Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears…
In a 2009 report for The Guardian, writer and broadcaster Cole Moreton speculated that paganism was “beginning to look like” the UK’s “new national faith.” At the time, there were reportedly a quarter of a million people who identified as practicing pagans—more than the number of Buddhists and almost the same as the number of Jews. That’s a massive jump from the 2001 census which recorded only 40,000 pagans in the country. Noting that many won’t call themselves such in front of a government official, The Pagan Federation claims upwards of 360,000 “committed, practising pagans,” making the group the country’s fourth-largest religion.
Across the pond, a similar story of pagan growth is emerging. A 2014 study put the number of “practicing witches” in the U.S. at a possible high of 1.5 million, more than the number of mainline Presbyterians. Two decades after a 1990 CUNY survey found only 8,000 Wicca adherents in the country, the U.S. Census Bureau reported a rise to 342,000. Ten years on, the number of Wiccans has skyrocketed to nearly one million.
Continue with numbers and we’ll soon run into conflicting stats: some surveys rate the number of people turning to paganism drastically higher or drastically lower. The difficulty of landing solid numbers is due to the diversity of flavors that exist under the pagan banner. Some consider paganism “the broadest of churches, spanning witchcraft, Wicca (the organised witchcraft-based religion founded in the 1950s), shamanism, druidry, heathenry and a vast swathe of non-affiliated ‘eclectic’ pagans.” (From here on, we’ll use the term pagan in reference to all the above.)
Data supplies only a skeleton understanding of growing pagan sensibilities in mainstream Western culture. Just as significant are what Moreton calls the “unofficial, instinctive pagans” who celebrate the summer solstice by “going out into the garden at dawn and just tuning in.” Such instinctive paganism is popping up everywhere, from social media’s “witchtok” trend garnering billions of views to the mystical Green Man being featured prominently on invitations to the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla.
Why this enthusiasm? Why now?
Dr. Denise Cush, emeritus professor of religion and education at Bath Spa University, chalks it up largely to the “disenchantment” of the world, something sociologist Max Weber believed was wrought by modernity and the scientific and industrial revolutions. Paganism, she says, “seeks to ‘re-enchant’ the world and restore the sense of awe, wonder and magic.”
Describing the potentiality of a “genuinely post-Christian future” in America, Ross Douthat says the “pagan religious conception” bequeaths to its adherents the understanding 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… [I]t insists that this everyday is divinely endowed and shaped, meaningful and not random, a place where we can truly hope to be at home.”
It’s not all vague transcendence talk, however. Among the monikers used to describe the shift is the pagan-adjacent term nature-based religion. English historian and University of Bristol professor Ronald Hutton says paganism fulfills “a need for a spiritualised natural world in a time of ecological crisis.” Like other religious movements, paganism fills both the spiritual needs of the religiously disenchanted but also a practical, earthbound, social need—like the Black church during the Civil Rights Movement or the current trend that sees Christianity as a “bulwark” against threats to Western culture.
Christian leaders tend to see rising numbers of nonreligious and pagan folks as a cause for mourning, a sign of the decline of Christianity, a rejection of norms established in a Gospel-influenced society, and a regression to say the least. But French philosopher and political theorist Chantal Delsol thinks it is only Christian culture which might be coming to an end, not Christianity itself. In her 2021 book, the title of which translates to The End of the Christian World, she points out that much of the scaffolding of Christendom was raised in reaction to pagan Greco-Roman society and, later, the heathenism of European and Britannic tribes. Reactionary aspects of the faith were then exported to the rest of what would become known as the West. Essentially, the Christianity we know today would not be what it is without paganism. Christianity brought “normative inversion” to pagan Rome, she says, and “what is happening today is an undoing, but it is also a redoing. We are inverting the normative inversion. We are repaganizing.”
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There is only one thing in the modern world that has been face to face with Paganism; there is only one thing in the modern world which in that sense knows anything about Paganism: and that is Christianity.
