr. Douthat's columns with no little smirking and a sense of superiority. This particular year, though, I had one of those profound religious experiences or awakenings he mentioned. I found myself compelled, really, and not altogether willingly, to embrace the Orthodox Christian faith. Now, I had pretty much hit rock bottom from a health standpoint, and felt useless in the world except as a recipient of retirement checks to assist my wife. I had studied most of the world's religions in depth in my life, hoping to find something that resonated. Somehow I had overlooked Orthodoxy, buying into my Roman Catholic brainwashing as a child that it was just an exotic heresy.
Once I started studying it, I found myself led to attend services, and to start praying, which I had not done since I was 17, over fifty years ago. And something stirred. And grew.
I found real meaning in its precepts. And I did need help. True Christianity to me means valuing God's creations and seeking to preserve them, hence environmentalism. It means succoring the poor, as the rich already have theirs. It means living a moral life, free of substance abuse, recreational sex, lying to others or myself. I find I am a better husband, father, and grandfather by far. I find joy in my days, health be damned. I am at peace in the hope of an afterlife where my passions, pain and regrets will depart. Paganism nor atheism would give me that. So take heart, Ross.
4
It's necessary to examine the conceptual space between science and the supernatural where we try to fine meaning in our daily lives. There the search must be internal and free of creeds of any kind. In doing this, I suggest we find meaning in our daily experiences by pursuing a considered “way of life” that includes respect for self and others, kindness, fairness for each and every person, and self-reliance (to the extent one has the capacity and opportunity to exercise it).
On the other hand, I don’t think we can ever answer the spiritual question “What is the meaning of life?” While contemplated by religious scholars, examined by philosophical reasoning and scientific observation, and envisioned by mysticism, the answer appears beyond human discovery.
1
Or, maybe just maybe, we have a God that is both transcendent AND imminent and the answer is Panentheism. Theistic religions are failing, in part, because they do not offer people authentic spiritual experiences. People are thirsting for love and connection, and instead people of faith offer a rule book and moral judgement. The irony is that Mr. Douthat's faith is at its core the very experience folks are looking for: unconditional loving acceptance.
2
Mr. Douthat seems to assume that the only two religions Americans have embraced are Christianity and paganism. But surely the real picture is a good deal more complicated. Immigrants from Asia and the Middle East have been infusing our communities with strains of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, and more for decades now. There's also Mormonism, which has been around for 150 years or so. The implication that we used to be a Christian nation, but now we're becoming a pagan nation, is just too reductive to hold water. Sorry, Ross, I don't buy it.
3
I do not understand why you would use the word "pagan" other than to brand new forms of spirituality as frivolous, silly, and a form of "woke witchcraft." I think the whole point of most New Age religion is not being prescribed "an actual way to worship" by someone in a robe, and instead celebrating the awe of the universe on your own terms. Most New Age religion also seems to have a deep reverence for self-betterment, tolerance and the Golden Rule--Christian ideals that have been utterly ignored by most organized religions since at least the 80's. Many polls show millennials citing hostility against LGBT people as a leading cause for fleeing the church. As an atheist, I could care less about new trends in religion. But my advice to you if you want to increase church membership would be to disentangle the connotation between right-wing politics and organized religion that many millennials are recognizing and rejecting.
4
Douthat notes the paradox that more Americans value spiritualism at the same time they are abandoning traditional, formal religions. He says that new spiritual leaders "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."
I suggest it is not just that the traditional religions are inconvenient, demanding, or too ascetic. People are reacting to the increasing secularization and politicization of traditional religions and to the hypocrisy within the institutions of traditional religions. People with spiritual needs will look elsewhere for fulfillment when their religious leaders are morally empty, corrupt, and bereft of genuine empathy.
Why does what is being born have to fit into the old forms? Ross is trying to stuff the new into the “old skins,” and given his knowledge of that biblical reference and history overall, he should know better. I am happy to see he is finally sort of “getting” that the 1950s - for religion and spirituality - are really over. Hope he keeps believing and acting on that. Because it is true.
The strength of paganism in ancient times was that it was local. It honoured the local gods. Paganism in modern times is play-acting. What we really have to fear is social media based conspiracy theories like QAnon. We've already had two incidents with young men and guns based on their theories about Hilary Clinton.
Trump's ongoing disaster Presidency will seriously weaken American Christianity. The other wild card is the internet. If Trump goes down, a significant minority may go underground. ISIS gained recruits and blew away the competition (Al Queda) by savvy use of the internet. Q Anon, with it's members mindless need to see Trump as a saviour, is a sitting duck for Cultists.
2
The word "pagan" is pejorative. From Wikipedia "Paganism has broadly connoted the "religion of the peasantry" and for much of its history has been a derogatory term". Understandable choice by someone like Douthat who probably thinks of Christianity as superior to other superstitions.
How about a "Buddhism Without Beliefs"? (see the book by Stephen Batchelor). There is so much work going on with mindfulness, and this way of looking at oneself and the world is secular.
well, considering that Christianity has been a complete failure, with the RCC protecting criminals and the evangelicals worshipping an anti-Christ, oh and still no return by their supposed messiah, it's no wonder people who need to pretend that they have a magical best friend who agrees with what they think turn to another religion.
Catherine Nixey's most recent book came immediately to my mind when reading Mr. Douhat's article. In you have not read it yet, I highly recommend it: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/books/review/catherine-nixey-darkening-age.html
I took a university level Bible course a few years back. The Jewish professor dismissed much of the historical basis for the Abrahamic religion: No Abraham. No Moses. No Exodus. Israelites are Canaanites.
Maybe the word is getting out.
I will continue to post to all editorialists who use the term "the left" that the term is too vague to be used meaningfully. Douthat in particular uses it very loosely and never in a manner that indicates he has dialogued and learned from "the left". In other words, another finger-pointer with millions of people he can conveniently lump together and blame for any problems he sees.
1
Paganism is another variation of religious supernatural hokum for those too hip for church. It’s just as worthless except as a parlor trick. I’ll stick with martinis when I wanna go brainless. Praise Goddess!
1
Maybe there actually is a genuinely post-Christian future for America..." {R. Douthat}
I AM Pagan.
I WAS, ('ancestral'), Catholic, but this (Rome, based) R.I.C.O. crime lost me...back in the late '60's, due to their obsessions, re other's sexuality, gross lack of concern for humanity's starving masses, (literally: 10's 'Of 1,000's dead, via starvation for EACH, of the X-Y days of my life!!), etc.!
Meanwhile...Australia's Cardinal Pell has, (allegedly...), become a convicted sex offender, and the Vatican is, (allegedly...), considering...his removal from an obscure Vatican policy-planning unit!
I'll close in the usual way: Otherwise...
Blessed, Be Kept, 'N, enjoy the season(s), (Samhain - Yule...in my Paganism), if you so, celebrate!
1
December 12, 2018
The savior of the American culture - universal is greater than paganism anywhere, and forever true. As proclamation in our Constitution the separation of Sate and Religion is doctrinal and incorporated by all facets of secular education and warranted by the major population with great comfort.
However with the age of information technology and deeply improving in its design for the best choices for seeking truth, history and wisdom that the best estimation will come to the many in the later years of living when seekers for the spiritual narratives to guide both mind and soul -and indeed with a life subscription to the New York Times comprehensive web in its multi databases of sectors for both information and the living arts - not neglecting those that left the world to be ever in homage by its proper obituary of factual account - claiming a place in the pantheon of other worldly eternity - thus for some martyrdom for making America Great as trademark by the esteemed Commander and Chief currently attempting to orchestrate the new paganism that is not fake but earned by offering in votes to the destiny that is right on Earth and heavenly profits...... Being saved is the ultimate and by one Times news cycle everlastings......
JJA Manhattan, N.Y.
1
This NY Times writer views the nation's religious future as "a fully revived paganism." He asserts that the only thing missing is for "the philosophers of pantheism and civil religion ... to build a religious bridge to the New Agers and neo-pagans, and together they would need to create ... an actual way to worship ..." I wonder if he knows that this is EXACTLY what is prophesied in the New Testament book of Revelation -- especially chapter13.
1
What about the belief in abstract mathematical objects, Mr. Douthat??
I envy the Greeks and their ancient beliefs. It is much more interesting to imagine Apollo and Artemis and earlier Helios and Selene driving the sun and the moon than some Christian deity creating everything. They are all fiction - but paganism is much more creative and fun. Nothing divine made the universe - unless one imagines nature as divine.
1
Believing that every day has meaning and purpose does not make it so. Reality may be harsh but it is real.
1
@Allen
Quite right. Everything we know, we just think we know. Everything we see is just an internal mental map. Believing does not make anything so. Everything is just as it is, whatever that is, whether we like it or not.
The hope for post-Christian America is atheism. Look at many of our top minds in STEM, economics, and other fields that actually matter. A society centered on truth, with spirituality as a secondary individual alignment should be our aspiration.
Even though religion has a long shelf life, especially in places where knowledge and learning are forbidden, reality has been deconstructing fables of old with a steady hand. Americans seem to be more concerned with religious identity than religious truth anyhow.
The "new paganism" as you describe it - particularly in the paragraph beginning "What is that conception?" - bears similarities to the concept of "cosmic religion" that is often applied to Albert Einstein's approach to spirituality. One of the better known quotes attributed to him is "God does not play dice". THus his rejection of the uncertainty principle that lies at the basis of quantum mechanics.
@Jay A. Frogel: What physicists call "dark matter" is probably a quantum energy storage system cross-linking electric, magnetic and gravitational fields to contain packets of energy we classify as subatomic "particles", that are really complex harmonic oscillations.
We can be quite confident that, if there is a God, we will be 14 billion years dead when God finds out about what we did, because the speed of light is the speed limit of energy.
I've chosen pieces of Mr Douthat's column which appealed to me and help describe my views. I do consider myself an atheist, not a pagan and desire no inclusion in any cult.
