Senior editor at The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson, has a crusading spirit. No one would accuse him of lacking confidence. “Today, there can be no doubt,” he declares in his newest book, “that America has definitively entered a post-Christian era.” It’s conventional wisdom in Davidson’s circles, but he makes the case with panache in Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. The title effectively captures the spirit of the book. This is an author who has read Rod Dreher, architect of The Benedict Option, and judged him “too optimistic.” Don’t pick this book as a beach read.
As a bracing warning against the evils of modernity, Pagan America is fighting for space on an overstuffed shelf. A great many writers have taken it upon themselves to diagnose or denounce the progressive left, and Davidson’s book has most of the familiar elements: sermons against woke intolerance, reminders of repressive Covid policies, scathing denunciations of gender ideology. But he livens up his account with some more colorful elements: crusading Spaniards pounding the bloodthirsty Aztecs, British colonialists grappling with dark African gods, and a heroic recounting of the story of St. Boniface. One odd chapter suggests that generative AI is a front for demonic manifestation. Another considers how the “self-care” movement can tilt into a kind of witchcraft or black magic. All these imaginative forays are vivified by Davidson’s palpable yearning for honorable combat, of a sort that would enable him to vanquish Christ’s enemies on a clean field of battle. It’s endearing, and often evocative, but in the end the book bogs down in apocalyptic rhetoric and fails to deliver much useful advice.
The narrative of Pagan America can be summarized quite easily. As Christianity has spread across the globe, it has pushed paganism into abeyance, replacing it with the humane, reason-based norms of Christendom. We should be exceedingly grateful, and not only because Christ’s blood redeems us from sin. Paganism, in Davidson’s telling, is cruel and nihilistic, exulting in torture and human sacrifice as the strong dominate the weak. Sadly, those pagan norms seem to exercise a kind of gravitational pull on human societies, such that pagan barbarism re-asserts itself as Christianity’s influence wanes. In the insane excesses of woke culture, Davidson sees the shadow of paganism rising from its all-too-shallow grave. It’s a haunting line of reflection that seems to channel W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Davidson is a liberal of sorts, though it might be best to call him a “wistful liberal” in light of his deep pessimism. Against the neo-integralists, or critics like Patrick Deneen, he does think that the American experiment was well-conceived, planting a sober constitutionalism in a Christian soil. It has borne some good fruit. Unfortunately, the plant has now been uprooted, which means it is doomed to wither and die. Liberalism is only stable, Davidson argues, when it is sustained by a Christian culture, which supplies a natural law framework, a healthy culture, and thriving faith communities that care for people and help them find meaning in ordinary life. As Christianity erodes, liberalism will collapse along with it. Davidson urges his Christian readers to brace for “the ruin of our civilization,” a dark future of “unremitting cruelty, violence, narcissism, and despair.”
Again and again, a promising-looking enquiry devolves into an empty exercise in therapeutic panic.
That sounds bad. What is to be done? Davidson has strong sympathies with Dreher’s Benedict Option, but he also reminds readers to be active in defending truth and goodness. His crusading spirit is not content with the monastery; he wants Christians to embrace “the Boniface Option” in the spirit of Hernán Cortés or the British colonialists. In practice, he advises readers to get involved in local government (because Washington is irredeemable), boycott woke corporations, and try very hard to win back some ground in the gender-ideology wars. By way of practical advice, Davidson’s final chapter discusses a movement in Taylor, Texas, to prevent LGBT activists from taking over a traditional Christmas parade. That’s really all he’s got by way of modern-day exemplars, apart from a few warm words about Governor Ron DeSantis, and a passing mention of the public boycotts of Target and Bud Light.
I think readers could be excused for feeling a bit puzzled at this point. I hope the good citizens of Taylor manage to save their parade, but after leading his readers through that dramatic recounting of blood, fire, human sacrifice, and satanic rituals, is Davidson really going to end by exhorting them to attend city council meetings? After starting with a bang, it definitely feels like Pagan America is ending with a whimper. Further questions inevitably follow. How serious is Davidson? He wouldn’t be the first pundit to try to juice book sales with a histrionic thesis. If Christians are about to be chased into the catacombs, might it not be wiser to research emigration options, or start hunting for eligible catacombs, instead of fighting over parades? On the other hand, if the parades can still be salvaged, maybe other aspects of civilization can too?