—G.K. Chesterton
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The rebirth of paganism has been feared ever since Christianity gained normative status in the Roman Empire in 313 AD and state church status a few decades later. But paganism’s rise today might not be pushing us into a permanently post-Christian age. My argument is that it’s pointing us backwards, at least aesthetically, to a pre-Christian era and providing an opportunity for recovery of elements that have fallen to the wayside in Western Christian culture. For an imperiled Church, this might not be so bad as it seems.
“They err who say the world is turning pagan again,” C.S. Lewis wrote to Fr. Giovanni Calabria. “Would that it were!” The twentieth century Christian apologist feared that Christianity and the Christian-shaped culture that he lived in was moving away from, “not only the Law of Christ, but even the Law of Nature as known by the Pagans.” Lewis knew that Christianity had quite a healthy track record of engaging and converting pagans, after all, and in his stark assessment, many men of his time had “lost not only the supernatural light, but also the natural light which the pagans possessed.”
The late Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz may have gone too far when he said in 2009 that “we are now living in a world that is empty of Christianity or Judeo-Christianity.” However, it’s increasingly apparent that the void left by a faltering Christian vision “is now being filled with something else and that something else is paganism…we are well into a neo-pagan era.”
The path out of a post-Christian world might well be marked by pagan signs. Christians would do well to understand that those signs are not as strange as they seem. We still use variants of old pagan names for our days, months, and planets. Rabbi Steinsaltz and writer Neil Gaiman are on the same page in positing that all the old gods simply put on new clothes and re-entered the world. Many of the old myths are gift-wrapped in our new stories. In fact, as Steven D. Smith argues in Pagans and Christians in the City, the rise of modern secularism, often expressed in late-era culture wars, is merely the disguised return of the pagan mindset.
I am not so concerned with the cultural evidence of paganism, however, as I am with the thing itself. What does a renewed pagan sensibility bring to the world and what could such sensibilities bring to an understanding of Christianity’s place in the world?
For one, it brings a reacquaintance with myth, which lends symbols their value. The Christian myths (the stories from which its truths arise) seem to have lost all value in public life except for temporary, utilitarian reference: an illustration here, an inspirational image there, a comforting line from Scripture in the State of the Union address. Such appropriated Christianity (of which Christians are also guilty) does little to sway souls, as religion only for its practical benefits shortchanges the entirety of the religious enterprise. When it comes to Christianity or any religious system, as Lewis wrote, “it is the myth which is the vital and nourishing element in the whole concern.”
Arguments to restore “Christian values” or bring about moral reform are entirely defensible, but those will not return Christianity to its prior normative status. The shift towards paganism draws out something more necessary and more captivating to the human mind: a mythic handle on religion. Paganism is defined less by correct doctrine and more by true story—true in the mythic sense—a story that makes our stories make sense. The present pagan turn shows that no culture can move so far that it leaves myth behind. We must have some form of it to survive. Douthat writes: “The basic pattern of human existence and experience, an ordered and mathematically beautiful cosmos that…supplies all kinds of wild spiritual experiences even in our allegedly disenchanted age…, makes a general openness to metaphysical possibilities a fundamentally reasonable default.”
The developing neo-pre-Christian milieu, a milieu which embraces this fundamentally reasonable, fundamentally mythic, and fundamentally pagan default, is preferable to the alternative: a culture populated by “Christian atheists,” a Christ-literate but not Christ-haunted society. It’s preferable, for the Christian cause, that those who once presumed to escape the world’s corruption by Christ, and are now drifting from the faith, become pagan rather than apostate.
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Lewis lamented how often he felt at “cross-purposes with the modern world,” writing in Surprised by Joy, “I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.” After turning atheist in his youth, he retained and further developed a love of myths and wonder-evoking stories. They made him feel an enchantment that the oughtness of his Christian upbringing could not. The religion of his childhood was, he said, a subject “associated with lowered voices, almost as if it were something medical.”
My own religious upbringing was influenced progressively by fundamentalist, Baptist, Evangelical, and then Reformed traditions. The balance of Christianity in my childhood weighed heavily on explanation over experience, rules and right doctrine over reality and wrestling, and often sterile dogma over sacred appreciation. The mythic quality of the faith had been lost to a kind of clinical imperiousness. I did not wonder; I just knew the right things to believe.