These are the bits I have chosen which help describe my beliefs: "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.
everyday is divinely endowed and shaped, meaningful and not random, a place where we can truly hope to be at home."
When a more advanced species looks at our time, what will they conclude? We evolved in Africa, but spread all over the world. Why? To find exciting new vistas and experiences, or because we just couldn't stand the neighbors? There has long been a trend towards individualism. It was limited by economic dependency and by tribal bonds. But the printing press and the bible enhanced personal opinions. The industrial revolutions and the digital age have capped that. Going back. however--cities are maybe 12K years in development, and from Latin, gave us civics, civilians, and civilization. In Italy a country man was a pagus, and later a paganus. In Germany, he was a heathen. And country folk were always resistant to change. There's no shortage of theories on the arc of Christianity. Clearly, Luther and Calvin changed things. Did they, as Eric Fromm suggests, turn Christianity into an economic, paternalistic venture, with earthly success at least as important heavenly grace? As for "pagamism"--what I saw in my childhood in Ireland was a very Catholic country from which ancient superstitions had not departed. We used to say that the electric light chased away all the ghosts, but other ancient signs remain.
2
As a believer in Christ and one self-identifying as a "practicing Christian" I let go of pagan practices within Christianity....and was somewhat shocked that the most negative, at times anger filled reactions and responses have, these last thirty years, been from Christians! Even when presented with well known facts and historical documentation
those who cherish pagan practices have so woven them into their religion that great offense is taken.
Our country, at least New England, was founded on the removal of paganism and the FREEDOM to do so! The blame for the "Paganism" of America lies right at the feet of American Christianity!
1
I've pretty much stopping listening to or reading anyone who uses the word "elite" without providing a definition right next to it. The word has been robbed of most meaning and is merely trotted out as an insult every once in a while.
2
I tried to tell my Evangelical friends way back during the Reagan administration that mixing politics with faith would end up destroying both the government and the Evangelical church in America. They laughed. I take no joy in having been right.
3
It always surprised me that the people who are most interested in what other people believe, how many believe in a certain way, and trends in membership numbers of organized belief systems are those who think of such things with a political agenda. As someone who is neither religious not spiritual, I simply don't know why others care what other people believe...oh right. One cares if one assumes he has the power to use such beliefs to impact the lives of all, and feels threatened that a different group might supersede his. As I said, politics.
If you care what others believe, then your adherence to your religious beliefs pales in comparison to your desire for control.
1
From the perspective of a Jewish spectator, Christianity already represents the synthesis of Greek Stoicism with assimilated Judaism of the First Century AD. I've seen Catholics carrying effigies of the Virgin Mary in a parade, casting "holy water" on the crowd who are making the sign of the cross as she goes by. Is that not already a pagan ceremony?
3
@Jonathan
Actually, Christianity is much older than Greek Stoicism. Much older than Christ. Over 200 major elements were directly lifted from Egypts' Sun worship - Christianity is a Pagan religion through and through.
Judaism also.
"Amen" (inherent in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) is a magical invocation of Amen-Ra, the Egyptian Sun god.
The cross represents the eternal seasonal cycle of renewal and rebirth and the Christian (three days in the tomb" is the Sun stopping its downward progression to the horizon ("horizon" = the Egyptian Horus) on the winter solstice (Dec 21st) then it apparently stops for three days. After which, on the 25th, it rises into Heaven.
The halo and crown of thorns are the Sun's corona. "Walking on water" is the sun glinting off water.
All Christians are Pagans - they just don't know it because Christianity was engineered as a subconscious religion.
And why not? Seeing the Sun, how can you not see God?
1
“.....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.“
Is religious confusion on the rise or more accurately has some of its previously accepted premises become more nonsensical given Mankind’s ever broadening capacity to acquire and learn new information? What of Islam, the largest world religion whose adherents beiieve is the completed and Mankind’s final religion.
Human reasoning has always existed but access to new and more reliable information has been incremental overtime and that’s a true fact of His story!
Ross - a thought-provoking read - makes me think you have an open(ish) mind. Thank you.
I've long regarded Christianity, Judaism, Islam and many others as "sky" religions - the Creator is somewhere "up there" and if we adhere to certain practices we can die and go to heaven, which is "up there" in the heavens, the sky.
Astronomy has shown us that what is "up there" is an awe-inspiring window into ancient history, with structures of extraordinary beauty born from events of unfathomable violence. Is this where all the unborn babies come from?
I've often wondered if this widespread distraction by heaven is why our only Earth is in such a dangerous state of neglect.
Ross - it would be great if you would might turn your attention to Native American beliefs. I'm no scholar on this, but I've gained the impression their belief systems paid great respect to the Earth.
1
As is often the case, Mr. Douthat's column is fundamentally flawed logic with esoteric references and vocabulary.
The categorization and grouping is on the wrong variable. Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, and Satanists believe in invisible spirits with magical powers. I have faith in science, evidence, and reason; that's it.
1
As I grew, in a devout RC family, I quickly realized that no one, no priest or pastor, no teacher or parent, knew any more than I did of the supernatural. Ross Douthat makes clear here that he, too, hasn't a clue.
1
Your prejudice is showing Ross. I am a Hindu, so probably for some people I am a pagan. My religion does teach God is in everything and everything is in God, and everything is the essence of the divine. Tat Tvam Asi. Didn't Jesus himself say something to that effect which was so blasphemous. And the people who you describe as pagans now, are probably following the truth Jesus himself declared in the past.
3
The whole concept of "Christ" is groundless. There is nothing that anyone can do retain or recycle consciousness at death. Belief in "Christ" trivializes life and postpones expectations. One can believe whatever one likes about what Jesus purportedly preached because it is all hearsay now.
My work experience has been that Prosperity gospel is a license to be avaricious and shiv fellow workers. Jesus was not about cash. This is designed to fleece worshipers to give $ to rich tv ministers.
Religious nationalism is a green light for hyper-militarism. Jesus was not about killing.
These 2 points are why Evangelical Christianity’s aggressive intertwining with Republicans is dangerous.
Religious principles cant be compromised or one is ‘immoral’, another reason for separation of church and state.
The return of paganism is a result of unbridled Liberalism. I see nothing at all good in it, no reason to celebrate it.
3
@Southern Boy
I see any return to paganism as an answer to the unbridled conservative Evangelical Christianity currently dictating the tone of this administration.
No reason to celebrate that, either.
4
@Southern Boy
Then I hope you're not celebrating the Pagan holiday referred to in the below lyrics (Bob Wells and Mel Torme, baby).
"Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
Jack Frost nipping at your nose
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
Folks dressed up like Eskimos
Everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe
Help to make the season bright
Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow
Will find it hard to sleep tonight
They know that Santa's on his way
He's loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh
And every mother's child is gonna spy
To see if reindeer really know how to fly"
Merry Christmas to you, Southern Boy!
1
Ross's quip that for all "the witches who publicly hexed Brett Kavanaugh" omits the obvious counterpart: there were exponentially more evangelicals praying for his success. I for one see no difference.
2
In terms of literature, please see my new book about contemporary writers of spiritual memoir--in contrast to the old, doctrinal religious autobiography--coming from Swallow Press next March: "Spirituality and the Writer: A Personal Inquiry." Thomas Larson
Another irresponsible and inaccurate headline designed to trigger hyperventilation in people who should know better. Mr. Douthat mangles logic and the meaning of words to argue for and against something which just is not happening. For this headline to be accurate, it would need to be the case that many American's of non-native ancestry were turning to the animistic beliefs of the people who lived here before they were invaded by the Spanish treasure hunters. This is not what he is talking about, is it?
If we examine what he is actually speaking of, his ongoing concern that Puritanical Protestantism is loosing its grip on whatever he thinks it used to control, this is more a personal issue, which really is of little interest to the readership of this newspaper, or, at least, to me. Ugh.
Dear Ross, may I suggest you explore the principles of the Unitarian-Universalist "organized religion" since it seems you keep desiring to find a way to co-mingle an American religion you can feel comfortable with to a variety of spiritual practices you feel lack the appropriate "religious" grounding.
Besides the B'nai Brith, which may sound too un-American to you, Ross, I think you'll find what you seem to be seeking.
1
I tend to be extremely leery of any kind of religion or ritualistic practice having too much of a place in a government that defines itself as a "Democracy", because sooner or later there is bound to be conflict -- just as we're seeing here now with an increased dependence on the conservative Evangelical Christian mores that have come to define this present administration.
Unless, or until the United States of America is ready to proclaim itself exclusively as a theocracy, any use of any religion should merely be set as a moral guideline, and not as a rule.
1
I like paganism and pantheism in principle but I’ve been often underwhelmed by its manifestations here on the West Coast for the last thirty five years. Finding fault with organized religion is like shooting fish in a barrel. I often wonder if there’s a middle way that doesn’t reject the best of both worlds. In a way there already is, in many of the traditions of Mexico, Brazil and even the American South. I’m a professional astrologer and tarot reader, but I also experienced the good side of Christianity growing up Lutheran. It all depends on th good faith of the people involved. As Nietzsche said, human all too human. One point of this is for all seekers to get over themselves.
As a pagan who was married by a priestess 27 years ago, I find the normalizing and popularity of our rites and rituals refreshing and bountiful. I was born Catholic.I loved the rituals of the church but not the hypocritical rich who could buy annulments or use their money that would guarantee they might kiss the pope's ring. I am into all gods even Jesus, though many of my pagan friends are anti christian. I belong to several pagan pages on Facebook. One has 80,0000 Members. One has 20,0000.00. Glad to see this discussion in NYT.
2
Gods of the present become myths of the past. Exponential expansion of scientific knowledge is the reason for the decline in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Selective interpretation of religious texts may also play a role.
