The Daily Signal - John Daniel Davidson on What a Post-Christian America Looks Like

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

John Daniel Davidson, author of the new book, "Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come," says Christians will be a minority in the United States in the near future. What does that mean for life as we know it in the United States? What will the new pagans be like? What does this mean for our politics? We explore all these questions and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, May 15th. I'm Kate Trinco. Today, I interview John Daniel Davidson, author of the new book, Pagan America. We discuss what a post-Christian America could look like and how it will affect Americans' way of life. Stay tuned for my conversation with John Daniel Davidson after this. So what is going on with Ukraine? What is this deal with the border? How do you feel about school choice? These are the questions that come up to conservatives sitting at parties, at dinner, at family reunions. What do you say when these questions come up? I'm Mark Geinney, the host of the podcast for you. Heritage Explains brought to you by all of your friends here at

the Heritage Foundation. Through the creative use of stories, the knowledge of our super passionate experts, we bring you the most important policy issues of the day and break them down in a way that is understandable. So check out Heritage Explains wherever you get your podcasts. Joining me today is John Daniel Davidson, author of the new book, Pagan America,

The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. John is also a senior editor at the Federalist. John, thanks for coming on. Hey, thanks for having me. Okay, so it's no secret that American's religiosity has declined, but your book argues

that perhaps we are not cognizant of what a faithless America means. You write that we are nearing a time when Christians will be a minority, in the United States. What do you think will be different about a post-Christian America and, let's say, 50 years from now? Yeah, the basic claim in the book is that a post-Christian America means that we lose our American way of life, our American system of government, the Bill of Rights, things like that, rule of law, consent to the government, freedom of speech. those things rely on a specifically Christian cosmology, specifically Christian claims about the human being, about our relationships to one another, our relationship to God, and how we should organize society. So without an active Christian faith alive among the people themselves, we can't have a republic of self-governing citizens.

And I argue that that's how the founders understood what they were doing and that they knew that form of government. and that kind of way of organizing society would only be possible with a Christian people. So on that, because you mentioned our founders, do you think the United States being post-Christian will be, say, fundamentally different than New Zealand or Argentina being post-Christian? I mean, obviously throughout the Western world, we're seeing a decline of religiosity. Yes. Is it going to affect our country in a different way? No, I don't think so.

I mean, I wrote the book about America because I'm an American, and I'm vested. I have a vested interest in the fate of my country. But I think we see kind of the post-Christian West all going a similar way toward a new resurgence of paganism or paganism in a modern context. You mentioned New Zealand. You know, the fundamental claim of the book is that a pagan society is one that is organized on class, hard class systems or caste systems and where might makes right, basically, based on force and coercion. Right. Things like human rights are not going to exist in a pagan political order. They didn't in the past and they won't in the future. So when you look at even a place like New Zealand, right, which is maybe arguably further along in the process of decristianization than America, we sort of start to see in more obvious ways. And there's other countries we could point to. And I do in the book of how this post-Christianity is taking shape, really in the form of tyrannical.

state that crushes individual rights, that crushes the individual, that attacks the family, that attacks private property. We see that in New Zealand. We definitely during COVID, we saw that in Australia. We see that in Great Britain, in Ireland, with these laws against, let's say, praying silently outside abortion clinics. It's illegal now in many parts of Great Britain to do that. So I think in some ways when you look at the Anglosphere, you can kind of see where we're

headed in America. They're a little bit further along on some of these things. Okay. So you just mentioned, you know, that in this pagan order, human rights wouldn't be valued, you know, painted this very dark image. And, you know, it seemed like a central thesis of the book was paganism of old was really horrible. Warning to the fainthearted. I felt quite sick when I was reading your description of Aztecs torturing babies. I was like, okay, thanks. But you say that post-Christian paganism won't necessarily be any kinder or gentler. Couldn't people argue that, hey, they may not. believe in the Trinity anymore, but they've learned about empathy and the importance of that. Why is your view of post-Christian paganism so bleak and what's it grounded in? Well, because I think that in order to maintain the Christian morality, right, and these Christian moral precepts, you have to accept the underlying normative claims, which are theological claims about what human beings are, right, that we're chief among them, the doctrine of

Imago Day, that we're created in the image and likeness of God, right? And from that, we get things like human rights, you know, and consent to the governed, right? And all of the things that we associate with our American way of life in our system of government. But if you reject or you discard those underlying theological normative claims about the person, there's no basis for respecting human rights. And in fact, in pagan society, it was just the opposite. It was a moral duty to subjugate or enslave or pillage a people. that were weaker than you, right?

They were naturally slaves. And that's what Aristotle argued. That's what all the pagans accepted as the proper way to understand the world and what human beings are and what their relationship should be to one another. And so I think it's maybe a little bit naive or it's a little bit overly optimistic to think that we can retain Christian morality without the Christian faith from which it springs. That is to say that you can have the cross. culture without the cult, right?

