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How the West Became Pagan—Again
In trying to map out our religious landscape today, it’s natural to reach for the data. Michael Graham, Jim Davis, and Ryan Burge will tell you that in the last 25 years, we’ve lived through the “great dechurching,” where 40 million Americans stopped attending church. Similarly, Christian Smith will argue that religion has become “obsolete,” much like how the automobile replaced the horse and buggy.
But these surveys only give a partial answer. Burge notes that “None” doesn’t always equal “atheist.” Moreover, when Smith talks about obsolescence, he’s not pointing to a dramatic growth in atheistic secularity. He’s pointing to its replacement with varieties of “spiritual but not religious” options.
God hasn’t been removed from the picture; he’s been relocated. Where did God go? There are as many answers as there are people. Consider some conversations I’ve had recently:
At the start of the semester, I met a young man of Indian descent and Hindu religion. He approached me because he’d watched The Chosen and wanted to discuss Jesus and the Bible. We discussed faith for a few weeks, but I haven’t seen him since.
A young woman at my gym’s front desk was reading a book on neuroscience, and when I asked her about it, she shared that her interest stemmed from experiencing radical healing of her uterine pain. She credited her healing to the practices of mindfulness, meditation, and manifestation.
During an airport layover, a woman saw me reading a Bible commentary and wanted to talk about religion. She quoted an orthodox saying from her Baptist upbringing that “God has a purpose for whatever you’re going through.” Yet by the end of the conversation, I learned that, alongside believing in God’s providence, she engages in rituals involving crystals. She said they help her feel grounded and connected to her ancestors.
When I shared with a young man from my gym that I’m a pastor, he told me he was a believer, too, but he came to faith without ever going to church or opening a Bible. He came to faith simply through conversations with friends and YouTube videos.
God hasn’t been removed from the picture; he’s been relocated.
These stories are a microcosm of the broader spiritual landscape before us in America and the West.
I want to offer my survey of this landscape and suggest that to understand our current moment, we need to see it not as irreligious but as deeply pagan. After mapping the terrain, we’ll consider the stories we’ve told that have brought us to this place. Finally, we’ll explore how our current moment is rooted in a pagan mindset, one whose religious hunger cries out for more than what merely localized religions offer.
Mapping the Terrain
One of the best topographers of our spiritual landscape is Tara Isabella Burton. In her book Strange Rites, Burton lays out a bewildering array of our culture’s “spiritual but not religious” options. These can be organized into three “tribes” (and to them I’ll add a fourth):
Blue tribe. This group includes spiritualities centered around wellness cultures, from spiritual yogic practices, ayahuasca retreats, and microdosing mushrooms to the massive comeback of astrology on TikTok. It features the use of healing crystals and the return of New Thought through the metaphysics of manifestation.
There’s been a rise in Wicca (which apparently has more adherents in the United States than Presbyterianism does). We also see sexual religion, where kinks, chosen families, and sexual identities are elevated into spiritualities. Add an intense growth of interest in the occult and left-wing social justice cultures that can include political satanism or a postcolonial retrieval of allegedly more ancient traditions.
Red tribe. “Spiritual but not religious” isn’t just a left-wing phenomenon. For years, millions have tuned in to the Jungian spiritual meditations of Jordan Peterson, who recently penned another bestseller, We Who Wrestle with God, that consists mostly in reflections on Old Testament narratives. Going further right, we see postcolonial retrievals of Norse gods, often merged with a post-Nietzschean vitalism––a return to the glorification of strength and tribe.
Gray tribe. Interspersed between the blue and red tribes is the rise of spiritually infused techno-futurism, focused on AI and transhumanism. Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder highlights the creepy way Silicon Valley is banking on creating a techno-utopia filled with immortals by using longevity technology or uploading our souls into the cloud. These dreams depend on summoning a benevolent AGI (artificial general intelligence) that functions as a deity.