1
"40 percent of Americans answered with an emphatic “yes” when Gallup asked them if “a profound religious experience or awakening”"
Would this be the same group of delusional people believing Trump is close to the Second Coming?
1
No, I'm as anti-Trump as they come and my experience of seeing my long dead grandparents caused a profound change in my atheistic views. And no, I was neither stoned or having a psychotic episode.
1
Perhaps one religion would consider themselves equal with all other religions instead of invading invasion privacy and individual rights, or leaving politics out of worship religion might be doing ok.
The damage to certain organized religions (you know who you are) may never recover after this presidency.
AND don't get me going on 'Corporations are People' (I see you Hobby Lobby and Cake Artisans)
Much ado about no-thing. People inherently yearn for a parental figure of some sort. Religion fills that role.
People yearn for a close community. Religion fills that role.
People yearn for a rationale to denigrate enemies. Religion fills that role.
People yearn for the proposition that there is only one true answer, and Trump gets elected president.
People should grow up.
4
Douthat desperately clings to the false comfort of a blinkered Manichean worldview, not seeing that what he holds as a firm context of reality is merely an institutional construct. Ross, "Heresy!" is simply the outraged scream of established power protesting that it is not maintaining control, a "J'accuse" of the sheep.
Once again, Ross doubles down on his ignorance regarding atheists. I’m an atheist. Every single day is filled with purpose and meaning for me. I experience pain and sorrow, as well as extraordinary joy, love, and awe. No, I don’t believe in the supernatural. But that doesn’t mean that all is bleak, random nothingness. Try talking to one of us, Ross. You may find yourself enlightened!
1
Denis Diderot "Let us strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest."
Well were not there yet but certainly making some progress -in this country at least.
Still have absurdists like our VP with their Bronze Age worldviews standing in the way of everything progressive (like dealing with climate change) - Certainly can't blame religion for trump's worldview which is simply "trump"
The Evangelists are just scared and ignorant - And now we know post trumpism- absent any core values that can survive a real moral challenge.
It will be a great day when children will all be free to learn how to reason objectively and understand that morality does not come from angry man made myths - That's a long way off but as Msgr. Douthat points out - Closer than ever!
Or maybe the con is over. Maybe people are tired of being "played" where religion is interpreted by "retailers" ( politicians, businesses etc) and dupes end up having to wait for 70 for Social Security, tortured and bankrupted by health concerns, and where money is the double secret God behind the curtain.
I think many of us born into an organized Christian religion became disillusioned. We became seekers, looking for some understanding of the world beyond self and money. At this same time, religions of the East like Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and others became accessible to study. Many of us researched pre-Christian spirituality like that of Ireland. WE have sat with, analyzed, experienced, and in some transcended into a personal spirituality that may for the individual become a unified consciousness with that presence (maybe an unnameable creator) that is present in all things. This necessitates a differing way of interacting with the other species known and unknown on the Earth. It leads me to a feeling of deep connection, blessings and respect for all I encounter. And really... isn't this what we were told , "Love your neighbor as yourself." "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." there are basic spiritual truths of unity and how one operates in that unity tat have been around in almost all world cultures for many thousands of years.
1
“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...”
This insults Christians who accept those of other religions or even non-religions, who do not label non-Christians as “heretics.”
I speak as one who was born into the Jewish “race” (since I have been labeled as such since childhood, regardless of my beliefs) and a believer in Buddhism (Jodo Shinshu denomination, which regards the historical Buddha as an enlightened prophet, not a deity).
Having been a minority in a heavily Southern Baptist region in the 1950s, I used to think of all Christians as damning everyone not accepting Jesus as their savior. I’ve since learned many Christians are accepting of others.
Thank you for inspiring me to, for the first time in my life, defend Christianity against your mischaracterization of the many Christians I’ve met who accept me as a friend and without prejudice.
To extrapolate on a line from Buddhism: May you become enlightened to regard non-Christian religions as worthy individuals, as have so many other Christians you have slurred who do not share your bigotry.
1
First of all, Christianity as practiced in America is very paganistic. So please do not gloss over that.
The aggregate American interest in religion let alone in Christianity and its paganistic rituals can roughly be described this way :
1. No interest in any religion
2. No interest in Theism
3. No interest in religion or Theism
4. Some interest in all these but not to point of being termed religious
5. Happy with status quo but not interested in a further thrust of religion into our daily lives
6. Need more religion not less
7. Need only Christianity and to hell with the rest.
Because America as a whole does a really poor job of separation of religion and the church (many of our elected politicians are no different from Mullahs), it is important to view our shifting religious attitudes from within the context of the political spectrum.
The first three make up a large portion of the Democratic party base. Therefore, you are going to get no support in strengthening institutional Christianity through the political leadership. They are incentivized to not act.
The next two make a reasonable portion of the Dem base. Again no incentives for the leadership to react.
Items 6 & 7 are the evangelical and baptist base revulsion against whom is driving the rest toward 1-3.
What you are going to get in the end is religious rejection by the majority and a revert to extreme paganism by the political minority as is already happening.
"..A place where we can truly hope to be at home." For Christians confused as to why some folks don't attend their church, this line sums it up. You were never that welcoming. Your religion damned far too many good people. Your religion excused far too many crimes. And now all the so-called Christians backing a fraud like DJT? Well, they're proving that all the hands-to-the-sky Jesus act to be nothing more than that--an act. What makes people so comfortable with total hypocrisy? I suggest it is the very thing Mr. Douthat likes about Christianity--the absolute certainty of a divine intelligence that created the universe. Once a person is absolutely sure of something for which they have absolutely zero proof, they might just believe anything. Once a person believes that the Almighty is capable of forgiving them for anything, they might just DO anything.
Now is some kind of formalized paganism the answer here? Probably not. But letting go of the absurd idea that YOU--or worse, your LEADER--possess some insight into the will of an infinite Godhead is a good thing. It simply means actions must be justified with reason, and not excused with myth. (And honestly, if their is an Almighty, wouldn't he/she/it be capable of making creatures that could think for themselves? Wouldn't it be fun to find out if we were that creature?)
1
Wouldn't it be nice if people were educated to understand how to critically assess empirical evidence only believed things for which there is good evidence? Instead of investing time debating the extent or lack thereof of god(s) in our world, how about we spend that time and effort on teaching the kids science, math and ethics.
5
Atheists may be only a small fraction of the US population, but we are probably the smartest and most influential fraction of those Ross identifies as unaffiliated. Seeing the world as it is rather than through the filters of various "spiritual" delusions is useful when it comes to deciding how to act.
Of course we understand that democracy requires that we pander to the (often conflicting) demands of religious believers in order to get things done.
1
Because suffering -- by physical necessity -- threads gravity's gridiron on which life's play-options duly summon free will for better gains, evil can't hold a candle to what's ultimately one with light in meaning's purposeful destiny. Hence infinitesimally dwarfing mere suffering in but a pittance of spacetime nurture's gratitude in a nature otherwise too taken for granted. That the universe is exponentially expanding is the "ticket to ride" our consciousness so clearly covets. Something we're wired to do whether free will's duly expounded upon or not.
So, if what's only 05% knowable is all we've got, what's wrong with empirically compiling hope as the 25% dark matter whence faith's the 70% dark energy without which we're not even HAVING this conversation?
After all, if in the beginning had indeed been but the Word, has creation yet consciously created the God from whom our image even WANTS to come (once ALL words are spoken)?
In short, meaningful matter temporarily GROUNDED whence purposeful energy eternally EXPANDS requires -- by physical necessity alone -- a cyclic essence if our observer-dependent reality can even begin to function.
Ross Douthat does not seem to have a good grasp on Christianity as many of the arguments he puts forth as paganism actually are concepts that exist in Christianity such as: "that divinity is fundamentally inside the world...and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world." His view of Christianity is too black and white. Christianity is nuanced. Before talking about paganism and Post-Christianity, he should make sure he has done ample research into Christianity and that he has a full understanding of the religion. Otherwise, his entire argument is specious at best.
1
We live in a babble of religious/anti-religious thought. Whenever Douthat writes these columns, I cringe. While there are thoughtful, critical responses, there are also the usual know-it-all “atheists” belittling religious faith with their very simplistic characterizations and their reason and science trumps all talking points, finally putting an end in their minds to any discussion. Some of the world’s most egregious mass murderers were atheists. Stalin was an avowed atheist. Hitler, though nominally Catholic, was in practice and belief an atheist (See the Wikipedia article “The Religious Beliefs of Adolph Hitler.”) Both these men presided over atheist governments, though Hitler used religion in Germany to further his own ends. Reason and science, like anything human, can be put to deadly use. Religion, subordinated to a lust for power and wealth, can also be put to deadly effect. One very wise move of our Founding Fathers was to separate Church and State thus respecting a wide range of beliefs.
1
@Kevin Garvin: Yes, I cringe when the climate scientists belittle the climate change deniers. The arguments of the climate scientists can't be any good because I had a really mean science teacher once.
1
It is discouraging to see yet another mainstreamer treat this subject as though it's a newly discovered phenomenon, complete with disregard for the associated scholarship that is readily available. This is not something new, not some recent discovery or emergence. Paganism (ie: the pre-Christian practices of the indigenous peoples of Europe) has always been alive and well in the world, just not flaunted, due to the varying levels of fervor from religious extremism. (See works like 'Pagan Ethics - Paganism as a World Religion' by Michael York also, earlier works by Ronald Hutton which contain some valuable gems, in spite of his assumptive arrogance - no matter how well meaning.) There is reason to believe that the British Crown has kept Druidic practices alive, and the nomadics of Europe have most certainly been the source from which some of these practices have been stumbled upon by Christians recovering from the nerve gas of indoctrination they've been force fed for the past couple thousand years. (See works by Charles Leland)
2
As a person raised in a very traditional protestant family, I think I understand that form of thought. I am now Non-religious but not anti-religion, so I can stand on the sidelines and view the actions and results of both sides.
