In his 2020 book, The Final Pagan Generation: Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity, Edward J. Watts details daily life at the end of an age. It was the early 300s, and the final pagan generation, he writes, “was born into a vast sacred infrastructure that had been built up over the past three millennia.” The gods were everywhere, woven into the language, commerce, daily rituals, and the very landscapes of every city and town. The gods were an omnipresent and accepted assumption. Many of the Roman elites no longer believed in the literal existence of these deities, but they were seen as necessary myths—a foundational part of the social order. Nobody could anticipate how swiftly everything would change.
Watts begins by describing a face-off in Alexandria in which pagans, enraged by the conversion of their ancient shrine into a church, rioted in the streets, killed and wounded several Christians, and barricaded themselves in their shuttered temple until the emperor promised them a pardon. When they left the Serapeum, the Christians tore it apart, triggering a wave of idol-smashing across Egypt in the weeks that followed. It was a watershed moment in which many pagans finally realized that their empire was being remade and that “Christian attacks could reach the most permanent and impressive elements of the urban religious infrastructure.” By the “final pagan generation,” Watts is referring to the last of the elite Romans, both pagan and Christian, “born into a world that simply could not imagine a Roman world dominated by a Christian majority.” None could grasp that they stood at the dawning of a new age and that all the old things were passing away.
Many now argue that we stand at a similar threshold today. In the West, we are at the end of 1,600 years of Christian civilization. The culture—and the foundational underlying assumptions—have all changed, and people have passed from Christendom into a new world.
The French philosopher, historian, and novelist Chantal Delsol believes that we are not simply becoming post-Christian; rather, we are re-paganizing. In her 2021 book, La Fin de la Chrétienté (The End of the Christian World), she observes that we have yet to fully understand what we are living through: nothing less than the death throes of a civilization that lasted 16 centuries. This slow-motion death began with the French Revolution, she argues, which—unlike the Dutch and American revolutions—produced the first civilization that did not rest on Christian assumptions. Once Christianity faced off with modernity, Delsol says, the handwriting was on the wall. And even though a handful of elites deluded themselves into believing in the future of atheism, most people need gods—and soon the old gods began to creep back in.
Our new society, in fact, still has ‘saints’ and ‘sinners.’ They have simply swapped places. Christians who condemn unbiblical sexual behavior are damned as ‘wicked’ for their intolerance, while the gilded homosexuals of our celebrity elites are instead celebrated for ‘being who they are.’ This change seems to have happened rather suddenly, facilitated by the fact that even those who no longer believe in Christianity have continued its cultural practices—even as the end of the age was approaching. When the end finally came, it seemed to happen overnight. In 2008, U.S. President Obama ran for office opposing same-sex marriage, but a mere decade and a half later, in 2022, most Democrats wouldn’t dare question the ritual mutilation of children in the name of transgenderism. And much like the pagans of the 4th century, Christians have simply been caught off-guard.
Unlike the majority of Christian intellectuals, however, Delsol does not believe that the collapse of Christianity will necessarily be accompanied by darkness and chaos. I would argue that this depends on how one defines “darkness and chaos.” For example, Delsol does not think abortion should be banned in a non-Christian society; but in my mind, any culture—whether explicitly Christian or not—returning to the infanticide practices of paganism is already living a dark, bloody nightmare filled with obliterated children.
The 4th century has lessons for us here as well. It was the Christian condemnation of abortion and infanticide that brought about a prohibition of these practices by Emperor Valentinian in 374 AD. Even a secular conception of human rights, however, ought to recognize that abortion is unjust to all those involved, above all the unborn human whose life is being ended. Indeed, one may reasonably argue that human beings possess human rights from the beginning of their lives, which science has incontrovertibly established begins at conception. You don’t need Christian eyes to read an embryology textbook or view an ultrasound.
Among the various examples of alternative religious systems that have filled the vacuum left behind by the decline of Christianity, Delsol notes that even environmentalists have their liturgies and, in many ways, are engaged in a form of worship of Mother Earth. As Delsol noted in a 2021 essay:
We are at a stage where, in the vast field opened up by the erasure of Christianity, new beliefs waver and tremble. Disaffection with dogmas, or with a decreed and certain truth, brings about the triumph of morality. It stands alone in the world. We see philanthropy at work, a love for humanity directly inherited from the Gospel, but without the foundations. Late modernity takes up the Gospel, but strips it of all transcendence. …
[I]n pagan societies, religion and morality are separate: religion demands sacrifices and rites, while the rulers impose a morality. This is the situation we are in the process of rediscovering: our governing elite decrees morality, promotes laws to enforce them partly through insults and ostracism. Our morality is post-evangelical, but it is no longer tied to a religion. It dominates the television sets. It inhabits all the cinematography of the age. It rules in the schools and families. When something needs to be straightened out or given a new direction, it is the governing elite.
