Is America Now a Pagan Country?

Hey, everybody. It's time for The Charlie Kirk Show. John Daniel Davidson joins the program talking about American paganism.

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We play to win. Register now at tpaction.com slash peoples. Very excited for the guest this hour. I heard him on the Tucker Carlson podcast and I texted Andrew immediately. I said, get him on here. It is John Daniel Davidson, author of the important new book, Pagan America, the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. That is awfully uplifting. He's been on the program before and welcome back, John, to the program.

Hey, thanks for having me. John, tell us about your new book. Yeah, Pagan America makes the argument that America was founded as a Christian nation and can only survive with a Christian people. In other words, the founders understood what they were doing is creating a republic of self-governing citizens, but that only a Christian people could sustain that republic. And we are right now entering a post-Christian age. And as we move into that post-Christian era, the America that we knew it as we knew it will come to an end. And instead of a republic of free citizens, we are going to be living in a in a pagan empire. And that is the purpose of the book is to kind of trace the broad outlines of what that pagan society, what that that pagan empire will look like.

So let's get our terms straight. I think I have an understanding of what paganism is or what it means, but how would you define it? Yeah, by paganism, I don't mean that there's going to be and I say this in the book, there's not going to be a return to temples to Zeus and Apollo and, you know, these sorts of altars popping up in Times Square. What I mean, you know, paganism in a post-Christian context in a modern world is going to take different forms than the paganism of the past. But it will still adhere to the pagan ethos. And that is a radical subjectivity about reality, about human nature, about truth. Because the pagans were free to divinize the here and now, to divinize natural phenomenon or events or even people. In other words, they rejected transcendent truth, transcendent moral order. And that, of course, is what Christianity proclaims. And so in the pagan ethos, you have a kind of inversion of the Christian ethos.

And that's why we're seeing today a radical subjectivity creep into our public life, into almost every debate that we have over culture and politics and policy. And it's this re-emergence of the pagan ethos in what I argue is a post-Christian context. So, you know, when I think of pagan, I think it's a collection of earth worship, of worship of yourself, of idolatry, basically the violation of the first commandment. You shall have no other gods before me.

And I don't think it's a reach at all. I was just in Seattle and I was actually thinking of you because I think it truly is a captured pagan city. You drive by some of these homes right near the university, and if it's not the trans flag, it is the, this home believes that diversity is our strength and so on and so forth, with these kind of incantations. And are these examples of the modern manifestation of what you call pagan America?

Absolutely. One of the main points in the book is that the future, like the post-Christian future of America isn't going to be this secular liberal utopia where we all kind of go along to get along and it's a live and let live sort of libertarian kind of society. That is coming to an end, right? The secular world where we have like a neutral public square and cold rationalism determines public policy.

That was always sort of a temporary situation. And it was one that relied in fact on a majority Christian culture. And so as that majority Christian culture recedes and fades away, we're going to see the return of religious impulses, right? And so the trans flags that you see, that's an expression of a religious impulse.

The pro-Hamas student protesters that we've all kind of been poking fun at for the last couple weeks, that is not fundamentally a political ideology on display. That is a religious impulse that is being expressed. And I think a fundamentally pagan one, like these students are not Muslims for the most part, but they are enacting a kind of religious ritual and swearing fealty to a really a pagan or a neo-pagan ethos.

And so yes, you're right. In all these different ways, you can see this expression in all these different areas of society of this return of a pagan way of understanding human nature, our relationship to one another, and how society should be organized. So there's so much to unpack here, and I think let's also just reiterate something that you mentioned, which is that there is this burning religious desire that is configured within all of us, and something has to fill that void. And traditionally, that void was Jesus Christ and a belief in the transcendent triune God. We then say, okay, God is dead in the West, and we replace it with all these other pseudo-pagan-type religions, and they are fake counterfeits of the real thing. That pushes back against this idea of secular atheism. Are you making the contention that America is actually becoming more religious, just not more Christian?

Yes, absolutely. I think that not just America, but the entire West, Western civilization is going through a re-enchantment. And that means, for one thing, some people are being drawn back into Christianity, and we've seen a lot of high-profile converts to Catholicism recently. But it also means something dark and disturbing, because the re-enchantment of the world also involves the old gods, the pagan gods and practices, and a pagan way of thinking coming back into Western society and Western civilization.