Okay. First time I've been accused of being overly optimistic in a minute. So we've been throwing around this word pagan a lot, and I'm wondering if you could, to go back to my college classes, terminology, explain your definition, explain your term. Does this mean people who are worshipping Athena, Zeus, or are you talking about something different? Right, right. So I say this explicitly in the book, we should not expect the post-Christian paganism or neo-paganism or modern paganism to take the same form as pre-Christian ancient paganism.

I don't think we're going to see a sudden flowering of altars to Zeus and Apollo in Times Square or a sudden resurgence of witchcraft, although we are seeing that. That won't be the major features, I think, of a postmodern paganism, right? It's really the resurgence in a modern context of the pagan ethos. And the pagan ethos was one in which you were free to assign divine status to things, to the human. here and now to places to phenomenon and even to people. And it rejected transcendent moral truth claims, right? It rejected the fundamental cosmological vision of the Christian religion. And how that worked itself out and how it is working itself out now is the embrace of a radical kind of subjectivity, a moral subjectivity that we see all across our society.

of try to tease that out in a lot of the sort of high profile public policy and culture war debates that we're having. I argue our manifestations of this reassertion of the pagan ethos in the modern context and a rejection of objective moral truth that is sort of, you know, the beating heart of Christianity, the claims that God makes about his creation and about himself. What is one of those public policy debates that you see as acting out that tension? Well, a big and obvious one is the changing ways that we talk about and debate abortion, right? And I walk through this in the book how when Roe v. Wade was decided the justification for abortion was that this is not really a human beings, a clump of cells.

It's no different than getting an appendectomy. You're not taking a human life, so we don't really even need to go there. Advances in medical technology quickly rendered that justification meaningless, right? it became clear very quickly that this was a unique human life that was being taken. And so we shifted, the rhetoric shifted, to safe, legal and rare, which anyone from the 90s remembers the Clinton's invoking, right, about abortion. It should be safe, legal and rare, but let's not talk too much about, you know, the ontologically what we're doing here and whether or not this is a human being.

And the medical technology continued to advance in remarkable ways, right? and you started to be able to operate in utero on on born children and cured, you know, diseases and correct defects in utero before birth. And we saw a shift about 10 years ago in the rhetoric and a new justification for abortion was put forward, which is now the reigning sort of dogma of the pro-abortion, you know, lobby, which is to shout your abortion, to celebrate it as a positive good, something that vindicates the rights of women, right? And it is very dark and it's disturbing, but we have to call it out for what it is

and explain that this marks a radical philosophical departure from what has gone on before such that now the only thing that matters to the pro-abortion sort of movement, the only thing that determines whether or not a human being has any worth is a life that deserves to be protected or a life that can be discarded with impunity is the will and desire of the mother, right? And so here again we see this power dynamic that I say is properly understood as pagan. The one with power, that is the mother, wields that power in their own interest over and against the powerless, which is the unborn child. And that is the pagan dynamic. The Christian world view, the Christian more,

moral universe inverted that and said the powerful need to exert their power and exercise their power on behalf of the weak. And paganism has always rejected that. And in our time is rejecting it in new forms like in the abortion debate. And I think in the book you mentioned, I'm going to butcher this example, so correct me if need be, that there was a young woman who like worshipped the abortion pill on TikTok or something. This is why I'm not on TikTok, among many other reasons. Yeah, what is this religiosity around abortion? And then, of course, you also talk a lot about child sacrifice and how it was so prevalent in a lot of pagan societies.

Why, I mean, yes, I understand the powerful, sometimes the powerless come in their way, but it almost seems like it goes beyond that. Yeah, it does. It does. This was a woman who did a series of videos about how to build an altar to your abortion, like to make an altar, a pagan altar at home,

and perform these ceremonies celebrating yourself and affirming yourself in taking the life of this child, right? And they don't use those terms, right? But it's a very odd admixture of scientific kind of materialist language together with this neo-pagan, these neo-pagan, you know, accoutrements, like an altar, right? A very pagan practice. And you're right, child sacrifice has been part of all pagan societies. And part of the pagan religion, you know, I mentioned earlier that paganism is a kind of inversion of Christianity. The atrocity that is attendant to human sacrifice and especially child sacrifice, which I talk about in the Aztecs as well as other cultures have engaged in this,

part of that is a way, it's both a belief system and a system of social control. And everybody has to be on board with it, right? There has to be unanimity around the atrocities, right? You can't have anyone who objects and sort of rips the veil off the monstrosity of what is happening, right? And so you have this uniformity of practice of what was called public or state morality in the ancient pagan world, right? which was why it was so important for the Christians. It was so important to the pagan Romans that the Christians just offer that pinch of incense to Caesar. They couldn't have anyone dissenting from the state morality.

