The Return of Paganism

G. K. Chesterton summarized the history of religion in a single sentence: “Paganism was the biggest thing in the world, and Christianity was bigger, and everything since has been comparatively small.”

But it’s just quite possible that paganism could, once again, become a dominant worldview, which Chesterton also warned of in writing, “When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

Due to a number of sociological and academic trends, paganism has re-emerged from the shadows. And as many seek to overthrow the Western tradition and return to what was before it––that would be paganism. The paths of today’s utopianism and primitivism both converge in a new or neopaganism, which is critical to see and understand.

It is early 2021 and a controversy erupts over a Los Angeles County public school ethnic studies curriculum. The conflict, which results in several lawsuits, is over the integration of “a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations” that directly invoke ancient Aztec gods. One god, Tezcatlipoca, was once worshiped with human sacrifice and cannibalism.

Elsewhere, the curriculum encourages school children to call upon gods like Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totec. The prayers entreat these precolonial deities in the hope of ushering in a new era of “critical consciousness” and “liberation” from historical forms of social and religious oppression.

This is all part of a broader initiative to counter what one educator, R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, called the historical theocide white colonialists brought to native shores. Theocide is the killing of the old gods at the hands of western Christians: the murder of Quetzalcoatl by Jesus.