Over the summer, I work as a face painter. A fun perk of the job is that I’m always up to date on baby-name trends, because of all the children I meet. Recently, a little girl named “Freya” hopped into my chair. When I complimented her name, derived from the Norse goddess of love, beauty, and battle, she immediately began trying to convert me to Norse paganism! “I believe in the goddess,” she told me, “And you should too.” This was a surprisingly run-of-the-mill experience—this girl was the third Freya that I had painted that day!
Statistics tracking the decline of Americans and Europeans who identify as traditional Christians are often accompanied by a startling footnote—more people than ever are self-identifying as “spiritual.” Some conservative Christians react to the rise of neopaganism with triumphal crowing about the impossibility of an atheistic society, (mis)quoting G.K. Chesterton: “When people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything.” Occasionally, there is even a sense of false affinity between traditional, history-loving Christians and neopagans, borne of a similar Romantic view of myth, mutual respect for the past, and discontent with our secular time. However, after years of talking with neopagans, asking questions about their seemingly bizarre beliefs (my mom works at the Renaissance festival—I’m practically an expert!), I would caution Christians against such sentiments. The “pagan revival” is not a reaction against anti-sacral modernity, but an advanced stage of the deconstruction and aestheticization of religion, backed by a strong, anti-Christian, intellectual heritage.
Sociologist Phillip Rieff, an author with whom GCC students might be familiar through the work of Dr. Trueman, provides a helpful framework for understanding the rise of neopaganism in his book My Life Among the Deathworks. Rieff classifies societies into first, second, and third world – terms which ironically invert the usual connotations of national development. For example, using Rieff’s terminology the current United States of America would fall into the “third world” category. These three might also be called fate, faith, and fiction societies. First world societies are governed by “fate…the unchangeable directive force of some unsurpassable authority from which all authorities…derive.” Some examples of the faceless “directive force” of fate are the traditional Grecian concept of fate, Platonic idealism, and Aboriginal Dreamtime. The gods in first-world cultures are aspects or servants of “fate.” The great monotheisms belong to the second world, that of “faith,” whose worldviews and interdictions are grounded in specific divine revelation, not a vague force. Finally, our modern culture is the third world. Its prime goal is not to follow revelation, but to dismantle the second-world’s faith-focused structures. Because of this, Rieff would say it is not a true culture, but an anti-culture. The characteristic element of the third world is “fiction”—there is no revealed sacred order, only rhetorics and readings by conflicting powers or interests.
Though the relationship between the anti-culture and the two sacral orders is primarily antagonistic, Rieff argues that “first worlds have been recycled in a variety of disarming assaults by third world warriors” to attack the second world. In the modern third world, even though the rituals or language might look pagan, fate is not the motivating force behind human action. Rieff gives examples of what might replace fate as the explanation of why humans are the way they are; the Freudian sexual instinct, Marxist class warfare, and so on. Pagan terminology and rituals are an aesthetic veneer for modern ideology. Neopaganism, viewed from this angle, is not an expression of the human search for God, but the weaponization of first-world cultural symbolism to further the anti-cultural quest of dismantling faith and the structures that accompany it.
This all sounds very threatening. But does it align with the way that neopagans see themselves? Previously, perhaps because their beliefs are those we typically view as “primitive,” I assumed most neopagans were unaware of the potential ideological implications of the movement and were hopping on the “WitchTok” internet bandwagon for the aesthetics and “unproblematic” nature of the belief. Talking to practicing neopagans quickly dispelled this assumption. A self-described “green witch” selling hand-crafted ceramics explained to me that engagement with her “coven” and ritual practices were a key aspect of her feminist beliefs. Another practitioner explained that her pagan identity was central to her queer identity, describing each of the Norse Gods she revered in terms of modern theory. As Rieff—who wrote several books on Freud—anticipated, fate has been replaced with sexuality as the motivating force behind human action. The gods, instead of representing aspects of fate, now represent aspects of desire.
One of the most telling conversations I had was with an axe-wielding barbarian by the side of the jousting field. A former Catholic, he described himself as a neopagan apologist, boasting that he knew more about Catholicism and Christianity than the typical believer. Certainly, none of the Christians he had talked to knew anything about the intellectual foundations of his beliefs. This is revealing in two aspects. Firstly, he saw neopaganism as intellectually—not just emotionally or spiritually—strong enough to take on the largest and most apologetically developed religion in the world. Rieff’s description of neopaganism as a weapon for attacking the second world, an aesthetic language for the anti-culture, was on full display in this conversation. Secondly, the Christians he had engaged with were completely unprepared for the unique types of questions that neopaganism raised.
The segregation of religious aesthetics from doctrinal foundations—in fact, the glorification of aesthetics over beliefs, is a frightening trend, and one that second world faiths are not exempt from. From Met Gala outfits to Amazon original series, the imagery of Christianity is being detached from its intellectual backing and re-fixed to post-modern culture in a sort of surface-level syncretism. Neopaganism is a carefully constructed belief system that glorifies and confirms self-identity, decorating the third world with shiny aesthetics picked out of the “heap of broken images” they have made of the first and second worlds. Christians often complain that the modern age has made everyone their own god—neopagans have gone a step further and remade the gods in their own image. Just as the third world is an “anti-culture” that uses creative fiction to tear apart the structures of the second, neopaganism is an “antireligion,” founded on the re-imagining of the past to reshape and liberate the future.
Since the early 2000’s, neopaganism has been one of the fastest-growing religions in the West—according to the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, its numbers double every 18 months. The instinct to reject neopagans as ignorant, innocent spiritual seekers, who “latched on” due to their lack of a defined world view is demeaning to its rising numbers of practitioners, who are aware of its strong postmodern foundations, and dangerous to Christians who wish to combat its influence. Neopaganism/spiritualism, like all belief systems, should be approached and refuted with discernment and vigilance.
