As news concerning Trinity College’s American Religious Identification Survey data from 2008 starts to seep into the blogosphere, we’re starting to get some initial reactions and meditations on what it all means. Beliefnet’s Pagan blogger Gus diZerega wonders if the religious right has poisoned the well, ultimately benefiting the Pagan community.

“Now the Religious’ Right has worked hard to push their ghastly conception of a deity down everyone’s throats, where all talk of love and charity has been drowned out by belches of bigotry and ignorance, hatred and greed.  Fortunately more people are repulsed by this business than are attracted … [Pagans] have no problem with science, are tolerant of spiritual differences, and address constructively many of the biggest political and cultural issues of our day. The numbers of nontraditional religious groups, including us, now number 2.8 million calling themselves Wiccan, Pagan, or Spiritualist, up to 1.4% from .8% since 1990, all without seeking converts.  Our biggest problem is a shortage of qualified teachers compared to the demand for them. I believe there will be more of us in the next survey.”

Another Pagan blogger, Lonnie at “Here In The Cave of Wonder…”, looks at the numbers on a state-by-state basis.

“That said, while specific numbers aren’t available for Virginia yet, “other” religions seemed to have grown at a rate of only 1%. So, it’s still likely that my own observations have been true, but just not true for Connecticut (+5%). Other areas, did indeed shrink in numbers of people practicing alternative religions including RI (-1), FL (-1), MA( -1), NY (-2%), NH (-2%), and WY (-8%). For around 15 states there was no change at all.”

Meanwhile, the Get Religion blog names the “mini-rise of the Wiccans” as a discernable subplot to the ARIS story. So you can expect a number of journalists will most likely be nosing around the “NRMs and Other Faiths” in the near future to figure out why we’re growing while others shrink. As for Christian pundits, there is some (prophetic?) doom-saying going on. Pastor Tony Beam at Crosswalk partially blames “aggressive atheism” and “new age nonsense” for the current declines in Christendom.

“The combination of traditional religious teaching with the new age concept of spirituality.  The “Oprahization” of the church is well under way with millions now tuning in (through TV and the web) and turning on to Oprah Winfrey’s brand of homogenized religion.  Being spiritual, as defined by Eckhart Tolle and others means simply believing in a nebulous force that might work well for Star Wars Jedi but in the real world, is nothing but new age nonsense.”

While Beam thinks Christians can turn things around if they buckle down, author Michael Spencer at the Christian Science Monitor believes a major evangelical collapse is right around the corner.

“Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century. This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good. Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline.”

That’s some strong stuff, and it gets even stronger on his blog. This (alleged) fragility of the evangelical boom seems to born out by ARIS researcher Mark Silk who discusses the finding with the Telegraph.

Mark Silk, who oversaw the findings, said: “There is now this shift in the non-Catholic population – and maybe among American Christians in general – into a sort of generic, soft evangelicalism. “If people call themselves evangelical, it doesn’t tell you as much as you think it tells you about what kind of church they go to. It deepens the conundrum about who evangelicals are.”

And the media storm continues fast and furious. Steven Waldman notes that “No Religion” is now the fastest growing religion in America (sorry Wicca!), while Touchstone Magazine claims that Wiccans and “self-described pagans” are growing faster than we did in the 1990s, and Commonweal bemoans the “real-time effects” of  America’s “anti-religion” bias. And on, and on, and on. It looks like there is some serious re-evaluating going on and modern Pagans (being one of the few “winners” here) may end up getting a lot more attention from this story than we think. Expect lots and lots of essays and articles in the coming weeks and months to mention the ARIS data, and for some religious groups to be emboldened (or feel threatened, or both) by what that survey says.

The top religion-oriented story of the day is the release Trinity College’s American Religious Identification Survey data from 2008. A survey of 54,000 people (in contrast, Pew’s religious landscape survey had 35,000) , ARIS is one of the biggest and most influential snapshots of faith in America. The most popular ledes from the newly available data is the ongoing erosion of denominational protestantism, the overall shrinkage of Christian adherence, and the growth of people claiming “no religion”.

“The only group that grew in every U.S. state since the 2001 survey was people saying they had “no” religion; the survey says this group is now 15 percent of the population. Silk said this group is likely responsible for the shrinking percentage of Christians in the United States.”

While I love to pontificate on the looming post-Christian society (and there’s plenty of meat here to feed such pontifications), you, gentle reader, are no doubt wondering how Pagans and other fellow travelers are faring according to this data. Well, from a cursory examination of the data it looks like we’re doing just fine.

