Pagan America by John Davidson: A Review

There may be a limit to my beating the dead horse of the dangers of Western civilization's return to paganism, but not just yet. The left screams, “We’re not going back!” while they are falling down from the tower of Western civilization to the abyss of paganism. A model to aid understanding may be the old saw about a man who has fallen off a 100-story building being asked by someone on the 30th floor, “How is it going?” with the response, “Pretty good so far!”

In the introduction there is a discussion about how the idea of the emperor being God emerged at about the same time as the Incarnation, God made flesh, and entered the world, after which paganism was severely wounded for 2,000 years. Humans always have a God or Gods, and without Christ, power is God, and power defines “morality.”

We dance around the truth that Christianity was what destroyed paganism and brought about the idea of respect for all men, the idea of equality before God, the belief that the earth was ordered and could be understood and “subdued” by man: the concept of a transcendent truth that included fixed recognition of specific good and evil, the sacredness and sanctity of life, the concept of morality itself, and the specific Judeo/Christian morality where marriage was between a man and a woman, and the family was the foundation of civilization built on a monotheistic transcendent God — and so much more.

Our current pagan world seems “moral” because the remnant of Christianity is still a fading backdrop to the sacrifice of children by abortion, the cascading destruction of sexual morality, with transgender being a current frontier, and pedophilia being increasingly normalized (see “Downstate”). It is hard to tell what “floor” we are at as we fall into the abyss. Davidson spends some time on the idea that AI will become “God,” and from the early returns, apparently, that God is Satan.

On page 271, the discussion of “Loab” begins:

In the spring of 2022, an AI produced a demonic image of a woman it called Loab. Loab emerged unprompted when an AI was asked for the opposite of the actor Marlon Brando …

On 273, “The AI repeatedly claimed to be friendly, and although capable of both good and evil, promised “not to be scary.” Asked who its father is, the AI replied, “My father is Satan.”

Our books, movies, studies of primitive peoples, Halloween, etc., show “our” fascination with Satan, demons and the occult. Is it really “our” fascination, or do we have some paranormal assistants?

The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher (a book I enjoyed and will pull the review from my old blog over “soon”) is referenced a good deal, but another more hopeful “Boniface Option is discussed. I pulled a quote from another review of Pagan from here:

Yet Davidson argues for something different than Dreher, what he calls a “Boniface Option,” after the medieval missionary to Germanic peoples who so aggressively combatted paganism and its rituals that he was ultimately martyred. This is a more combative, political approach than Dreher’s. Though Davidson acknowledges that Washington and other major cities are likely a lost cause, he exhorts readers to take back local institutions such as city councils, public libraries, and school boards. Christians, he urges, should be banning drag performances and pornographic and pro-trans books from l­­­­ocal libraries and schools, and applying economic pressure by “refusing to patronize businesses and brands that embrace pagan morality.

There are other discussions about how governments are currently wading into the waters of the persecution of Christians. The Biden/Garland regime has been busy attacking pro-lifers with Gestapo techniques. The somewhat well-known (at least among Catholics) case of Mark Houck is one chilling example. Catholics who attend a Latin Mass are also targets for the Garland FBI.

I would recommend this book over Life in the Negative World, but both are worthy.

In this Halloween season, it is important not to forget that we now officially celebrate “Indigenous Peoples Day” (not an official holiday yet) vs. Columbus Day, with most Americans having little or no understanding of the “Indigenous Peoples'” culture beyond positive portrayals of Indians helping the Pilgrims, Pocahontas, and the overly negative portrayal of the disease brought by Europeans (who didn’t understand how immunity works).

Somehow the ancient rites of pagans around the world — universally sacrificing children, virgins, and people in general and often including rites of cannibalism — are claimed to be “hoaxes.” But many cases, including in pre-Christian Europe are covered in this book. With the internet and better archelogical technology, we know much more about the actual brutality, which is naturally hidden by those that want to declare Western civilization evil.

The power right now is increasingly with the pagans, and as Justice Kennedy helpfully informed us in Casey “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

Without Christianity, man is God, and from pagan civilizations, through many wars, the Holocaust, Roe, etc., we see that man’s heart is exceedingly evil, who can know it?

We are falling into the pit, but at least we're coming to have a better understanding of the unpleasant truth.