In short, Delsol writes: “We have returned to the typical situation of paganism: we have a state morality.” However, she does not believe attempts at cultural transformation by Christians will be successful. The die is cast and the wheels of ‘progress’ grind forward. Instead, she suggests, like the pagan communities that struggled to survive for centuries after the rise of Christianity, we have to find ways to live in this new society—as strangers in our homelands. Christians, says Delsol, must become witnesses to another way of living—salt and light, as the Scripture puts it. “The experience of our fathers brings us certainty,” she says. “Our business is not to produce societies where ‘the Gospel governs states’ but rather, to use the words of Saint-Exupery, to ‘walk very slowly towards a fountain.’” Recently, Delsol was kind enough to answer additional questions about her thesis.
You’ve written that the West is re-paganizing. When did you first identify this trend? And where would you place the chronological end of the Christian era?
Paganism, a belief in immanent gods, never completely disappeared from the Christian landscape. These gods appear naturally in the human mind and imagination. And, if Christianity put them backstage and deprived them of their legitimacy, it did not manage to annihilate them. We can cite a number of schools of thought and Western authors who were tempted by this reasoning, from Freemasonry to the New Age through Spinoza and Nietzsche. In Science as a Vocation, Max Weber described these gods lurking in the corner; still alive and ready to return at the smallest sign of weakness in transcendent monotheism.
As soon as doubt or disinterest in the dominant Christian religion develops, the temptation of paganism reappears. Read Montaigne, for instance. I believe that, since the Renaissance, many authors in Christian countries were no longer believers, even though they could not express their doubts openly. But the cracks became larger several centuries ago, and multiple revolutions in the 18th century placed an emphasis on the process of reassessment.
What overt signs of re-paganization do you see?
Insofar as paganism is defined as a belief in a world filled with immanent gods, we can say that environmentalism may belong to pagan thought. Animals, plants, and the elements of nature in general are often considered sacred and even adored.
This belief is different from those that preceded Christianity. Nevertheless, it is a return to the veneration of sacred nature. Moreover, what is called pagan refers to societies with pragmatic and consequentialist morality, unlike Christian, Jewish, or Islamic moral codes, which are based on transcendent dogmas. The pagan society belongs to the great Pan, god of sex and violence. In this respect, our societies are becoming pagan once again. We do not lack morals, but our morals are no longer anchored in absolute principles. They are pragmatic and consequentialist. In pagan societies, religions deal with rituals; it is the state that decrees and governs morality. This is what we see in post-modern Western societies today.
Do you see the rise of the pagan alt-Right, the increasing popularity of overtly pagan musical genres like ‘dark folk,’ and interest in Viking culture as symptoms of a post-Christian age? Or are these merely fads?
Yes, we see this interest growing in cultural trends, in ‘Gothic’ groups, and many others. This cult of violence corresponds, I believe, to what can be called the ‘return of the great Pan.’ Violence is humanity’s natural, animalistic state. Governments punish it and monotheistic religions domesticate it. But when our religion, which held ground as the majority religion, eventually fades, primitive violence reemerges in its own right. This is why, in the absence of faith, many Christians who have fallen into skepticism have at least valued Christian civilization as a way of preventing brutality in our society. This was the case of Maurras, who took it from Machiavelli.
In How the West Really Lost God, Mary Eberstadt theorizes that secularism was a result of the sexual revolution rather than the other way around. How is the sexual revolution connected to the new paganization?
That is not my view. I believe that our societies maintained demanding mores as long as people believed in the fundamental principles that established these requirements; or at least as long as the habits cultivated by those demands were maintained by institutions and common practice.