Having lived in major cities where church was a small part of life, and now a small community where church is a major part of life, I can tell you that church attendance appears to have no impact on ethical daily living. Here in rural America where weekly church attendance is over 50%, we have just as much dishonesty, cheating, fornicating and lying as in NYC and LA. Murder rates are the highest in states with the highest percent of regular church goers (check the facts, I have). So if a religion based on the 10 commandments has no real impact on the way people actually live, what is the point?
Conversely, I see just as many people with no formal religious affiliation that are morally and ethically fine citizens.
I guess my conclusion is that I do not see that religion or lack of religion has much impact on the how people behave , ethically or socially, in their daily lives.
5
Blame Saint Paul for the fact that for many fundamentalist Protestant sects, getting into heaven is automatic if you believe in Jesus; you don’t have to behave well. The Catholic Church, while accepting the teachings of Saint Paul, always required a Christian life and forgiveness of your sins as a condition of heavenly status. Catholic doctrine, and that of many similar Christian sects, is a synthesis of many seemingly inconsistent propositions in the New Testament. The evangelicals simply swept the nuances away and adopted the “born again” interpretation that now prevails in all the pro-Trump churches, and explains why they have no interest in godly behavior or good works.
@Didier Thank you for your intelligent and thoughtful post.
You wrote, “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.”
Is truth found in a structure with pews or from flawed church leaders' limited, simplistic interpretation of the Bible and life’s mysteries? Maybe, we were meant to individually explore and find our own truth, rather than blindly follow the religious indoctrination we’ve been raised with or led to believe.
Many hard-core Christian fundamentalists/evangelicals want to imagine that Jesus will appear on a cloud to save all the “believers” and throw the non-believers into a fiery barbeque to roast for all eternity. How would they react if Jesus were to walk among them today—whose teachings are largely ignored, by the way—preaching love of neighbor, welcoming the stranger, peace rather than war.
Sadly, I imagine his teachings of love would be rejected, and he would be derided and crucified in the right-wing media as a “radical, left-wing snowflake.”
There is a vast difference between religious indoctrination and spirituality. The first demands conformity, while the latter encourages questions, growth, evolving, and freedom.
2
“... meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world...”
I should hope so. That is, if we want to survive as a species. However, all this civil stuff must become civic stuff by way of the voting booth. I despair that these well-intentioned people don’t have a clue as to what planet they are currently on.
1
Do we have to replace Christianity with something else? Many of us are perfectly happy living without any sort of religion at all.
5
So many words, so few facts. Simplest explanation is that people are growing up, maturing, and losing their primitive fears. They're also recognizing how deeply evil and corrupt organized religion is.
Why have ANY sky-wizards and invisible friends? Into the dustbin with all of that nonsense, I say.
2
Read Brian McClaren and others and stop whining about the death of a deadly orthodoxy. Christianity has a chance to redeem itself and part of what's going on is people making various attempts at just that.
1
Except for the fact that the USA was at its apex (1946-1969) precisely when it was the most secular, not the most Christian.
The USA (and the West in general) were walking towards a secular world when, because of the fierce ideological war during the Cold War (1945-1991), the CIA begun a covert propaganda campaign to and to advise the USG to rehabilitate Christianism as a form of combating the socialist ideas in the masses. The aim was to cement the USA as a "Christian nation".
This process of rehabilitation involved generous taxpayer money covertly directed to evangelical churches from the end of the 60s and had its apex during George W. Bush's government, when the Baptist Church received Government money on the billions scale. When Ronald Reagan was elected for the first time (1980), pastor Bill Graham became an advisor, and the USA became a de facto (extra officially) theocracy.
Even Democrat POTUS that came after (i.e. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) had to reiterate their Christianity publicly constantly, in a way that, nowadays, the POTUS is essentially a Christian Emperor.
1
Oh, hello. Ever heard of Unitarian Universalists? Maybe you should.
1
As almost always happens, I find the comments to this Douthat column infinitely more interesting and thoughtful, more well-rounded and insightful, than the column itself.
1
Praise what you like - just keep it out of the government house, the court house and my front yard.
1
The Judeo-Christian religions are nothing but a patriarchal authoritarian construct put in place by the ruling class.
And that structure fits very well with the political right wing ideologies
Our modern day Olympus is the corporotocracy.
"As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,
They kill us for their sport."--King Lear
1
The Abrahamic religions have been a scourge on humanity for thousands of years. I, for one, am glad to see them decline.
"Paganism" is too broad a term to be used in reference to any group because it includes pretty much all non Abrahamics.
As humanity evolves (I hope this is true!) we learn and grow and become smarter and return to our original understanding of the Earth as the source of human life.
2
The new paganism "sees the purpose of religion and spirituality as more therapeutic, a means of seeking harmony with nature and happiness in the everyday."
Bah, humbug. Is there room for an atheism that thinks "that there exists some ascetic, world-denying moral standard to which we should aspire"?
1
It seems that it is the more moderate faiths the creation of which were influenced by the modernizing factors of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries that are loosing followers, especially among the younger folks. However, it does seem, at least here in Ohio, that more fundamental, less rational versions of religions have gained strength and numbers of believers. Perhaps, because life is more uncertain and the more fundamental religions provide a structure for living that is more definite, they are gaining members. However, the danger is that these ways of worship could once again become less tolerant of others who believe or worship in another religion. That would be a further disunifying factor in a country already seeing divisions grow.
1
I don't personally find the movement from Christianity to spiritualism a problem. I hope that we continue to move toward a more rational, secular society. Polls, while they can be wrong, seem to indicate that's where we're heading. Awesome.
But there is a disturbing trend that I find alarming. Secularism is apparently on the rise. But at the same time, religious extremism is also on the rise; perhaps as a direct result of the former. I'm not sure.
I have seen more and more anti-vaxers, flat-earthers, young earth creationists, etc on the internet than ever before. We have local school boards instilling creationist nonsense into the school curriculum. We've got preachers releasing videos on the internet that advocate for the death penalty for being gay. And we have prosperity preachers and evangelicals supporting one of the most openly amoral presidents in US history.
People who claim that this is a christian nation, founded on biblical principles are WRONG. We do not advocate stoning our children to death for disobedience, for example. Most importantly, the First Commandment directly violates our First Amendment.
The few biblical sayings that I could get behind, seem to be ignored by the larger religious organizations. Heal the sick, feed the poor, love your neighbor, and judge not.
3
The characterization of paganism as immanent deity is false, unless you exclude the very Hellenic religions and religious philosophies to which "pagan' was first applied. Some were immanentist: Stoicism for example; others definitively not, Platonism, for example. Indeed, the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic monotheisms developed their doctrines regarding the divine transcendence through interpreting their scriptures via the Aristotelian - Platonist synthesis dominant in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Plato was executed by the Athenians for his beliefs. He can’t be counted as a philosopher of paganism; far from it.
There are a few truths that have become difficult to put aside. The divine is built into us, and we shape it, and are expressions of it simultaneously. These understandings reflect our global consciousness, our ability to see into previously lost histories, and global crisis that is here at our doorstep.
We aren't mistaking our myths for reality, we see them as vital conveyers of meaning and messages of divinity.
We have come to realize that in truth Eve came before Adam, and that the universe is an act of creation, and being birthed is an act of women. And this has lead to a rebirth of goddesses, rebellious children, and fathers who act justly and with humility, in humanities mythologies.
In the end, the claim that there is only one god and he is all powerful, was never going to last eternal. Luckily we still have more than just a few scraps left to re-envision what this new spiritual path might be.
Elohim will still have a place at the table, but his voice will only be one of many.
1
Interesting. As I recall Nancy Regan regularly sought advice from psychics. My grandmother (who would be 125 years now) went to a spiritualist church in San Jose in the 60's and my grandfather was a hands on healer. I don't recall them ever referring to Christian beliefs but they were very christian. My mother a devout Catholic told stories of her mother being psychic. So perhaps many of us who are boomers grew up with ideas that organized religion did not explain everything.
It seems like Douthat misses an important component in the turn toward what he calls a "post-Christian" spirituality. It's not just "pagan" impulses and practices that infuse it. There are also thoughts and practices grounded in Buddhism, most notably mindfulness and other meditation. Many people, who don't identify as Buddhist, find an appeal in the fact that these practices are not based on some kind of received wisdom or revealed "truth" by some deity, but that they can find truths themselves though the practices. And many of these are practices grounded in long tradition, not merely the lastest feel good thought exercise.
4
Although formal religion played no part in my longer than average life it was impossible to presume no faith in a central core of integrity in all sectors of humanity that sustained people in the fundamental necessities of any functional community. The immensely imaginative particulars of each of the established and many of the outlying religious concepts may have violated extraordinarily the current adopted rationality which is the basis for the extraordinary technologies that have recently captured current civilization but somehow be accepted as poetic analogies to pragmatic dynamics. The fundamental motivations of it all must direct human decency and mutual respect or the looming doom of planetary disaster will not permit any of us to exist.
....these beliefs, referred to as post-Christian, are not necessarily in contradiction to the teachings of Christ, who taught that we should love our neighbor as ourself and recognize the Kingdom of God within.
Lumping New Age, Pagan, Cults, Agnostics and Witches all together as heretics, is simply lumping them together as "The Other."
Pagan usually refers to people who follow practices that honor the Earth. (The article has gone beyond that meaning.)
Pantheism is the belief God and the universe can be equated; that God is the universe.
Panentheism is the belief that all is in God; it says the divine interpenetrates all aspects of the universe and also transcends it. In "New Thought" we say Spirit is Omnipresent, Omniscient, Omnipotent.
Christ encouraged non-resistance. Turning the other cheek is not a command to suffer, but a command to turn and look towards the Good. Where we place our attention is where we shall find ourselves.