So we're seeing that happen right now. Secularism isn't durable, and one of the reasons that secularism like atheistic, liberal secularism is collapsing is because Christianity is receding. Secularism itself, the whole idea of science and rationality and of a neutral public square, those are things that came out of Christian civilization. And as Christian civilization recedes, those things are going to recede too, and what's coming back in is this older way of understanding the world. And we should say, and we should be clear, that what that means is a society and a political order that's not based on human dignity or human rights, but is based on force and coercion, as all pagan societies of the past had been. And that's what we need to grapple with now, looking toward the future. Yeah, again, this is an incredibly deep and profound topic. And again, when people think of paganism, they think of like, okay, there's some special rock in the woods of Germany, and that rock your ancestors would pray over, right?

And so it's easy to reject this. Can you just give some historical context, though? Because the Holy Roman Empire, I believe it was Constantine who like depaganized Europe, because Europe was like predominantly pagan at the beginning of the advent of Christianity.

We don't even think of this now. We think of just Islam, or we think of like New Age type stuff. Can you talk about how dominant paganism was at the infant stages of Christianity? Sure, it was so dominant that it actually took many centuries for all of Europe to be Christianized. Constantine in the fifth century, or in the fourth century, which was just the beginning of that process, of the early church kind of converting the Roman Empire slowly and infiltrating these Roman cities. But it wasn't until the ninth and 10th centuries that Northern Europe was converted to Christianity, right?

Scandinavia and the Nordic peoples and the Germanic peoples up there. So it took centuries of consistent, dogged work by Catholic missionaries to go out into these pagan societies and sacrifice their lives. Many, many Christians sacrificed their lives to convert pagan Europe. Paganism was very entrenched in Europe, right?

So it was a long process to convert Europe. And the other thing to say is, it's true that paganism is like worshipping a tree or sacred stone or thinking that the sun is a god or the thunder is a god. But it's that, it's these religious rites and rituals and beliefs about nature. Well, also child sacrifice, which is something that just happens that every pagan society had this idea of killing children. We would know nothing about that in the West, obviously. We're much better than that.

Yes, and that gets to the other thing that paganism is, which is a system of social control. Look, for over 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless provider. The only.

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PatriotMobile.com slash Charlie. As a means of social control, walk us through that, please. Yeah, absolutely. So paganism isn't just a system of religious belief, religious ritual. It's also a means of social control. And that's what I was saying earlier that all pagan societies across time and geography and cultures, they all end up taking the same form, which is some sort of a slave society where there's a ruling caste at the top and everybody else is a slave. And this was the case where a ruling class that includes administrators and military officials, but in other words, people who sort of run things and then everybody else. And this was true in the Roman Empire. We tend to romanticize ancient Rome and ancient Greece, but most people in the Roman Empire were slaves and they didn't have anything like rights.

They didn't have recourse to court appeals. If a Roman citizen, a Roman aristocrat wanted to do something to someone who was in a lower station than he was, he could do whatever he wanted. He could rape, murder, kill, discard. It didn't matter.

And in fact, it was seen as a mark of his rank that he was able to do that. So there was nothing like and has never been anything like our concept of human rights in a pagan society. So that's one thing. The other thing is that pagan society separated religion and morality.

There were two distinct things. The regime didn't care what your religion was as long as you offered a pinch of incense to Caesar, which was why the Romans insisted that the Christians had to at least offer the symbolic pinch of incense to Caesar. And if they didn't do that, they were going to be martyred. There had to be uniformity in the performance of the state morality. And we're starting to see that come back in our time where religion is supposed to be this totally private thing. You can think whatever you want in your church, in your home. But when you come out into the public square, you better offer that pinch of incense to Caesar and affirm transgender ideology, affirm gay marriage, affirm abortion, or you'll be destroyed. Yeah, it's inherently totalitarian at its core, which is that you must then participate in whatever pagan ritual is.

So you said something earlier, and it's a provocative question. And I trust that you'll answer it regardless of how it sounds, which is you said that the Constitution is written only for a moral and religious people. John Adams, I believe, said that, right?

And you mentioned that basically the construct is set up for that. We're no longer a Christian religious and we're no longer as morals. Does that mean the Constitution is sustainable?

