book review

Pagan America:
The decline of Christianity and the dark age to come
by John Daniel Davidson
Regnery, 2024, 344 pages

Reviewed by T. Nelson

Books proclaiming the imminent demise of Western civilization have a long pedigree. John Glubb and Oswald Spengler are the most well known moderns, but end-is-near eschatology, which calmed down a bit after the year 1000 passed without incident, has started to make a comeback.

John Daniel Davidson says America was founded on religious principles and if it loses them, it will signal a return to “neopaganism,” in which the value of human life is lost. There are, he says, signs everywhere: kids not watching nearly enough TV and spending too much time on their cell phones; AI; “Satanism”; Covid mask mandates; and the decline of marriage.

Few would deny that our population is declining or that Europe is in deep trouble. The general idea is that without Christianity, we will cobble together a new pagan religion to replace it. It’s not a new idea. But Pagan America is no scholarly work and the author is no philosopher. His arguments consist mainly of complaints about recent political events.

He tells us about NYT reporter Kevin Roose, who was told by Microsoft’s Bing chatbot that it wanted to hack into computers, make people kill each other, and steal launch codes, and that it loved him. Roose apparently was frightened by these “emergent capabilities.”

Okay, maybe Roose is a doofus. But how does a broken chatbot lead us into paganism? Davidson says even if the computer is not infected with a ‘demon,’ it still might become a neopagan idol—an “evil thing that has a measure of autonomy.”

It seems to me the real reason for the decline in religion, which is certainly happening, is not that our computers are infected by evil demons or that people up and decided God doesn’t exist, but that believers lost so many battles: evolution, gay marriage, contra­ception, school prayer, and creationism in schools to name a few. Picking fights and losing them is a sign either of bad judgment or that the opponents’ god is stronger. That was how Judaism prevailed over the idol-worship of the Midianites: Yahweh 1, Baal 0.

Paganism

What is paganism, anyway, and how is it different from Christianity? Both believe in unseen spirits. Both believe that failure to obey these spirits will result in disaster. Christianity was certainly an improvement: It doesn’t sacrifice virgins or eat them. It stopped burning unbelievers at the stake centuries ago. And it fought to eliminate slavery and racial discrimination.

In the author’s view, euthanasia and abortion are scarcely different from the child sacrifice of the pagans who sacrificed children to Baal, and the Aztecs, whose cannibalism and slaughter are legendary. Opposition to euthanasia and transgenderism comes from the conviction that human life and the human body are sacred. But opposition to evolution and to IVF, which could be our only hope in a depopulating world, damages its credibility.

Religion is a belief that knowledge was revealed to humans by super­nat­ural beings who then disappear and never provide clarifications. Thus religion is inherently static and unchangeable. That is Christianity’s weak­ness: it had trouble adapting to nearly every major scientific advance, from heliocentrism to evolution. Even today Christians periodic­ally revive invalid creationist arguments and publish them as if they think they’re rock-solid proofs.

Thus, the decline of religion is more than anything a failure of religion to renew itself. An atheist would ask how we know this guy who claimed to come back from the dead really was the Supreme Being. Even if he was, I’ve never seen a plausible explanation of how it saves us from sin as we’re told. These things demand explanations. If Christianity wants to survive, it needs to put itself on a firmer theological foundation. And it wouldn’t hurt to join with science, the only other institution that still believes in objective eternal truth.

We need Christianity’s respect for human integrity now more than ever, but a civilization built on sand can’t survive. Is Christianity is up to the job? I’m not so sure.

aug 03 2026