4
I can hear Douthat chuckling to himself as he wrote this self-important piece. Like any conservative, he has to insist on some measure of across-the-board order---"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"---to which he has no right whatsoever to impose. Never mind the resentment I shall express about his use of the word "cult," by the way.
Until he discusses spirituality with every pagan on the continent, he would do well to refrain from telling them how to comport themselves.
3
Yep. He might also drop the “pagan,” bit, given the actual history of its use. It’s a little much too much like throwing, “Negro,” around, and leads some of us to think about bringing back “Papist.”
At least.
@Richard Steele Although I understand the resentment towards the term "cult", should it be thrown your way by Christians, I find it useful to use the term "Cult of Christ" as an appropriate descriptor of their faith.
The most powerful aspect of religious belief is based on fear, & fear breeds cruelty. That's what many renowned philosophers, including Bertrand Russell, told many years ago. That fear basically comes from ignorance.
There are actually two elements to Russell's diagnosis of religion here. The first is that religious belief is a symptom of fear: aware that our lives r precarious & vulnerable, we seek the protection of a powerful deity, to comfort ourselves with an illusion of safety. The second is that fear is a symptom of religion: in particular, doctrines of punishment in both this life & the next cause ignorant believers to live in fear unnecessarily.
It seems that no religion at any time in human history would flourish, or even survive, without forceful imposition of the religion by the king or the state. In short, religion cannot thrive or even survive without state sponsorship.
People's natural curiosity and intelligence need to be subdued either by force or systematic coercion (mostly both) to spread any such ideology (religious or political like communism) to pass its affiliation or allegiance beyond certain level. Forget about new religions, I think, even the old established religions would lose its support base & gradually become extinct if national governments or political parties stop exploiting religious sentiments- directly or indirectly.
It's not any coincident that countries which are less religious are more prosperous, peaceful, and happier.
4
Why doesn't Ross write a column that is honest about two postulates of his view of about belief and faith in America. First, Ross is a fidelist, in other words he believes in the Christianity of the Roman Catholic Church because he believes it. In all these many columns as he has derided non-believers, who lake any columnist from the Times to speak in our defense,he has never, not once, offered to defend an argument for the existence of God, the divinity of Christ and the authority of the Roman church. Of course this is his right even if many of us may find it hard to believe simply due to family background. Secondly,it is now clear beyond question that Ross wishes to impose his faith as the official belief system of the United States. On this central aspect Ross is profoundly opposed to First Amendment and its prohibition of the establishment of a church byt the Federal government. In fact this is exactly what he wants from the Supreme Court. As for alternative faiths, from Judaism to what he calls paganism, Mr. Douthat understands little and respects them less. While I am sure that Mr. Douthat would tolerate Jews remaining in his vision of America, they would surely have to understand that they were second class citizens as were Muslims, let alone non monotheistic belief systems such as Buddhism. If these positions were to be made clear, without the wink we got when he called for a Catholic Pan American Aristocracy, then I think more readers would question this column.
2
Oh yes, let’s dump one set of bizarre, unscientific and often hateful beliefs for a new set of weird beliefs that have no basis in fact or history. That would really help move humanity forward!
2
The problem will come when they come up with a right wing version of paganism and they start believing that they should kill or convert anyone who lacks their beliefs. Same as it ever was.
2
Take a gander at “Stormfront,” and note how many of those clowns like to style themselves “Thor,” or “Baldur,” or “Odinsson.” One wonders what they’re like at an “Avengers,” movie.
The less religion in our shared secular life, the better.
And that applies to Ross Douthat's musings as well.
3
Trump, whose religion is wealth at all costs, hurting others, lying, then elected by evangelicals, convinced me to turn away from organized religion. Compounded by the continuing, centuries old, abuse of children by the Catholic church and other churches. Doing my best now to be aware of those in need and help as much as I can. Each day. That plus a dose of George Carlin.
2
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 Forth 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.
432
@North Carolina
To think that Madison and Jefferson insisted on Separation of Church and State mostly because Virginia was jailing Baptist preachers for heresy. Maybe jailing them preachers was always a good idea.
17
@North Carolina unfortunately, when people "find other places to connect to the universe..." they will bring corruption with them. Corruption is not a trait of "organized religion" but of the human race.
17
@Leland Seese -- Much less corruption in paganism, humanism and atheism than in organized religion. Pretty much a no-brainer there. @North Carolina is spot on.
8
I recently went to a Greek Orthodox funeral for a friend’s grandmother. She was a pious women who had lived an exemplary life within the church—dozens of grandkids, a marriage lasting 60 years, service, a home that stood as the center of a community. You would have thought the service would have been, at least in part, a celebration of a life well lived. But it was a morose affair. In a most lavish and guilt space, the priest spoke only of how glory fades, and that you can’t take it with you. There was scant talk of heaven or love, but plenty of mentions of hell. The priest even found time to bemoan “victim culture caught up with microaggressions.”
I failed to see how this brought anyone in the family much help or solace. Indeed I couldn’t help but think that this church was not much more than a continuation of Romanism, with all its wealth and it’s message to the masses to be humble and not strive for anything outside one’s lowly station (at least while on earth). There was nothing of the early charitic Jesus I’ve read about and studied. I also found myself constantly comparing this religion with Ancient Greek polytheism, which celebrated humanity and asked its people to seek glory. I had the same thought while traveling through Greece a few years ago. As an enthusiastic student of Ancient Greece, it seemed obvious to me, as I stared out at idle men drinking coffee all day in cafes, that modern Greek religion had failed, and that a return to polytheism was needed.
3
The times they are a'changing. The new political and religious orders are rising because the old orders have failed to take care of the people who depended on them.
Trump and the Catholic Church are brothers. Neither can be embarrassed, both would not recognize truth if it stood before them, and both have, and continue to perform, unspeakable acts. Lastly, both have adherents that insist that they have been ordained by the divine. People are leaving their sphere of influence in droves. Trump is having a hard time getting people to work for him. The Catholic Church does so by recruiting from 3rd world countries and hiring those with 'issues.'
As a result, both the religious and secular worlds are in a period of transition. The old order is clearly unsatisfactory but what is to replace it is not yet clear.
1
Douhat makes a mistaken assumption here:
A recent Pew survey on secularization likewise found increases in the share of Americans who have regular feelings of “spiritual peace and well-being.”
He states that because of increased well-being and spiritual peace, Americans aren't entirely over religion. Well, actually one does not need religion at all to be spiritual or have a sense of well-being. In fact, I'd argue it is the opposite and further undermines his argument.
1
I see some combination of Shinto and Native American belief finding traction. When we realize that time is real and not an illusion then to the spiritual person all things in time will have meaning, all instructive, all divine, for good or ill, and the task will be to find the righteous path.
Mr Douthat,
Have you read Harold Bloom's The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (1992)? There the great literary critic explores what he thinks to be America's quintessential religious denominations from a critical and late twentieth century perspective.
Bloom does not label the American religion explicitly pagan, but he does call it post-Christian and specifically gnostic. That implies unique access to recondite knowledge and an individual and perhaps exclusive relationship with the Diety.
It also implies a hefty dose of solipsism, which seems to fit well our time.
2
I've felt for a long time that extremist and/or passionate political feelings are similar to extremist and/or passionate feelings religiously. But they can also work in concert; for example, left or right wing passionate and/or extremist politics can be part of the fabric of a church, synagogue or mosque.
So, are we to understand that after some 2,000 years Christianity in all its myriad forms does not provide the ultimate in “spiritual comfort and certainty” despite its innumerable apologists, philosophers and its alliance with secular power? Well, my question is how can you be surprised at this since the entire edifice is built on such an unbelievable story of the sacrifice of a half human half divine being to atone for the sin of a mythical human progenitor couple by a completely clueless group of actors two millennia ago that is somehow relevant to the post death aspirations of approximately 7 billion current human beings only a third of whom even give the story any shred of possibility and that only because for the most part they were born to parents who did? Somehow I doubt that this will provide eternal spiritual comfort to the human condition and I submit Christianity’s history of often brutal coercion as my ultimate proof.
6
Way over-thought, methinks. All of this can be distilled down to one simple observation: No man’s god owns the Golden Rule.
3
"A recent Pew survey on secularization likewise found increases in the share of Americans who have regular feelings of “spiritual peace and well-being.”
That is a vague statement so really does not mean much. Biologically, one probably got a little squirt of serotonin to some specific part of the brain at some instance of time, and that gets interpreted by the brain as "spiritual peace and well-being". Objectivity, if even possible, does not come easily to humans; we are creatures heavily influenced by our cultures and their myths. Without objectivity how can we say anything about a spiritual world, including a "god"?
1
Douthat apparently lacks either the diligence to do his research, or the ability to understand what he reads in its own terms, which leaves this article being shallow and full of inaccuracies when he speaks of the current state of pagans in the US. (Jumping from immanence to worldliness was perhaps the most appalling. Not that pagans don't revere the world as well! ...and enjoy it a great deal.)
Pagans don't need to wait for some prophet to lead them into their "harmonized" practice. Polytheists, animists, and other people who want to affiliate don't need to be standardized, that's rather the point - that multiple groups can exist side by side, and that indeed a single individual might be involved with several is common in such a society. (This is documented in both current and historical cultures.)
One doesn't need to be pagan to write about pagans, but one does need to have the intelligence and imagination to understand them on their own terms. An illustration: an outsider might conclude that Christian practice ritual cannibalism and vampirism. No one with any background (and the emotion maturity of greater than an eight year old) would argue that this is true. And it's not hard for a reasonably intelligent outside to understand and respect the ritual, even if they'd never adopt it.
Stop trying to ram pagan through Christian shaped holes - it only displays your own ignorance.
