John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist explores the likely impact of Christianity’s decline.
President Biden’s decision to elevate Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter, the holiest day of the Christian calendar, was no accident. Yes, we all know (now) that it falls on March 31 every year, while the date of Easter obviously varies. But the idea that the White House’s promotion of the transgender agenda on Easter was a mere coincidence, as Biden’s press secretary insisted on Monday, strains credulity. We all know it was no coincidence.
I won’t go into the specifics of it here … but focus instead on the larger story within which the Transgender Day of Visibility incident fits.
That story, put simply, is the retreat of Christianity in the West and the emergence of a new religious faith in its place — a new paganism. What comes amid the decline of the Christian faith is not some live-and-let-live secular liberal utopia, not a rational and atheistic political order with neutral public spaces and a culture of tolerance. Instead, we have a new form of paganism with its own moral precepts, obligations, and rites. And unlike the secular liberal order, which embraced tolerance and pluralism as an inheritance from Christianity, the pagan order will be intolerant in the extreme.
Let me clarify my terms. By “paganism” I don’t necessarily mean a flood of new converts to the cult of Zeus or Woden (although that too is on the rise, at least in Britain). The postmodern pagan culture that’s now emerging won’t look like the paganism of the past, but it will be no less pagan for all that.
The pagan ethos, across immense spans of history and geography and cultures, has always been a rejection of reason and objective moral truth (along with the entire idea of objectivity), and a radical embrace of relativism and subjectivity in every realm of life. Paganism embraces a divinization of the here and now, of things and even people. Its creed, so far as it has one, can be summed up in the maxim: Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