No, it's not. Not with the American people as they are. That's sort of the point of the book that we are living in a post-Christian era and that we're going to continue moving into that era. And we need to sort of wrap our minds around the implications for that. And the implications are that all of the things that we associate with our form of government and our way of life, freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, consent of the governed, all of these things are going to come to an end under a pagan post-Christian regime. And our task is to start thinking about, first of all, our task is to accept that. Secondly is to start thinking about, for our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren, how can they be in a position to re-found the Republic with a new Christian people.

That is what we have to think about. Politics isn't going to save us. We need to have a re-conversion of the American people in order to have a re-founding of the Republic. And I want to just get two examples, and I don't want to overly politicize this, but it's hard not to. So the Congress, they do this ridiculous anti-Semitism awareness nonsense, getting rid of the First Amendment.

They get rid of the Fourth Amendment protections, and we call it the death of the U.S. Constitution. And it's happening, though, because the body politic is largely not moral and religious. You don't need vast spying powers on the American people if every person in the country believed in the Ten Commandments and that there was a God who judged their actions.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. You don't need as much government when you have a moral and religious people, and that's what the Founders understood. John Adams said it.

All of the other ones said it. They said it over and over again in very clear terms, that this kind of society that they had in mind was only going to be possible with a predominantly Christian people. And when we lose that kind of people, we're going to lose that society, that form of government as well, and something else is going to come in and take its place. You know, for example, the left, which is very post-Christian, don't care at all about things like freedom of speech or freedom of religion, and they demonstrate that a million different ways every week, it seems like.

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Noblegoldinvestments.com. The book is Pagan America. So let me ask, and I think this is really important, and I'm just curious, can you point to any other countries currently that have been captured by paganism that might have been ahead of the curve than America?

Sure. I think when I talk about this in the book, we can look to Europe and to the once Christian countries of Europe in many ways to see kind of where we're going. I talk about some of the things that we're starting to see in European Union countries and in Great Britain. And one that comes to mind that I discuss in the book is laws that have come on the books in recent years, both in Ireland and in Great Britain, about these speech code laws around abortion clinics. So you have laws that within a certain distance of an abortion clinic, you cannot protest or say anything negative about abortion, and that includes you may not pray silently in your head within a certain distance of an abortion clinic. Abortion being a sort of pagan sacrament of the new pagan era.

If you do that, and this has happened in the United Kingdom, the police will come and if they ask you, are you praying, and you tell them that you are, they'll arrest you and put you in handcuffs and take you away. And this is the kind of society that a post-Christian order ushers in, one in which you're not even allowed your conscience freedoms, not even in your head, to oppose the public morality. We talked about the public or state morality of the pagan regimes earlier. Well, you can't defy them even in your thoughts. And I think that's the kind of thing we need to start wrapping our heads around because we're going to see that sort of thing come up here.

I totally agree. So in your research, what is the best way to combat paganism? Obviously it's Christianity, but tactically, how do we then go up against of crushing a pagan empire? Yeah, the main thing, and this is not a book that is a council of despair, but I'm also not going to gaslight my readers and tell them these 10 steps to save America.

The way tactically to fight back is to find and fight on ground you can win. And that may mean making major changes to your life. It may mean moving to a blue city or a blue state and moving to an area where you can actually have an effect on the public square in that town or in that county or in that state. And it means not also just keeping your religious life sequestered from the public life of the community in which you live, right?

So you don't just go to church on Sunday. You don't just build up your homeschool network or your local religious community. You take your faith out into the public square and you fight for it to be in the public square. So maybe that means that you run for city council or you fund someone to run for city council and you get porn out of the local libraries. You take over the school board. Maybe you take over the county government.

Maybe you help take over the state legislature. But the point is that we have to fight. We can't just hide in an arc and hope that the storm passes us by. And we have to fight knowing that we will meet and face growing persecution from a pagan society. We mentioned this previously, but I want to emphasize this, which is the the theme of child sacrifice and of the patterns of a pagan country. What is it about sacrificing of children, massacring? These are seems to be rituals within such worldview and ideology. Yeah, and you see it all across every pagan society, every pagan empire that's ever existed, child sacrifice and human sacrifice. The more advanced the pagan society was, the more surely they fell into child and human sacrifice.