It gets weirder: Some in Silicon Valley have dedicated their AIs to ancient gods, believing they’re spiritually communing with interdimensional alien beings who download technological insights. C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength wasn’t fiction; it was prophecy.
Surprising reborn. Alongside these groups, we’re seeing a public revival of openness toward traditional Christian belief. Justin Brierley has chronicled a “surprising rebirth of belief in God.” Major intellectuals like Niall Ferguson and his wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have turned to Christianity, citing an increasing sense that Western culture without Christianity is becoming morally exhausted. The United Kingdom is even speaking of a “quiet revival” of traditional religion, which, on both sides of the pond, seems to be increasingly male.
This is all part of what’s being called the “vibe shift.” A good amount of it is political—a pushback on the “Great Awokening.” But a big part of it is a new openness to talk about metaphysically charged realities. Joe Rogan’s massive podcast, for example, will have episodes on conspiracy theories and aliens and then have a Christian apologist talking seriously about documentary evidence for the Bible.
When you think about your average non-Christian today, you’re not likely dealing with an old-school secular humanist of the Bertrand Russell sort, or even a New Atheist from the early 2000s. It’s far more likely to be someone who never went to church, checks her astrology chart, likes nature, takes an interest in breathwork because it connects her to reality, and maybe believes in the simulation theory.
Stories That Brought Us Here
If that’s the terrain, it’s useful to ask how we got here. The stories we tell ourselves about this journey matter because they can become self-fulfilling prophecies that distort our understanding of the world and how we should engage it.
Story of Secularization and Disenchantment
The most famous story of how we got here comes from Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. He argues we live in a “secular age,” where belief in God is no longer the default but just one option among many. We’ve moved from a world where disbelief seemed unthinkable to one where everybody feels the pull.
Even for believers, Taylor says our experience of reality feels self-contained—a self-sufficient natural order not requiring God to explain its existence or our moral order. In this “immanent frame,” creation no longer feels charged with God’s glory but appears as bare nature, without reference to anything beyond itself.
Taylor’s account is a version of the disenchantment narrative. First, the gods, goblins, and fairies of pre-Christian Europe were driven out by the worship of the one true God. Then that purification process ran amok, and the presence of that one Creator has come into question. The world has been “bleached” by the advance of science, reason, and technology. As Joseph Minich describes, even believers feel this pull due to the increasing artificiality of our environments, technological insulation, and mass migration into cities.
With the cosmic “roof” closed, a fully immanent, this-worldly moral order has arisen. Our morality, values, and sources of meaning are now grounded entirely within this world, often in our own minds. We exist as “buffered selves,” without the old animistic sense that our souls are permeable to spirits. This allows for “exclusive humanism”—naturalistic worldviews that account for all significance apart from transcendence.
However, Taylor notes that this same framework fosters alternative immanent spiritualities. In reaction to both classical religion and the coldness of exclusive humanism, some pursue reenchantment through pantheism, nature worship, Eastern mysticisms, and other syncretistic blends.
Complicating the Story: Have We Ever Been Disenchanted?
Taylor’s narrative is good, but it needs to be complicated. Jason Josephson-Storm questions this myth of disenchantment. There’s nothing new about the twilight of the gods. We have legends from the 1300s about magic declining, long before the Enlightenment.
Closer to our time, many leading theorists of disenchantment and the scientific revolution at the turn of the 20th century were deeply interested in the occult and spiritualism. Josephson-Storm notes that renowned scientists Marie Curie and Max Planck attended séances. American psychologist William James believed in telepathy. Even Max Weber, the strong gogodfather of disenchantment theory, knew people dabbling in the occult.
In light of these examples, is what Burton describes in Strange Rites new? Yes and no. Because of social media and remixed and hyperindividualized spiritualities, this moment is unique, but the algorithms have in another sense simply intensified a process at work for a long time.