Nevertheless, the beliefs were crumbling underneath. So these expectations continued to exist without legitimacy: the edifice had to crumble one day. In 1970s France, for example, it came with the manifesto of several hundred women who boasted about having had an abortion. Then everything suddenly turned upside down, because deep in their hearts many people no longer believed. The sexual revolution essentially means, I believe, the abolition of principles such as sacred fidelity, the dignity of the human being created by God, and the value of the promise rather than the contract. Instead, it made absolute individual freedom sacred, which gave us the ‘my body belongs to me’ motto. The post-modern pagan society is not the reproduction of old pagan societies, which were holistic and generally had a ‘patriarchal establishment.’ But paganism in the new sense of the term indicates the end of the application of Christian principles and the return to the principles of pleasure based on pragmatism.
Many historians, Tom Holland among them, have theorized that ‘wokeness’ only survives by borrowing fundamental concepts from Christianity. Would the new civilization you write about be a sort of ‘Christian pantheism,’ stripped of its central stories but borrowing some of its key concepts?
I should read Tom Holland in the first place! In my opinion, one can only speak of a ‘Christian pantheism’ to colorfully describe certain currents of syncretic thought today. But it’s an oxymoron anyway! Christianity can in no way be pantheistic, since it proclaims that God is transcendent and that there are no other gods in the immanent world. On the other hand, our societies borrow from Christian morality, at least the fundamental atmosphere of its morality, albeit paganizing it. The atmosphere of Christian morality is the gentleness, the kindness, and the extraordinary indulgence that Jesus demonstrates.
All of our contemporary morality comes from that tradition: the cult of the victim, equality, the refusal of humiliation. All of these are stripped of transcendence, and that changes everything. Without the guarantee of fulfillment in eternity, they must be accomplished here and now, and that makes them grotesque. That’s why Chesterton said that our world is full of Christian virtues gone mad—especially since the erasure of our bi-millennial religions leaves room for a morality that tends to become a religion itself. We have the experience of a sacred morality today, declared and dictated by governing elites.
Commentators like Douglas Murray, Roger Scruton, and Niall Ferguson have expressed their concern that Christian principles, like the sanctity of human life, will not long survive the death of Christianity. What is your view?
I agree with this concern. In my opinion, Judeo-Christian civilization performed three great conquests for humanity: the idea of universal truth (hence, the development of science in the West), progress in history (which leads to improvements), and the sacred dignity of the human being (which made us the first civilization to abolish slavery and emancipate women). I believe that the results of these three conquests are in danger with the collapse of Christian civilization. We see the decline of universalism and even attacks on science. We see the rise of apocalyptic fears, in ecological activism, for example. These people believe that we are returning to chaos and the circularity of time. And we cannot deny that abortion, at least when it is performed at a very late stage of pregnancy, is an attack on the sanctity of human life.
I believe that this third conquest will last the longest because of trauma from the Holocaust.
However, we must never forget how paradoxical the whole story is: the Christian centuries have been marked with massacres, sometimes perpetrated in the name of the Church—and yet, the Holocaust is such a traumatic event in the West (which is not at all the case in Asia for similar events) because of our Judeo-Christian roots.
How should Christians respond to this new reality? How should we engage with the culture around us?
We have nothing else to do but to live by our beliefs as reliable and exemplary witnesses. It is not a question of fate, but a question of belief. My comment may be shocking to you, but I find it clumsy and counterproductive to ban abortion in a society where the majority are not Christians. Are you going to force marriage on people who don’t believe in fidelity? Are you going to ban abortion for people who do not believe in the dignity of the embryo? This amounts to imposing beliefs by force, which is particularly silly. Let the Christians go and reconvert their societies, and only then should they propose to live by Christian virtues.
Should Christians worry primarily about ‘soft marginalization’ or ‘hard discrimination’ and persecution? What is your view of Rod Dreher’s thesis in Live Not By Lies: that Christians will face conditions similar to those behind the Iron Curtain?
I think Rod is exaggerating. We’ve spoken about it several times. Totalitarian societies are societies where police can pick you up for no reason and take you to a penal colony for twenty years. But we are not persecuted. Let us avoid believing that because we no longer govern societies, we are enslaved. Obviously, it is no longer our beliefs or principles that govern our societies. But nobody forces us to live as pagans. We are not prevented from practicing our principles of fidelity and respect for the individual. We are not victims!
Naturally the main question that arises for us is that of transmission of principles and education for our families. This is a very complex question, because you want to protect your family so that your children will share your principles, but at the same time, you don’t want your children to retreat into a besieged fortress. Hence the need to respond to those questions on a case-by-case basis guided by prudence.