Very few serious Christians would argue today that Western culture is in a rosy state of health. We debate just how bad things are in part because we’re discerning where and how to invest our energies. Is it still worthwhile to engage in the public square, or should we focus on building and reinforcing our bunkers? Which battles are still winnable? By implying that it’s still worthwhile to push for incremental changes (through boycotts or participation in local government), Davidson strongly suggests that he does see better and worse-case scenarios for America’s future, despite his lurid rhetoric. But he never articulates those with clarity, and while I don’t expect Davidson to have a crystal ball (which would be shockingly pagan), it would be nice to see him follow out his own lines of questioning with more care. The book is dogged by a recurring problem: Davidson tends to set out along an important line of investigation, only to lose patience mid-stream and stampede recklessly toward his alarmist conclusion, trampling crucial distinctions and glaring counterexamples along the way. Again and again, a promising-looking enquiry devolves into an empty exercise in therapeutic panic.
A few examples may help illustrate the problem. Davidson argues that American liberalism, for all its virtues, is bound to crumble without a foundation in Judeo-Christian principles. This is an interesting and defensible position, which has been explored at length by many serious scholars and intellectuals over the past half-century. But to make the case responsibly, one must consider a number of crucial questions that Davidson never bothers to broach. Part of the point of liberalism is that it is meant to enable people of widely diverse views and commitments to live together. There surely are some limits to that, but before we connect those too tightly to the Judeo-Christian tradition, we should note that many modern nations (such as Japan and South Korea) enjoy stable liberal-democratic governance even though they have never been majority-Christian societies. Among today’s major world religions, Hinduism looks to me like the one that most closely resembles the paganism of the old world, as a polytheistic faith more closely connected to organic folk traditions than to any formal orthodoxy or religious hierarchy. But India has long been recognized as the “world’s largest democracy,” and it doesn’t appear to be a hellscape of torture and wanton bloodshed. Clearly, the links between paganism, natural law, and liberalism are far more complicated than Davidson suggests.
After leading his readers through that dramatic recounting of blood, fire, human sacrifice, and satanic rituals, is Davidson really going to end by exhorting them to attend city council meetings?
He is equally vague on the subject of paganism itself. What is it, exactly? He never offers a clear definition, and his target seems to shift dramatically throughout the book. Sometimes “paganism” is equated with a thoroughgoing individualism or nihilism, a worldview in which “all is permitted.” Sometimes it is described as a strong commitment to civic religion trending into totalitarianism; pagans, in this view, differ from Christians in that they demand full participation in public ceremonies and rituals, with no concern for conscience or individual integrity. Sometimes paganism is just barbarism, a might-makes-right channeling of the worst human impulses. There are obvious tensions between these many faces of paganism that Davidson never explores, nor does he address the rather important fact that pagans have clearly made positive contributions to Christianity at many points, most obviously through the incorporation of Greek philosophy into Christian theology. Modern progressives do resemble pagans in some very interesting ways, and Davidson repeatedly gestures towards potentially-interesting parallels. Unfortunately, he lacks the discipline to develop these lines of thought, so it’s hard to judge whether they’re important, and even harder to say what should be done.
A sloppy, underdeveloped book is not the worst thing in the world. One does worry that the reality may be a bit worse. Doom-and-gloom narratives can hold real appeal in moments of high anxiety and intense polarization, reaffirming us in our sense of unimpeachable righteousness, and making us feel we have “permission” to bypass difficult and uncomfortable questions. A similar dynamic can be seen in other deeply pessimistic theories: climate doomerism, critical race theory, or the hyperbolic rants about Christian nationalism. There is something comforting about persuading ourselves that all is lost, not dissimilar to the cheerfulness some people exhibit right before attempting suicide. In accepting one very bad problem, the weight of a thousand smaller ones seems to be lifted.
Maybe God wants us to address those smaller problems, though. Maybe the harder truth, for us, is that we are not living in a “post-Christian era” any more than our great-grandparents were. The world continues to challenge Christianity in a wide variety of ways, and we must keep working to answer those challenges as well as we can, ideally with reason and love. We also need courage, and here Davidson is right to invoke St. Boniface, the eighth century Anglo-Saxon missionary who converted the Germanic tribes by chopping down Thor’s “sacred” tree. I can still remember my own sons’ delight the first time I read them that story years ago. St. Boniface’s audacious heroism can surely inspire us, and it’s natural, in these confused times, to yearn for such a clear-cut assignment. Over the years, though, I have tried to teach them that such moments are earned more than chosen. Some are called to nourish the Church with their blood, but if God prefers our sweat and tears then who are we to deny him?
“Today,” declares Davidson, “a new pagan empire is arising up amid a once-Christian people.” There may be some truth to this pronouncement, but if Christianity’s influence on the West has been as profound as Davidson himself argues, the obstacles to building a “pagan empire” may be formidable. This is our city on the hill. Instead of marinating in despair, let’s keep working to recall our wayward compatriots to their rational, liberal, Christian heritage.