And part of that is what I mentioned earlier. Pagan societies are built on a worldview in which might makes right and force and coercion are the only sort of permanent, unchanging values around which society and a worldview is organized. And so in order to maintain that kind of control, you have to play on and manage anxiety, fear, you have to instill fear in the populace. And so human sacrifice and especially child sacrifice is engaging in these sort of atrocities becomes a system of social control. And it was also, and this is an important part of it, there had to be unanimity about it, right? You couldn't have people protesting and pointing out that you were committing this atrocity, right? That's a common feature and this has been studied in people who study warfare when atrocities are committed in warfare.

If there's any member of a unit that sort of isn't on board, immediately becomes a problem for the whole unit, right? And so this is true on a society-wide scale as well. There had to be unanimous support for these pagan sacrificial rituals and they were a means of maintaining social control. And we see it all across time and history. It doesn't matter how far forward we go into history. We saw there were pagan societies that were engaging in mass human sacrifice well into the 19th century. So time alone doesn't solve this problem. Modernity or technology doesn't solve the problem because it's fundamentally about a worldview that's based on violence and coercion and force and the instilling of fear into the population by the ruling caste.

You write, there are hard times ahead but not without hope. Christianity emerged from within the confines of a pagan empire. And you show how with courage, fortitude, and faith, it will be our duty and privilege to defend Christianity and restore its claims. I think one of the advantages we have is just the lack of morality in that of a... Well, I shouldn't say the... There are some morality that morality is screwed up. But what happens when you get into polytheism? When you have multiple gods, you have multiple moralities. And you cannot have a flourishing civilization. You cannot build a flourishing civilization around such an idea set or construct. I want to ask, in your writing of this book, in your research, how would you grade the American church, Christian leaders and pastors, in how they have been able to diagnose this and push back against this?

Not good. In fact, Christian leaders and church leaders, and I write about this, a devoted chapter of it at the beginning of the book, are largely responsible in some ways for the collapse of Christianity in America. And part of it was embracing the moral relativism that is at the heart of the pagan ethos, and letting that into the church. And we saw this in really dramatic ways in the middle of the last century, when Christians and Christian leaders began to accommodate the morality of the world, of the secular world, and even embrace the idea that we needed to be neutral, we needed to accommodate or be winsome, and be tolerant of things that Christianity had historically taught were wrong and could not be tolerated, and had to be called out as sin. And we saw very quickly the collapse of mainline Protestantism in the 70s and 80s, and now we're beginning to see these same things infect large portions of the evangelical church, and even, I'm sorry to say, in some parts of the Catholic church as well. And so, at the same time that our Christian population is decreasing, the quantity is decreasing, but the quality of religious faith and a theological teaching has been declining for a long time in America, and that's a big part of the problem. I think it's exactly why you're seeing an ascendant paganism, is that a weak church allows for this bacterial infection to grow and to fester and to multiply.

And I agree, I think politics have a role, I think that if you don't have political power, then you can't do anything good. However, the politics are what you get from the morality of the people, and if the people just want to have pagan worship, can you riff on that, please? Right, you can't have the culture without the cult, right? We think, you know, Richard Dawkins said recently that he didn't understand why we couldn't have cultural Christianity, and that there were fewer believing Christians in his country, in Great Britain, and that was a good thing, but he hated to see the cultural Christianity start to disappear and be replaced, in the case of Great Britain, in the context of that conversation, by Islam. But he seems to misunderstand that the cultural Christianity relies for its sustenance on real Christian faith, alive and active among the people. I think we've been lulled into thinking that our sort of liberal, enlightened values can subsist on their own, but they rely on what are fundamentally theological claims about man, about man's nature, and how society should be organized. And I think all societies are actually built on theological claims, normative and ontological claims about human nature, and what is right and wrong. And we lose sight of that at our peril, you know, we think that things like freedom of speech and human rights just exist out there in the ether, untethered to Christian moral precepts. It's totally wrong, it's totally wrong, and when we lose the Christianity, we're going to lose those. Those are jewels of Christian civilization, but they cannot exist on their own, and we're starting to see that in many, many ways. It's a Christian inheritance, as Tom Holland would say, who's agnostic, he wrote a great book called Dominion, which is a thorough book, but he even says that this idea of natural rights and free speech and private property rights, you don't get them out of the woods in Belgium when you're worshipping the river and the great Norse god of whatever nonsense.