As Josh Nadeau expresses similarly from his experience: “Sure, I could explain a lot: the Trinity, ontological arguments for the existence of God, nature-person distinctions. But did I experience? Did I thrill? Could I stand, alone, before my Maker and simply marvel. Could I believe in a way that captured my heart?” Certainly not all believers (or non-believers) will express their discontent with religion in these terms, but many would.
The way I see it now, if Christianity is to reassert itself in the West, there must be symmetry between clear doctrine and the holy haze of mystery. The seeming chasm between a system of explanations and an experiential, mysterious, ever-living revelation maps almost precisely onto the heart of the Pagan-Christian divide.
Many discouraged by what they perceive as the organless functioning of the Church are attracted to paganism (and pagan-influenced ideas) because of its embrace of a spirituality expressed via nature, mysticism, community, and the self. Paganism’s rejection of institutional rigor pairs with a longing for a feeling of enchantment. What is felt is more important than what is known.
This disparity between the seemingly structured Christian concept of the world and the wilder pagan vision might lead us to see the latter as hostile to religion when it is anything but. Chesterton decried the common conception of pagans as merely “crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an irresponsible state.” In reality, the pagans of bygone days tended to be “too rigid” in discipline, dignity, responsibility, and obedience. “They were above all things reasonable and respectable.”
Yes, the pagan is reasonable to the world around her. She beholds it with awe—it is magicked and mythologized—on measure with what it deserves. She errs foremost in the elision of created and creator. But her feelings aren’t incorrect, only misdirected.
Contrary to the prevailing view that we live in a disenchanted world, Francis Spufford points out that humans “cannot stop producing enchantments.” If one source of enchantment loses its capability to convey meaning, that meaning will be sought elsewhere. The rise of contemporary paganism (even your garden variety TikTok witches) is a cry for connection to something more than what’s offered by both wonder-starved religion and an increasingly naturalistic, machine world that reduces humans to augments of technology.
The modern world yearns to be reminded that the supernatural invades the natural all the time, and the natural is the aesthetic of the supernatural. Buried beneath our current pagan ponderings is an impulse to see these elements reconnected.
“The sensitive, cultured atheist seems at times to enjoy the aesthetic trappings of Christianity in a way which the believer can only envy,” Lewis wrote. While aesthetic enjoyment is not to be confused with intellectual assent, aesthetics do communicate in a way that pure intellectual address cannot. We know something of what the architects of high-spired gothic cathedrals believed without an encyclopedia entry to tell us so. Again, what is felt is more important than what is known. Today’s pagans aim to recover the feeling.
Pagan signs exist because they are what mankind knows best. Attend to these signs and what accompanies them is an expanded comprehension of the earth as a divine cathedral via its aesthetic and mythic trappings and via its definition of the supernatural by the natural. In such a comprehension, doctrine and gospel become something more than dictates to be propounded and defended before a hostile world. They become a panoply of sources for enchantment, without which we cannot survive.
Pagan attentiveness gives a man the capability to feast on and be nourished by the entire world, including those elements some consider exclusively Christian. “A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth,” Lewis avers, “would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it.” This sentiment plays out in faded form among those who speak of stories like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and The Chronicles of Narnia as life-giving, even life-saving.
The enchanting, mystic, and mysterious aspects of Christianity—those which cannot be completely reasoned about, only completely experienced (and even then, not completely understood)—enlighten all who enter the world. The West’s troubled relationship with truth might give rise for a return to belief in the Christ-story as myth once more. The grand pagan myths of the world’s creation were not, for Lewis, “a hostile novelty breaking in on my traditional beliefs. On the contrary, that cosmology is what I started from.” Perhaps the West is reaching such a starting point again.
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The modern pagan may be loath to admit that his worldview includes the tenor of spiritual realities spoken of in Christian scriptures: demigods and demons, invisible but intelligent forces of vice and virtue, “principalities and powers and depraved hypersomatic beings.” The pagan regularly appeals to, or at least acknowledges, such forces outside of himself—he operates in the world as if they were real, as if a potion, a charm, or a chant will order the world in such a way as to make his crush fall in love with him or his nemesis stumble and embarrass himself before an audience.