3
In this article Mr. Douthat asks if post-Christian belief systems are signaling a return to paganism. He appears to conclude the answer is no, at least not yet, but we should still be wary that one day it might, despite not offering any argument as to why or how that might occur. While I can't fault him for examining the question, I hope those who might fear these newer belief systems will take comfort that at least in this article he provides very little reason to worry.
Your discussion about the possible return of paganism is just idol talk.
4
@Jay Orchard
No really it is an attack on people that don't believe the same things Douthat believes. That is why the insult "Pagan" was invented, to attack other religions.
1
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.
404
Reason is a much better life road-map to follow than superstition... thankfully the Nones designation is growing.
32
@Kjensen
I have not read this Writer’s previous work, which you seem to be aware of, so I’m not denying that he may be attempting to defend or lament the decline of organized religion in the larger body of his work, but I really didn’t see it in this article.
Coming at him a from a just-introduced perspective, this article seems less about pushing a position or discomfort with a lessening importance and ubiquity of Christianity-as-institution, than trying to make sense of a trend, to put a name on what (so far) seems like a widely scattered set of informal beliefs— so I guess what I’m saying to you is that from this article alone your condemnation of what the writer is saying seems a bit extreme, but I would also agree with your opinion at least for further observation at this point, that we’ve seen this sort of thing before:
but if this kind of thing keeps cropping up in humanity with different names, predictable behaviors and informally organized until some institution gets attached, it seems that we need to try to better understand what the impulse is in the first place, rather than trying to name and thus conceptually organize it’s superficial expression as half-baked New Age religions.
I would’ve been more interested in an article exploring why we need to believe in anything rather than the writer simply making a vague discussion about it easier to hashtag.
17
@Victor Noir. Good comment. But there are probably legions of articles about why we believe since it has been a focus of a lot of social, psychological and evolutionary research. I can't say I've read much of it, but it must be fascinating. I'm going to check it out.
5
I prefer to recognize the changes at hand as the emergence of DIY Spirituality. We are each empowered and able to craft our own spiritual lives and perspective as a lifelong quest - that can and will often change in a lifetime, transforming our understanding and convictions as we are transformed in our lives. And in this way, we build a personally meaningful and relevant set of beliefs, ways to living, stories, etc about the world, what is mysterious, what is wisdom, what we doubt, and what we believe.
5
Ross writes: "...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"
.
.. and this above describes Christianity in general since AD 1. It's not something new that's taken form in the U.S. since 1950. We've always just kinda forgotten about parts of the bible that were inconvenient to the current societal norms. The Old Testament itself is a vestigial artifact of that process.
.
Also, there's an odd passive-aggressive suggestion in this article that seems to try to instill a sublime fear (or guilt) - if we keep going down this road, paganism may happen - and that's a type of... *punishment that we may deserve. Very Christian strategy there, Ross. :)
4
There are those of us that do not need and even disdain "ritual". The absence of ritual and organization in itself can provide true peace. Dark Matter can provide all the adhesion needed.
1
Adherence to the three transcendent Abrahamic religions has brought us to this point of dire climate disruption and mass species extinction and over population by their insistence on conquering nature and squeezing out every drop of whatever we deem valuable out of this planet and by their insistence to be “fruitful and multiply.” Additionally, these religions insist, in degrees, that people be wary of and avoid the pleasures that the natural world and being a part of the natural world offers. We’ve become split off from the natural world. For the sake of this planet, the only one we know of that has abundant and intelligent life in the cosmos, we need to quickly outgrow these religions and embrace other ways of being with the planet and all of life that is harmonious, and many of the earth based religions and practices point the way and offer beautiful alternatives.
5
Agnosticism is inherently secular. Rational thought can, by definition, neither explain nor disprove any proposed divinity. That doesn't make you a pantheist anymore than an atheist. You simply accept the world as place bound by the limits of physical reality. If you're wrong, you'll find out when you're dead.
This view doesn't preclude celebration or mourning. For whatever reason, humans are conscious living organisms. We've mourned our dead since before religion existed. Agnostics simply refrain from anthropomorphizing their relationship with the natural world as a deity or deities.
I think Douthat is confusing human emotion and sensuality with spirituality. Spirituality is an expansion of the basic social construct. Spirituality is a fabrication. However, the social function prescribed by institution and ritual are real and necessary for human primates.
Take weddings for example. The ritual needs no spiritual grounding to form a significant emotional and social compact. First between partners but also between families and friends. A god or gods is rather irrelevant to the union.
Equinoxes are another example. Even chipmunks understand seasonality. Is it so odd to wonder why social primates have seasonal rituals? Recognizing how days get shorter at certain times doesn't make you a pagan. It makes you well adapted for survival.
I don't see it Ross. A post-Christian religious society is not only still over the horizon. The idea doesn't make any sense in the first place.
4
Seems like if you are going to talk about the shift to paganism and/or secularism and/or syncretistic therapeutic mixes of practice and belief, you need to ask to what extent conservative evangelical white protestantism and conservative white catholicism in America contributed to this.
Decades of culture wars and demonizing of anyone who questioned a needlessly rigid orthodoxy or who thought a little differently were bound to have some effect. I'd like to see that measured and quantified. I bet it's substantial.
I am a Christian with the basic historic beliefs summed up in the Apostles' and Nicene creeds. And it's very difficult indeed to find a congregation where I can even begin to fit in. And in the era of Trump, I find I have less desire to even try. Why would I want to be where close to 80% of those around me support this monster of a president and the cruelty that is today's GOP?
It's no wonder people are seeking something more spiritually therapeutic and personally affirming.
1
That’s a lot of fretting to expend on the possibility that others with freedom of religion may one day have more members in their club than you, also with full freedom of religion, have in yours. Other, more remarkable changes are happening at full speed, before our eyes.
Each week in this country, Democracy dies a little more, and the president with whom so many believers have struck a devil’s deal cares not a whit about individual freedoms, religious or otherwise. And the religious leaders with whom he’s struck that “deal”—largely Protestant evangelical—do not spend their energy defending the rights of other believers, whether Pagan or Catholic. Their lawyers and lobbyists are out pushing for special rights for their followers over others and special status as the official religion of America.
Maybe worrying about the overstated popularity of Paganism is a fun diversion, but if you’re concerned about the future of the more fundamental right of freedom to practice religion, whichever that is—turn around; you’re looking in the wrong direction.
2
Americans have increased feelings of “spiritual peace and well-being” because a lot of us have rejected religious fairy tales and embraced the soothing calm of atheism. No atheist has ever started a religious war. Let's all work to reject false religions that foment hate of others, and work to reclaim care of the earth and our fellow human beings.
5
One form of what one might call paganism in our world is the relationship many people have towards sports teams. On a Sunday afternoon in the fall in the US millions of people watch their favorite teams play. Many dawn ridiculous costumes at games and participate in rituals they think will help their team. When their team wins the Super Bowl there is a ritual of celebration. Today it might be said that sports are often more powerful than religion but only offer short term happiness.
3
Christianity does not argue for a transcendent God who is completely separate from this world. Of course, God as Creator is transcendent and beyond single experience or created good. God is always more.
But to assert that God is immanent and can also be known in this world is not paganism. It’s called the Incarnation.
4
All religion is superstition. Start from there.
People are alienated from Christianity. Okay, but are they seeking to find truth (as science understands truth), or another type of opiate? I would use Marx's full quote on the subject, not the Cliff Notes version most people are familiar with. Here it is: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people..."
Does not "heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions" speak a powerful truth, and a damnation of our current society?
After reading this pseudo-theological rendering, I can only conclude that Mr. Douthat lives in doubt and fear. Much like the GOP base that believes everything Trump says... Not a good state to be in, Ross.
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I was born and raised Catholic, converted to Protestantism in my youth, passed through an atheist phase, explored the New Age, and then sat Zazen for seven years—and now find myself practicing yoga regularly. Does that make me one of Douthat’s neopagans? Perhaps. But all I see is a path of spiritual exploration and experimentation, with each phase teaching mr something I needed to learn at the time. Scorn me for a superficial spiritual taste tester, but I’m 60, and I’ve never been more at peace or at home in this universe.
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Whenever I read Douthat I am reminded of a saying by the great Wavy Gravy (oft repeated by the great Ram Dass): "If you don't have a sense of humor, it's just not funny."
Perhaps Ross could have spent a moment or two with some Hindus, a polytheistic religion that far predates Christianity and probably Hebrew. Or investigated the wealth of tradition and philosophy of the Yogis and the Rishis.
I saw a headline once that said: Scientists say God is in every atom. That is about right.
God is love and that love is spread everywhere. All we need do is allow it to grace us.
And that is much closer to what Jesus taught than stoning heretics and drowning witches and crucifying rebels.
Imagine for just a moment that when a miracle is performed the one doing the performing might have an innate, molecular acquaintance with Quantum Physics.
Imagine dark energy and matter as the nerve center of God reaching out to touch every part of this vast magnificent Universe.
Ross, if you open your eyes and your heart you will find God everywhere at all times.
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Interesting ruminations. I'm not sure paganism is a particularly useful word for contemporary experience, though you point to some parallels to ancient paganism--parallels I hadn't thought of. My guess is that poeple who don't associate themselves with an established religion would prefer merely to think of themselves as "spiritual." One comment asks, "Do we have to worship anything?" The answer is "yes." Our president prefers to worship himself, a terrible choice even if he were a much better man than he is. All (almost?) of us feel the need for commitment to something other than ourselves. That may be somethinig as mundane as to a specific community of human beings. But something "larger" than simply ourselves. The point is not whether we need to worship something or someone; the point is to pick the very best thing as our object of devotion. Amd here I'll reveal my bias: just theoretically, could there possibly be anything better to worship than the Person who created the universe out of sheer love--who in fact IS Love?
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It seems that Mr. Douthat, like many if not most religious people, is hung up on the question of who's winning the contest for the spiritual hearts and minds of the average American.