It didn't matter what they believed. It mattered that they offered the pinch of incense. And I think this is also true in a much more horrifying way about child sacrifice. That's why it was such an affront to the ancient Romans that the Christians, the early Christians would rescue these children that were discarded by the roadside. that were left to die from exposure, rescued them and raised them and took them in as their own. That was a scandal to the Romans because it exposed the atrocity for what it was. And that was a problem.

That's always been a problem in pagan societies. So on the flip side, you talk about our pagan culture also exploring immortality about... Yes, transhumanism. Yes, about like someone having a robot body, but the consciousness. of stuff, what the heck is going on here and how is that related to the pagan mindset? Yeah, this is an interesting chapter on both on transgenderism but also another treatment of transhumanism and they're closely related and what appears at first in the transgender movement or transgender ideology to be a kind of worship of self and the idea that you can create yourself

that human beings are like Lego parts and we can like sort of reconfigure ourselves according to our own will, which is sort of almost like a form of Satanism, right, that you can do as thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law, I think, as Anton LeVay said. The transhumanist movement goes a little bit deeper into this ideology, and I think if you go far enough into it, you see that it really is a form of pagan worship. Now, they don't use those terms, right? A lot of these guys are Silicon Valley types who believe in life extension or, as you say, uploading your consciousness to a robot body, right?

But the end state, like the way it works itself out is that AI and these powerful technologies and computers that are going to control this process that are being created to accomplish this, to accomplish immortality, are the new gods. And they are talked about as such that the people who are creating AI talk about creating new gods. And I use the example of one Silicon Valley weirdo named Brian Johnson, who was profiled by Time Magazine last fall, who is committed to this idea of immortality. He thinks he can cheat death. And his whole life has been organized around an effort to slower reverse the aging process. And he made his fortune in an AI being applied in the medical field. And he has given over his life to this AI algorithm that he believes, if he follows it, rigorously and radically, and he does, will confer on him immortality.

Now, that to me is a perfect example of what I mean by a modern post-Christian, ostensibly secular and materialist person actually is a new pagan. And that is paganism in the modern post-Christian context. And this person's pagan God is AI. And I have to say, from listening to Brian Johnson's interview with Tucker Carlson a couple of weeks ago, it sounded like his diet alone. I was like, is life really worth living? Exactly. Exactly, yeah.

So, again, one of the oddities we're seeing in the movement, you know, we're also seeing the rise of euthanasia. So we've got Brian Johnson trying to live forever. And then we have Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, you list some other countries where people are choosing to die with the support of the state, the Netherlands. You can even do it for a mental health reason. You don't need to have a physical health reason. How are both of these things coming out of this post-Christian world? Well, this is a good example of the caste system I talked about earlier in pagan societies. The rich, the ruling class, the privileged class, they're the ones that will have access to these life extension technologies to the AI algorithms that will allow them to live longer and attain in their minds' immortality.

The underclass will be offered euthanasia, right? And the justifications for euthanasia have also changed, just like in the abortion debate, the slope is slippery and deep. when it comes to euthanasia. Canada's Euthanasia program, which they call a maid, medical assistance in dying, a very antiseptic name for a brutal practice, is not very old. It's only a few years old. I think less than 10 years, they've had it around, and they've steadily expanded the categories of people

who are eligible for euthanasia, including now you don't have to have a terminal illness. You just have to be in mental distress or have a substance abuse problem. And the National Health Service in Canada has become, a series of articles last year sort of like exposed this really disturbing practice of national health service workers encouraging or suggesting euthanasia to people who have complicated medical situations or who are kind of living in financially precarious circumstances that rather than help people out of these troubles or give them the care that they need,

they're just offering euthanasia instead as an alternative. And then as part of this, also the most obvious thing in the world, the Canadian government, the National Health Service, is also calculating how much money they can save the National Health Service by expanding the euthanasia program, right? They've actually tallied it up. Yeah, this would not be the right place for fiscal responsibility, maybe. Right, right. But, you know, the point being that if you just base these things on consent alone, that too is a slippery slope. Consent can be manufactured. and eventually discarded. And there's already cases in the Netherlands and in Belgium and increasingly in Canada of doctors just sort of making the decision on behalf of patients who they believe are not able to make a decision in their own best interests, and they just kill them.

It's interesting you bring up the word consent. I think especially since the Me Too movement, we've had a lot of interesting discussions as a society is consent enough because, you know, whatever your beliefs would seem to come out of me too was women often agreed they had consented, but they weren't happy. They felt used. And you also brought up that maybe in a more pagan world, pedophilia would become okay or would become a thing because people would argue, well, if consents what matters and kids can consent.