Christians in traditions that I have been party to have a much narrower view. We believe in spiritual realities less than we should, especially when it comes to supernatural dalliances prohibited by Scripture. Many believe in magic or witchcraft or astrology only so far as it enables them to condemn the practices of those who treat them as real. Certainly, there are limits to knowledge, but more consequential are the limits to our imagination. When my pagan friend tells me he had a séance and talked to Greg, I think, probably, you did talk to Greg (or some spiritual entity impersonating him).
In Narnia’s Last Battle, the Calormen leader Rishda Tarkaan preaches of and prays to the god Tash. But it soon becomes clear that his belief is merely political and practical, one useful in mobilizing his army and subduing the Narnians. He doesn’t really believe in the god of his country and, thus, grows fearful when something begins consuming creatures from behind a stable door. Farsight the Eagle observes of Rishda, “There goes one who has called on gods he does not believe in. How will it be with him if they have really come?”
The Last Battle recounts the struggle between an institutional religious culture, one confident in the correctness of its vision of the world, and a wild, unwieldy people who look to nature and ancient stories for signs of their god. Both visions of the world hold elements of truth. But Rishda’s familiarity with the structure he has always known fuels his lack of belief and dooms him and most of his people in the end. Perhaps if he had let go of what he knew, if he had become as inquisitively pagan as the Narnians were, he might have been saved.
Pagans today won’t speak of gods arriving in physical form. (Christians needn’t fear if they did because that’s no strange matter—the Christ-god really has come.) Rather, the pagan will look for the communication of the divine in the natural, material world, an idea not at odds with Christian orthodoxy. In the words of John of Damascus, “…the Lord of matter, becoming matter for my sake, [took] up His abode in matter and [is] working out my salvation through matter.”
The cross on which Christ hung, the hill on which he died, the Gospels that tell this tale are all matter and are tightly bound to physical and historical dimensions. The body crushed so that blood flowed? The bread and wine taken to commemorate this crushing? All of it, matter.
“I honor matter,” John says, “not as God, but as a channel of divine strength and grace… Because of the Incarnation, I salute all remaining matter with reverence.” Perhaps the way back to real Christian belief will show itself through the testament of the natural, material world—a world that must be recognized as an avenue of enchantment and thoroughly spiritual.
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In some ways, the advent of Christianity changed little in the supernatural worldview of its time. This is not because Christianity isn’t vastly different from the religious structures which came before it, but because all things find their redemption in Christ. The pagan impulses find their fruition in the Christian story. Pagan error finds its correction in Christianity. All of matter, including those gods and myths generated by mattered forms are truth, as Thomas Aquinas put it, “under the figure of vile bodies.”
In Athens, Paul argued from “the unknown god” to God-made-known, from the phenomena of lower forms to the realm of the highest form. The apostles didn’t obliterate pagan ideas but stripped them of blurred reflections till truth shone forth. All roads might not lead to heaven, but many do lead to divine reality.
Mythical radiance rests on all of matter. In answer to Job, God boasts himself in the path of lightning, in the starry belt of Orion, and in the scattering of the wind. He suggests himself in the provision of the lion’s prey, the joyful flapping of the ostrich’s wings, the stallion’s flowing mane. Christ compels potential followers to learn his nature by beholding “the birds of the air” and the “flowers of the field.” All these are signs, signs by which our culture might be guided into the Christian myth—a myth which many are prepared to embrace thanks to newfound pagan sensibilities.
Supernatural truth presents itself as a quiet testament within material reality. There’s never been an age or land in which “men did not know that corn and wine were the blood and body of a dying and yet living God.” Aligned with its general openness to metaphysical possibilities, the pagan worldview holds within its imaginative womb the cycle of incarnation-death-rebirth. Hence the “parallels” and “pagan Christs” in our myths, pop culture, and entertainment. “They ought to be there,” Lewis says. “It would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome.”
Many believers who lived closer to pre-Christian times didn’t see the existence of paganism as a threat. They understood that divine light shines on all. Today, we seem to be witnessing a restoration of the suppressed pagan imagination. Perhaps some must be good pagans before they can be good Christians.
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