For many years protestant Christianity was winning and held such a lead that we became in the eyes of many a protestant Christian country and this thinking persisted through the end of the 20th century. JFK's charisma and popularity made Catholicism OK so people like Douthat could safely convert (after all it is Christian). Not to say there were not plenty of questions and doubts but most doubters kept their thoughts to themselves.
By the latter part of the 20th and early 21st centuries self help gurus and others recognized this large market and catered to it with books, tapes, cds and podcasts. The doubters or, as I like to call them, searchers, became more visible and gave a bit of public acceptance to the idea of publicly questioning traditional religion.
People like Mr. Douthat who can't imagine trying to apply reason to spirituality feel like their beliefs are under siege. So many people who appear to be normal other than their lack of embracing of mainline religion - Christianity, Judaism or even Islam - now believe differently from what was once the right way to worship the right god that Mr. Douthat and others spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out just what is wrong with these people.
Nothing is wrong with them, Mr. Douthat. Get over it.
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We are a superstitious, pattern-seeking species. Michael Shermer explained it best when he told the story of the ancient man discerning whether the movement in the tall grass was just the wind or a predator. This is not something that we will overcome easily. And as long as religious people, whether christian or pagan, don't try to push their nonsense on the rest of us, I really don't care what they choose to believe or how they choose to worship.
Paganism is simply a step toward leaving religion altogether. People have become frustrated with organized religions, the scandals, the hypocrisy, the subjugation of women, and the dehumanization of LGBTQ. But while they are ready to leave the churches, they are not ready to leave the concept of god behind. They are not ready to give up the hope that there is something more beyond our deaths; that we will be reunited with loved ones.
I live just down the street from Cassadaga, one of the oldest spiritualist camps in the US. It's an incredibly interesting place to visit. And the people who live and work there are very nice. I've never met a pagan that tried to push their beliefs on someone else, or who condemned those who believed in a different god, or no god at all. So, I'm all good with the move away from organized religion. More power to them.
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I'm not sure what the fuss is all about. There have been charlatans throughout our history, in all cultures. One could conclude that the institutions built around the superstitions of Christ, Thor or Ra have the same foundations; fear of the unknown, quest for power by the few anointed, and monetary gain. The rejection of contemporary religion and adaption of pre-Christian rituals is no different, just less polished.
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Christianity has always taught both the immanence and the transcendence of God. In popular practice, however -- and in many cases with the blessing of organized religion -- God's transcendence has been emphasized almost to the exclusion of God's immanence, resulting a distortion of the millennia-old understanding of the divine. A view that recognizes only a God that is "out there" somewhere is unsustainable to modern people. A return to an understanding of God's immanence, indeed God's intimacy with the world and with humanity, is entirely consistent with Christianity. There is no need to abandon Christianity for a return to paganism, if Christians can alter their thinking. Many mainline Protestant denominations (including the Episcopal Church, of which I am a member) are doing exactly that. I would characterize my own faith as panentheistic (as opposed to pantheistic), and I think that a Christianity that embraces that view has a better chance of surviving than one that either clings to an unsupportable supernatural theism or one that returns to an ancient paganism.
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As I flip past the multitude of TV channels, I'm struck by how much Evangelical programming there is. Dozens of stations, each with dozens of pastors ranting 24/7. I've come to two conclusions about this: There's still tons of money to be made in the religion business, and if someone needs to reaffirm their faith by constant immersion in these spectacles, it must be pretty shaky.
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I'd suggest that Western forms of Buddhism also fit what Douthat describes. Buddhism is nontheistic in that it rejects the idea of a creator God outside ourselves who has a degree of control over what happens in our world, but it leaves open the idea that the "Buddha within" each of us that could be seen as divine.
Many will refer to science as the new religion. This could be good on many levels. However, when questions posed forth to be studied have a bias to begin with, we are biased with our science and become puppets to another belief system.
Eg, medical discoveries for treating / healing can only be done through the lens of a pharmaceutical type of approach, likely due to funding. If the same brilliant people are the ones who determine what gets NIH funding, then the same brilliant approaches get a chance to come forward. That's fine and still brilliant, but it then sets up a bias against the mind, the spirit etc as it relates to healing. The latter then arrogantly get snubbed as less than, or non scientific or non intelligent or supplemental to the "truth."
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A science-based approach to acupuncture is perfectly satisfactory in understanding its fundamental mechanisms. Acupuncture is a nonpharmacologic approach that is all about the body, the physical body, despite the attempt to cloak it in quasi-religious vitalism.
That doesn't mean that the acupuncturist's manner, her/his ability to approach and relate to a person, and fatalism. to frame what s/he is doing is not important. There are important, person-to-person intangibles in an acupuncture session. What I'm asserting is that the mechanisms of change and healing that stem from acupuncture treatment are rooted in physical processes that can be understood and will continue to be elucidated--by science.
@Mostly Rational
Please excuse my phone-based autocorrect typo.
This: "and fatalism. to frame"
Should be: "and ability to frame"
When you ticked off the characteristics of the new religion, they all matched the tenets of Buddhism, which also satisfies many of the requirements that you say a new paganism would lack. You should consider it in your list of alternatives. After all, Wikipedia estimates that worldwide there are 488 million Buddhists, which is considerably larger than the number of witches. Meditate on it.
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"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."
To degrees this bridge is being provided by yoga practice. Yoga studios offer a ritual, a community, a way to "worship", and evolving dogma -- perhaps bridging the best of Buddhism's "right way, right speech, right thoughts..." with western values. Old religions are misogynistic, archaic, seemingly unable to meet people's values of equality and inclusion. Yoga practice, it could be argued, is replacing traditional religious practice, offering a bridge, with a more pagan, pantheistic, inclusive modern ritual that satisfies, makes the world a better place, leads to moral growth, and is very spiritual.
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An issue really not explored in opinion is the level of hypocrisy which has been exposed in many sects which call themselves Christians. Whether it is the Religious Right who openly support a heathen leader, or the many cases of child abuse that has been covered up in the purpose of "protecting" the church, or those sects which seem to be more of a cult that a religion. Add to that those sects which see science and understanding of the universe as a threat to their doctrine.
Maybe worship of the sun and earth, which is truly the source of life, is what we should be praying to. That makes more sense to me that a cult that believes we can trash up the earth because the "end time" are coming anyway.
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President Trump is not a "Heathen." Heathens are people who practice a pre-Christian, earth centered spirituality.
Yes, and I personally look forward to it. We have all the pieces we need to make some great new religions. Renaissance Fairs, Walt Disney World, Universal Life Ministry, Broadway Musicals, Santa Claus, New Age Music, Wicca, Harry Potter, Flash Mobs, organized Haunted Houses, aromatherapy, Pagans & Druids, Pastafarians, Satanists, and on and on.
They need to be fun, tongue-in-cheek, egalitarian, earth-friendly, and progressive. Lots of ritual and fantasy, good works, fellowship and community, good food and beverages, with no war, cruelty, misogyny, or racism. Bring it on.
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The majority is often wrong.
During the war in Vietnam, the vast majority of Americans believed it was justifiable to bomb Hanoi to keep the countries in Southeast Asia from falling to communism like a series of dominos.
During the second Iraq War, the majority of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Nowadays, I am worried that democracy might not survive.
Thus I value those freedoms enshrined in our constitution, such as freedom of speech and religion.
Whenever I hear of a truly nutty religious sect, I rejoice, because it is proof that we are still committed to freedom of religion on some level.
But I must warn you, I also rejoice when I see books appearing by David Duke, and books denying the holocaust. Because this tells me that we have not fully lost freedom of speech.
Yes, I find the writings of David Duke to be singularly unconvincing, and I believe the holocaust happened.
But the Holy Scriptures on which are based the theologies of the Catholics, the Protestants and Jews are also demonstrably false.
A literal reading of Genesis leads to the conclusion that the world is only 6000 years old. Some of the fundamentalist sects continue to remind us of that.
And the morality is a bit twisted. I admire the Sermon on the Mount, but the story of Lot makes it clear that the old-testament God regarded homosexuality as a sufficient sin to destroy Sodom and Gemorrah.
We are often wrong, so allowing diversity of opinion is important.
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That pagan cult you're looking for that offers more balm and knowledge to the human race race than any other is called Science.
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Loved the article. But, as an ordained United Methodist pastor watching her denomination diminish, for a variety of reasons I won't get into here, I think the bigger concern is the steady, horrible rise of civil religion -specifically "Christianity," wrapped in the flag. A certain segment of "Christians" have somehow married their understanding of Israel as a chosen nation with the United States as the inheritor of that designation in view of Jewish "rejection" of Jesus.
Notably they have done this without adopting Israel's understanding of prophetic tradition and accountability to God and other human beings. This is not only the cheap grace that Bonhoeffer wrote of, it is, in my understanding, outright sin. (A word that has, unfortunately gone out of our modern vocabulary - even, and perhaps most distressingly from that of "Christians.)"
In my opinion, the rise of Donald Trump and his continued support by the faithful of this civil religion is a more powerful and shocking force than the return or enlarging of pagan understandings and practice. Pagans have always been around with minimal concern to most societies, but civil religion is always, always a great danger to any society and certainly to this democracy.
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This trend toward what Mr. Douthat terms 'paganism' has come about because biblical morality has failed to keep up with modern morality which is more forgiving and more humane: e.g. slavery is bad, abuse of gays and lesbians is bad, abuse of women is bad, health care is a right, racial hatred is bad, education is a right, etc. etc.