New Item on the Spiritual Menu: Irreligious Option
So, are we enchanted or disenchanted? Yes. Public discourse around morality, science, and metaphysics has in many ways become godless. The immanent frame has taken hold. But that’s not the entire story.
The algorithms have intensified a process at work for a long time.
In the 1960s, the theologian J. H. Bavinck was invited to give lectures on religion at the University of Chicago. In them, he cited T. S. Eliot’s choruses from The Rock: “But it seems something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left God not for gods, they say, but for no god: and this has never happened before.”
To this, Bavinck replied, “Indeed, ‘this has never happened before’ for it is not quite certain even of modern man whether he is as much deprived of religious feeling as he pretends to be.”
Bavinck was saying we’ve always sensed an absence, a homelessness in the world, a lost connection to the divine. And into this sense of disconnection, the Enlightenment introduced a new story, a new heuristic for dealing with that spiritual sense of loss: a more secular, irreligious immanent frame. This new story coincided with industrialization, technological advance, and increasing distance from the natural world, creating a feedback loop where the story we tell shapes our experience.
Secularization didn’t create the spiritual search; it added irreligiously immanent options to the deck that was already available.
Return of the ‘Strong Gods’
Alongside 19th-century secularization came a “migration of the holy.” As William Cavanaugh noted, in the absence of traditional religion, we began to deify and sacralize other things: the State, the People, the Race, the Economy. R. R. Reno has termed these the “strong gods”—objects of strong love, loyalty, and devotion that create moral orders.
Importantly, Reno argues that after World War II, the disenchantment process got to work on even these deities. In the name of an open society, freedom, and liberation, various “therapies of disenchantment” were put to work: deconstruction, critical theory, and boundary-erasing neoliberal economics. The “post-war consensus” banished these strong gods, offering in the place of truth the option of personal, private, local meanings. This created a loop of constant ironizing, deconstructing every thick identity and every solid rock on which one might build a home.
This brings us to the contemporary moment. In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat argued we have a public/private split. In mainstream public discourse, we see demand that we conduct our conversations according to the rules of a disenchanted universe. Our moral and political arguments run on the assumption that nobody thinks God or spirits charge the nature of things.
But privately, in their personal lives, the vast majority of folks do not and cannot operate that way—and they’re becoming vocal about their beliefs.
Tarot, SoulCycle, sexual spiritualities, social justice religion, blood-and-soil nationalisms, and the revitalization of traditional religion––the strong gods are returning in every form. The secular story has been distorting our social and emotional lives, thinning them out and people are searching for something more.
To put it another way, if you kill the one true God, the Many will rise again. We all have that sensus divinitatis, as Calvin put it—we’re hardwired to sense our need for something beyond us and to give it worship, even if we suppress and distort it. Bavinck was right: Leaving God for “no god” is spiritually impossible. Religious nature abhors a vacuum. Eternity has been set in our hearts.
Immanent Sacred, or Why Our Age Is Pagan
This complicated narrative brings us to my central argument: The basic metaphysical shape of the West’s religious ferment, in its non-Christian forms, is essentially pagan. Both exclusive humanism and the varied spiritualities that have arisen are pagan in character.
In his book Pagans and Christians in the City, Steven Smith argues that what marked off classical Christian and pagan religion wasn’t the question of how many gods but where adherants located the sacred. Quoting James O’Donnell, he says, “The gods . . . were mainly the mightiest part of the world itself, not beings that somehow stood outside it all.” Smith continues, “Pagan religion locates the sacred within the world. In that way, paganism can consecrate the world from within: it is religiosity relative to an immanent sacred.”
Religious nature abhors a vacuum. Eternity has been set in our hearts.
In the old order, the pagan gods sacralized the cosmos, the ordinary course of affairs. Worship of the gods made one feel at home in the world.