You don't just get those ideas by thinking that the pebbles in your pocket have some sort of supernatural ability. Christianity gave us the birthright of the West, it is the birthright given by a Christian inheritance, and it cannot be repeated enough, because you remove Christianity from it, we're getting rid and we're squandering that 2,000-year inheritance, that 2,000-year inheritance. And the smart people that are honest, like Tom Holland, who's not even a believer, who's just an honest historian, you guys realize that all the good that you think is just normal will disappear when you get rid of the foundation that gave it to you in the first place. Tom Holland wrote a great book.

Tom Holland was right about everything in Dominion, and I talk about him in the book that the only thing that he got wrong is right at the end of the book, he pulled his punches and he said, these Christian values won't go away quickly, and what I'm here to say is that they aren't going to go away, it's not going to take generations or centuries, they're going away right now in real time. The world is in flames and biodynamics is a complete and total disaster, but it can't and won't ruin my day. Why? Because I start my day with a hot America first cup of blackout coffee.

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Promo code Charlie. So John, I'm quoting you correctly. It's not that America will collapse, that America will become evil.

Riff on that, please. Yeah, well, the implications for a post-Christian America is that, as I say in the book, we will have a pagan society that will be organized along pagan lines with pagan values, and that is a society in which force alone determines what is right and that the most powerful do what they want and the weak have to endure it. You know, and it's interesting, we talked about power earlier. Power in the pagan society, it works like this. Power is exercised by the powerful on their own behalf against the weak. Christianity inverted that. Christianity said power should... It's not that Christianity destroyed power distinctions or class distinctions, but it posited that power should be deployed by the powerful on behalf of the weak, and that was the key difference, and that is what we saw throughout Western civilization, the development of Europe.

The fundamental point that, like, all men are created equal comes from the Christian doctrine of the Mago Dei, right? And so if you reject that, if you say, we're going to reject Christianity, you know, Nietzsche was at least honest about this, right? The Marquis de Sade was at least honest about this. The Nazis were at least honest about this.

They were honest enough to take the implications of their rejection of Christianity seriously, right? And so the problem we have today as a vocabulary problem is that we're still using some of the vocabulary inherited from Christianity in Western civilization. You see the left talk about, you know, marginalized voices or human rights, right? But they're talking out of both sides of their mouth because what they're really interested in is a power dynamic in which they impose their will on people who disagree with them, right? And so they're just paying lip service to these echoes of our Christian past, when what we should expect is for that vocabulary eventually to be discarded and the naked exercise of power take its place.

And that really is what it's up against. It's a question of power, and power is not the most important thing for Christians because we have a different calling, which is to make the disciples of every nation on earth. It's not political power, it's not the ultimate end or an aim for Christians. Do you believe it's time for us as Christians to get deeper into the arena of how power is administered politics and start to contest for these power centers and to, quite honestly, call out paganism as the great threat that it is?

Is it time to rally the troops, if you will? I think it's time to let go of the idea that we can maintain this neutral stance, right? This idea that we're going to have a neutral public square, we're going to have neutral institutions, right?

Those were luxuries that only a predominantly Christian society could afford, and we're no longer a predominantly Christian society. So now as we enter a post-Christian era, we need to contest for control of these institutions, for control of the public square. We don't want neutral institutions for the sake of neutrality. We wanted neutral institutions because we believe in things like tolerance and non-coercion as Christians. But if we're not going to have a Christian society, and we're not, then we're not interested in neutrality anymore.

What we're interested in is having good institutions, institutions and structures in our public life and our national life that foster human flourishing, that foster families, that foster faith and charitable organizations and Christianity out in the public square, and a public square that is oriented around the truths that Christianity proclaims. So I think we need to shift our way of thinking, and we're not ever going to go back. We can't go back to this notion of neutrality, that you just live your truth and I'll live my truth. It's time to fight for the truth. And as I said earlier, to do that, we should find and fight on ground.

We can win and start thinking about major changes that you might have to make in your life to make it possible to fight and hold ground. Very good. Well, John Daniel Davidson, excellent work, pagan America. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.