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Monotheism coupled to the concept of a transcendent and paradisal afterlife has fueled one of the most powerful and toxic religious movements in history. The notion that there is some "other" plane where all moral value resides has been used to justify innumerable horrors of torture and burning of heretics for the sake of their immortal souls. I visited Spain, Italy and Greece last summer, and anyone who has walked through the ruins and remnants of the indigenous Mediterranean culture cannot fail to sense that something great once existed, but something else truly violent and uncompromising smashed it nearly to dust. The depredations of ISIL pale in comparison to the destruction of Greek and Roman art and architecture by Christian zealots. Walking through the Roman Forum, the obvious question any child asks is "what happened?" Huge marble columns don't just disappear, so where are they? Answer: the Forum was stripped to it's foundations by Pope Julius II. Where the Basilica Julia once functioned as a public space of human proportions, we now have the Basilica of St. Peter - a space designed to dominate and to clarify the insignificance of the merely human. If we were to strip St. Peter's down to its foundations and rebuild the Basilica Julia - at least figuratively - that might not be such a bad thing.
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Do good unto others. What else you got?
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Tada! We have today's Oxymoron Award winner! Yes, it's our very own Ross, with his entry; "religious reality". Way to go, Ross.
Pssst, Ross, you do know that "christmas" is, and e'er has been, a Pagan holiday, doncha'?
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A great many Americans find comfort in superstitions of every kind, from wearing the same pair of socks for a game, using the same pen on exams, an all-purpose rabbit's foot, etc. My theology professor used to say that superstition was the bane of civilization, but also its twin--that human beings cannot exist in the presence of cosmic uncertainty. So we make things up. Christianity--with its saints, holy water, eating of wafers, stories of physical resurrection, virgin birth, pageants and churches full of idols--has always appealed to the ignorant. Which is why it has been losing ground as societies become more educated. But intellectualism, erudition, the ability to engage in abstract analyses, cannot provide an answer that is beyond the ken of our species. Yet we are cursed with the irony that, as this beautifully written op-ed shows, we will never stop trying.
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Until religions are denigrated as cults, humans will suffer. Religions look the other way as countries hurt and make suffer their poor. Religions are a joke on those of us who know better. They are fake and rely on superstition and myths.
Plus they control women. Women should never be Republican or religious.
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Ross, you and others can practice whatever religion you like, just keep it out of politics.
Keeping church and state separate ought to be like keeping open flames away from gasoline. There's a darn good reason this separation concerns the first line of the First Amendment.
Also, whether conservative Catholic/ETC or Wiccan/new age, religions contain a core of magical thinking. That might help people feel better, but the real, actual world of nature (physics, biology, etc) cares *not a whit* about what we tiny creatures might happen to believe in.
Thinking otherwise has led us to our current moment of existential and environmental crisis, featuring the rising tide (pun intended) of increasingly horrific weather catastrophes around the world.
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This laughable article omits atheism as the best break yet for overindulgent religitards seeking 'redemption' from the degrading and suppressive practices of religious belief.
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Why not a divine that made the universe who ALSO pervades it (panentheism) - ala Pierre Teilhard de Chardin? I get tired of this columnist's tendency to tilt to suggesting that ideas or beliefs that do not conform with fundamentalist strands of Christianity as non-Christian or post-Christian.
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I think this was actually what Christ was talking about before his teachings and "brand" got hijacked by the Church and the government. He told followers to look for the presence of the sacred within themselves - that God's "kingdom" or domain is within us. He told them to love one another, to care for one another, and to be open hearted and open minded. He taught that there is a point to our lives, and that there is a loving presence at the heart of the universe. He taught the importance of forgiveness as a path to personal and spiritual evolution.
The rest was made up by some guy who'd never met him and had a head injury from falling off his horse and the government for its own ends.
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When I was young in the 1950s, we heard the weekly chant from the Catholic priest at the end of the mass, "pray for the conversion of Russia."
By the way -- how has that worked out so far?
Oligarchy, Khashoggi, Putin and MBS slapping backs and laughing it up.
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This helps to explain the so called "Religious Rights" blind devotion to their new Religious Leader Donald Trump, a new form of Paganism in America.
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"Build a case for Paganism?" Well....since Christianity was built on the back of Paganism......what's your point?
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The great spirit,earth mother, is doing as poor a job protecting her children as the Abrahamic,Shinto,Hindu,and Buddhist gods.
If I missed one I'm sure to be struck down before finishing this sente..............................
Ross, maybe paganism wouldn't have so much of the rebel's appeal if your majestic religion hadn't burned so many pagans.
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At my Episcopal church a few weeks ago, a member of the congregation gave a money appeal--politely called a stewardship talk--in which he said something I found profound. He said, "I am religious, but not spiritual." He had described my situation. I only believe in God on alternate Thursdays if the wind is right and claim no “profound religious experience or awakening”, but take the Episcopal Church very seriously. The Church is the focus of most of my charitable and social activism. On a national level, my Church opposes capital punishment, supports the LBGT community (we have gay bishops), and generally advocates for Christian approaches to social problems. What I fear we will see as church membership drops--the Episcopal Church seems to have stabilized and my church and diocese are growing--is a lose of the institutional voice and effort. Mr. Douthat appears not to approve of the Episcopal Church--good liturgy, good music, no dogma--but I think it is a more useful response to our post religious age than "spiritual, but not religious".
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Hmmm. The phrase I hear Episcopalians say is that we are "spiritual but not religious," suggesting a rejection of religious dogma and the divisiveness of inter-denominational cat fighting. They believe there is a point to life and a loving presence in the universe, but that it's nature is a mystery. They embrace a kind of universalism, embracing the fundamental law of loving one another and living mindfully that is at the heart of most religions. Reject the bull but keep the love.
After reading in the National Geographic that the birth of religion started in southern Turkey to keep social order, it confirmed my hunch that all religious institutions are self serving. If all the Christians are right, then are all the Islams, Buddhists wrong? And visa versa?
Believe what you want, but don't throw stones at the others.
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We are post-Enlightment, thanks to the dumbing down of America through purposeful neglect of public education. Now we are a nation of “magical thinking,” with vampires, zombies and wand-wielding wizards manipulating us — the convenient explanation for a world that most don’t understand. How else can you explain how many hopeless people suspended all rational thinking to vote for a lying crook who is stealing their country out from under them as we watch?
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The survey that Mr. Douthat mentions, where 40% of Americans report a “profound religious experience or awakening” was taken in June, 2002, about 9 months after the traumatic 9/11 attacks.
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Changing religious landscape with rapidly changing demography and also within traditionally Christian community would pose some serious issues for our, officially, secular democracy.
Most of the new immigrants are more religious than traditional American people. They are also from countries which are more corrupt, lawless, and religiously very conservative. The story become more complicated as "religious belief and practice now polarizes our politics in a way they didn’t a few generations back."
US has no other option but to embrace science that prepare such huge diversity among its citizens to prepare them for logic cum fact based decision making. Now USA is the worst in terms of religiosity and science literacy among 35 developed countries, with about 40% of its college graduates "strongly believe that God created human in its present form". That high percentage is worst even in recent American history- even compared to 1925 era of Scopes trial.
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Yet another rant about The Invisible Fairy in the Sky. Enough, already!
Care to describe a city of man? A utopia for you where women are confined to rural areas or perhaps don’t exist at all?
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“....the transcendent alternative offered by Christianity and Judaism “
Why the reluctance to include Islam?
The Republic Party is now the locus of paganism in the US and its high priest occupies the White House. In the future this will warrant Indian Jones treatment with a golden idol fashioned in the shape of the Trumpian coiffure.
When I see words like "wokeness," I completely lost interest in the article and respect for the author. Wishing thinking Ross.
Paganism would be a step in a better direction. Let’s look at the hypocrisy of christians in supporting Trump, a man
-who acts like a mobster and uses the government and military as his enforcers
-who does wrong knowingly and deliberately
-who lies continuously
-who forces pro-fetus, but not pro-life policies
-who wants millions to die from lack of medical care
-who treats white women women as second class citizens
-who treats brown and black people as no class citizens
-who lacks civility and common decency
-who would gladly deprive all of us of free speech and our civil rights
-who is corrupting our judiciary
-who is greed personified
Oh yeah, this is “christian.”
Why? Because the bible “says so.”
Really? Yeah, “god works in “mysterious ways.”
No reason he shouldn’t be prosecuted. Naw, he “deserves” a pass, GOP Jesus says so.
He deserves jail time. Christians (and Mormons) supporting him deserve the same. Churches deserve to lose their tax exempt status.
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From the child molestation scandals that never seem to end in the Catholic Church and the fake piety of various Evangelical ministers who seem to be more about making money, is it any wonder that Americans who long for spirituality have abandoned formal churches?
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Well, an opinion this is; however, its supporting evidence puts the 'vague' in vagary. Truly this is mostly gobbeldygook.
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"Paganism is a term first used in the fourth century by early Christians for populations of the Roman Empire who practiced polytheism, either because they were increasingly rural and provincial relative to the Christian population or because they were not milites Christi." Wikipedia
Why is Ross Douthat so stuck in the past?
Why Ross, are you not enlightened enough to see that decent people accept science and see the utter hypocrisy of the Catholic Church and Evangelical Christians?
The former has perpetrated horrific crimes of sexual abuse on millions of children for centuries and is now embroiled in law suits galore for those abuses and for obstruction of justice.
The latter has made a Faustian bargain with the devil Trump - the groping, vulgar, racist, mob boss in the White House who is doing all he can to pollute the earth further, feed school children unhealthy diets, pack the courts with misogynists, afford foreign dictators the opportunity to murder with impunity, and foment hate in our country to make it ripe for authoritarianism.
Those who are finding "real" spiritually by rejecting the rampant greed-fuel consumerism pursued by Catholics and Evangelical alike and who find divinity by practicing yoga and meditation (your so- called "secular" leftists) are creating a world much more "divine" and happier than the one your put together by your creator.
Yes that book you wrote is woefully "incomplete".
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You forgot to include the biggest group of pagans of all, evangelical Republicans.
They have abandoned their Christian God for a political one, who offers them notariety and targets for their bigotry and scorn. What the evangelical Republicans call, if done by a Democrat, false idolatry.
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