This is precisely what we see today. Much of contemporary spirituality—from witchcraft to wellness—is about regaining a connection to the world, escaping that sense of alienation and thinness. On the political right, French social theorist Alain de Benoist’s confession On Being a Pagan excoriates Christianity for desacralizing the world, whereas paganism, he claims, “regards the world as sacred.” Certain kinds of nationalist, localist populism are a spiritual phenomenon of trying to be at home in the world in just this way.
We can identify two modes of this pagan thought, drawing on scholars like Michael Horton, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Robert Wuthnow.
1. Locative/Dwelling Religion: Smith spoke of “locative” (placed) religion. Wuthnow called it a “spirituality of dwelling.” This mode is about the sacralization of the cosmos around you. It’s concerned with “keeping one’s place” and reinforcing boundaries to maintain stability in a fragile cosmos. You’re connected, whole, and safe by finding your place in the proper order of things—honoring the gods, the ancestors, the traditions, the rulers, the family.
2. Utopian/Seeking Spirituality: Smith contrasted the locative with “Utopian” (placeless) spirituality. Wuthnow called it a spirituality of seeking. In this worldview, you attain fullness and transcendence not by fitting into the order but by escaping it. This is often done by achieving enlightenment, inner peace, or therapeutic self-actualization through the teaching or technique of a sage, guru, or influencer.
At first, these two modes seem radically different. One is social, traditional, and ordered; it receives its standards externally from the tribe or shaman. The other is individualistic, focused on liberation and self-actualization, on uncovering the divine spark within. Douthat has lumped much of this into a form of “god-withinism.”
Despite these differences, they share two important premises.
1. The Location of the Sacred (Immanence): Both modes are immanent, trending toward pantheism or panentheism. In traditional paganism (“dwelling”), the gods were the highest point on a shared scale of being. The Olympians lived on a sacred mountain in your world.
In gnostic spirituality, even when the idea is to escape the world, the premise is that deep down, you’re of the same stuff. A divine spark is already immanent within you and needs to be accessed. This premise is shared across forms of Eastern religion (overcoming the veil of ignorance to realize your oneness with all things) and popular transcendentalism.
As Alan Watts, popular among the psychedelic types, puts it, “You are the universe experiencing itself” and “You are not separate from the universe—you are the universe in motion.” This sense of a divine spark holds true even for naturalists who try to generate a “natural supernaturalism,” explaining the metaphysics of manifestation through woo-scientific explanations of energy, frequency, and light.
In both, a created good thing—the cosmos, the nation, the family, or the inner self—is being imbued not with its proper, created dignity that points beyond itself to its Creator but with divine dignity itself. This is the very structure of paganism according to Romans 1.
2. The Primacy of Technique: The other shared premise is that fullness—encountering the divine, achieving reality—is a matter of technique. Both traditional pagan religion and modern spirituality assume there’s a mechanism, a process, a formula that will make you whole.
In traditional religion, this formula is do ut des—you give, and the gods give back. If you do your part, they’ll do their part.
In modern spirituality, the guru, shaman, or influencer is giving you a checklist. They provide the process by which you interrogate yourself, rid yourself of false consciousness, consume the right mushroom, or whatever it is, to connect to yourself and the oneness beyond all things.
Hearth and the Torch
If I had to sum up the two portraits of paganism, I’d think of them as two fires: the hearth fire and the torch. The hearth fire is rooted, keeping you warm within its circle, at home in the world. The torch is the fire that brings light, illumination. But it’s also mobile and allows you to explore far off the beaten path on a journey of discovery.
Both traditional pagan religion and modern spirituality assume there’s a mechanism, a process, a formula that will make you whole.
Both are your fire, to some degree within the orbit of your control.
One of Christianity’s core teachings is that those who try to save their life––those who try to go through life with their own fire––will lose it. Scripture teaches that our God is a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29). God is a Holy One who burns in and of himself, the absolutely transcendent and yet immanent One who blazes beyond our control. For him, our hearts truly long. Our God is a fire who, if we’re consumed by him, won’t burn us to a crisp but refine us into who we were meant to be.
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