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On this episode of “The Federalist Radio Hour,” Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson joins Federalist Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss his new book Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come and explain how the country came to embrace radical moral subjectivity as a mainstream worldview.
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Published in: General
I was pleased to hear the reference to C.S. Lewis, as, while listening, I was already thinking of Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, in which Ransom sternly tells Merlin that he must not attempt to summon up the spirits of the earth, as they are no longer in any way “neutral.” Lewis, we must remember, came to (or came back to) Christianity via his love of Nordic paganism. But, as with Merlin, there is no going back to the old paganism; choices become ever more starkly distinct. Neo-paganism is demonic.
I have spent most of my life in Japan, and the great majority of my compatriots (if, as I Japanese citizen, I may call them such) are, whether they practice in any way Shintoism, Buddhism, both, or neither, at least vaguely disposed toward animism. They are paleo-pagans, theological fine points being of very little interest. Ah, but, unlike the neo-pagans, they have the common sense to know that humans are frail and fallible, that life is fleeting, that there is no utopia, and that men are men and that women are women. Abortion is, sad to say, widely practiced, but no one “celebrates” it.
Lewis described himself as “a converted pagan living among apostate Puritans.” Well, “progressive” Americans are now apostates of various kinds who are actively attempting to impose their woke ideology on others, including the Japanese. As a member of the tiny Catholic minority in Japan, I wish I could say that we are fighting back. Alas, we are not…