Dakota Beacon

Long summer days and warm evenings offer a great opportunity for reading. If you are looking for something, try this book for Christians and non-Christians alike. This book explores the cultural shift shaping modern America. It may not offer comfort, but this book does impose soberness and is worth reading.

Title? “Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come” by John Daniel Davidson published by Regnery in 2024.

A society does not lose its direction all at once. It forgets what it was built upon and then wonders why it no longer holds together.

The core argument of Davidson’s book comes straight at the reader. As Christianity recedes from the center of American life, it will not leave a vacuum. Moral frameworks like Christianity do not just disappear. They are exchanged for new frameworks often lacking the stabilizing structure that Christianity provided.

To be clear, this book does not treat paganism as a theological issue. Rather, it connects cultural belief to social order. Law, rights, and institutions do not float on their own. They rest on assumptions about human nature, responsibility, and truth. When those assumptions shift, everything built on top of them begins to shift as well.

Davidson paints a provocative picture of America shifting from a post-Christian culture into a pagan one opening an era of moral chaos, brutality, and darkness.

Davidson offers the following arguments. First, Christianity once provided the moral and cultural foundation for American society shaping its institutions, laws, and civil life. Second, as Christianity declines, neopaganism will assert itself as a worldview marked by materialism, secularism, and moral relativism. These will form a culture where the strong dominate the weak. He warns that without a Christian moral order, civil liberties and self-government will collapse under the weight of nihilism and authoritarianism.

Our founders presupposed that self-government started from the inside out and that Christian belief spurred self-control. Without such internal self-control, the reasonable expectation would be external control imposed by the old forms of government with which mankind was all too familiar. Herein lay the genesis of America’s new experiment in governing.

The point? People smarter than me have noted the signs of decline. Their observations came at different times and from different points of view. But come they did. As Davidson foresees, the eventual result will be a society marked by oppression and violence. Such violence will be officially sanctioned and carry the force of law. What a person believes won’t really matter to the state. What matters is whether a person adheres to state-defined morality.

Comparisons to earlier periods of civilizational decline are not presented as inevitable doom, but as a pattern worth taking seriously. Chapter One brings into sharp focus the reality of the universality and pervasiveness of paganism. From the Old Testament cults to the Romans, Vikings, Aztecs, and even Africans from a century ago, slavery and human sacrifice are not the exception, but the norm in human culture.

Davidson’s critics will have to grapple with the underlying question: what holds a society together when its foundational beliefs are no longer widely shared? That question extends obviously beyond religion into civic life. A self-governing republic must depend upon more than laws. It depends on the formation of its people. If the cultural foundation weakens, the political structure cannot remain unaffected.

Davidson believes we are well into post-Christian America, and what is happening is truly pagan. The gods may be different, but the worship and sacrifice to them are very much the same.

There is no hyperbole in "Pagan America." Davidson offers a review of how the influence of Christian values in American society are being eroded and replaced by a corrupt secularism. Change happens gradually -- until the results are suddenly clear.

Quite simply, this book is about Good versus Evil. Davidson sees Americans drowning in deception. When you leave truth behind, you are left with madness.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).