You noted that in some of these countries, kids are allowed to consent to being euthanized. In this country, they're allowed to consent to genital mutilation and sterilization. and these so-called gender-affirming care. Now, if you argue that a 12-year-old can consent to a double mastectomy, then on what basis are you going to say that a 12-year-old can't consent to sexual relations with an adult? There is no basis for it. And this brutal, inexorable logic is going to play itself out and already is playing itself out. And we are going to see people step forward with their underage partners

and say we demand that our love be affirmed and recognized, and enshrined in law, just the same as everybody else. This is a consensual relationship. On what basis are you going to tell us that we have to sort of stay underground or that our love is illegal? I mean, you know, the slogans write themselves at this point. Yeah, pretty horrifying prospect for the future. To return back a little, you said, okay, we're not going to have altars to Zeus and Athena.

But you mentioned witchcraft is on the rise. You talked about Satanism being, I believe, increasing as well. I mean, when you go shop for women's clothes or accessories these days, you cannot get away from astrology. What is this religiosity for these, this is a judgy word, but these weird sort of things happening? What's driving that? What's going on there? It's an implosion of like secular materialism, right? Secular materialism and sort of coldly rational worldview was something was an interregnum that we were.

in the middle of the last century, right? It wasn't going to last, and it's winding down. And in its place, new forms of religious belief and of supernatural and maybe even superstitious beliefs and practices are creeping back into what is supposed to be a secular rationalist world, right? And the reason for that is that the post-Christian era brings with a disfigurement of reason. And we see this in the trans debate that we were just talking about in the justifications for abortion. You have this odd moment that we're in right now where there's a mix of invocations of science on the one hand in a total disregard of science on the other.

Now, as a Christian myself, I believe there is no inherent contradiction between reason and faith between science and revealed religion. And that's a very ancient tradition within Christianity, that there is. There's no conflict there. That as St. Augustine said, all truth is my God's truth, right? I believe he said that. Someone's going to fact check me. Not me. But we're seeing what C.S. Lewis called the materialist magician emerge, right?

And that's this admixture of a scientific materialist mindset that where belief in God, the mind remains closed to belief in God. it opens up to spiritual forces, that it doesn't exactly worship, but it does pay attention to and it does in some ways serve. And Lewis talks about this in the screw tape letters and it talks about it in another way in both the abolition of man and that hideous strength, that this is the post-Christian end state of what Satan and his minions would like to create, this materialist magician who who is closed to belief in God, but open to spirits.

And that's what we see in this surging interest in witchcraft, like on TikTok, and people making altars to abortion and sudden popularity or surging popularity in astrology and things like that. That's to be expected as the Christian worldview and the Christian order implodes. With it will also implode confidence in reason and science and knowledge. objective knowledge as such, and we're going to see a resurgence of kind of pagan superstition that we see now. So last question, as we've discussed all these horrifying, bleak, possible futures, is there any

reason for hope? Is there anything that people of faith can do now to try to avoid this? Well, for Christians, there's always reason for hope and never a reason to despair. Even if we lose our republic, which I think we will, that's not a reason to despair because the Christian truth and the Christian vision and the Christian religion was always the thing that broke pagan empires. It was the only thing that broke pagan empires. Paganism would persist among a people until that people encountered Christianity. And so Christians have to prepare for persecution in the new pagan order, but that's also not a reason to despair because we've been

persecuted before. And it makes the church stronger and it makes it more faithful and it will make it a more potent weapon against the pagan order that is coming into being. And I think what people can do practically, I talk about this at the end of the book, this isn't one of those books that has a final chapter that's like these 10 steps to save America. What? It's not optimistic. Is it these nine steps? Yeah. It's not optimistic, but it is hopeful. And one of those things that I talk about is, yes, you have to build up thick community. Yes, you have to invest in your faith the community and in your churches. Yes, you have to sort of get your kids out of public school and build up private school networks and homeschool networks, but you also have to take your faith

out into the public square, even in the face of persecution, and you have to find and fight on ground you can win. And that may mean moving to a different state or do a different town where you can participate at the local level and help elect a conservative or a Christian city council or take over the school district or get the pornographic books out of the library. You know, we're not going to win over the whole country, and certainly entire swaths of the country are now forfeit, places like California. But there are places that you can fight and still win and bring the Christian faith back into the public square, back into the streets. Christianity can't be just something that's private. You know, we cannot cabin our religion in our homes and in our churches.

We have to live it out in the town square. And we need to find places and ways to do that. And we need to do it even in the face of certain persecution. Okay. Thank you very much. Again, this is John Davidson, author of Pagan America. And that'll do it for today's episode. In the meantime, if you haven't had a chance,

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