As you can see, ‘New Religious Movements and Other Religions’ packed on over a million adherents since 2001, and over 1.5 million in the last twenty years. That brings the total of “others” to nearly 3 million. Who are the others according to ARIS?

“New Religious Movements and Other Religions: Scientology, New Age, Eckankar, Spiritualist, Unitarian-Universalist, Deist, Wiccan, Pagan, Druid, Indian Religion, Santeria, Rastafarian.”

Now that’s a rather interesting stew of faiths there. How to tell who’s growing and by how much? For that, let’s turn to the Pew Forum’s religious survey, which while slightly smaller in sample size, mirrors the ARIS data rather well. Both Pew and ARIS give “other” faiths 1.2% of the (American) pie. That in turn seems to back up my earlier assertion that there are at least one million modern Pagans in America (probably more like 1.5 million), add in the over half-million UUs (around 20% of whom are “earth-based” or Pagan in some respect), close to a million practitioners of Santeria (in North America), and a few hundred thousand indigenous practitioners, and it seems clear that notions of our continued (slow and steady) growth aren’t unfounded. The ARIS data also makes clear that it isn’t the myth of an exploding Pagan population that Christians have to worry about.

“The 2008 findings confirm the conclusions we came to in our earlier studies that Americans are slowly becoming less Christian and that in recent decades the challenge to Christianity in American society does not come from other world religions or new religious movements (NRMs) but rather from a rejection of all organized religions. To illustrate the point, Table 1 shows that the non-theist and No Religion groups collectively known as “Nones” have gained almost 20 million adults since 1990 and risen from 8.2 to 15.0 percent of the total population. If we include those Americans who either don’t know their religious identification (0.9 percent) or refuse to answer our key question (4.1 percent), and who tend to somewhat resemble “Nones” in their social profile and beliefs, we can observe that in 2008 one in five adults does not identify with a religion of any kind compared with one in ten in 1990.”

In other words, America is becoming less Christian, but it isn’t really our fault. Just think of all the wasted time and resources fighting Harry Potter and other “occult” menaces. The kids aren’t becoming occultists, they’re becoming (spiritual but not religious) secularists! Meanwhile, while Christian religions still overwhelmingly dominate numerically, a majority of Christian adults believe the days of their faith being the “default” religious setting in America are essentially over. In the coming days and weeks it should be interesting to see how other journalists and religious groups spin this new ARIS data. Debunkings? Denials? Gloomy acceptance? Whichever the direction, I’ll content myself with the ongoing modest growth of our family of faiths.

If you ever needed an example of how journalism can change the religious aspect of a story, look no further than the media outlets currently doing retrospectives on the kidnapping and killing of Mark J. Kilroy twenty years ago. Kilroy was a University of Texas pre-med student on spring break in Mexico. On March 14, 1989 he was kidnapped and ultimately killed by a group of drug traffickers lead by the charismatic and insane ex-fortune-teller to the stars Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo.

“Kilroy arrived at South Padre Island on March 11 with friends Billy Huddleston, Brent Martin and Bradley Moore, joining the tens of thousands of students who each year made the trek to a warm sun, alluring beaches and unfettered nightlife on both sides of the border. Sometime during a visit to Matamoros on their third day in the Valley and into the early morning hours of March 14, Kilroy became separated from his group. They never saw him alive again … Constanzo’s followers selected Kilroy at random. Most of the other victims were competitors in the drug trade.”

Now, here’s where things get tricky. Constanzo adhered to his own twisted and distorted variant of Palo Mayombe, and ran his drug operation like a cult (complete with brainwashed followers), with numerous ritualistic human sacrifices (mostly competitors) being done to “feed” his magical power. The Mexican press dubbed Constanzo and his followers “narcosatánicos” (Satanic drug dealers), sensationalistically linking Constanzo’s warped Afro-Carribean practice with Satanism. Now, twenty years later, The Brownsville Herald’s report takes the time to unwrap the tangled story interviewing anthropologist Tony Zavaleta, an expert in African diasporic religions who advised police twenty years ago and witnessed first-hand the horrifying work of the cult. Zavaleta makes it clear that Constanzo was a madman engaging in a twisted and isolated distortion of Palo.

“…they also found evidence of “Palo Mayombe,” an imported Afro-Caribbean religion. It would be engrained into their memories. Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, the ringleader of the drug gang, gave the religion a “bad name” in the “self-styled” manner in which he practiced it, anthropologist Tony Zavaleta said … He has met with Palo Mayombe practitioners during the past 20 years in the Rio Grande Valley, other Texas locations and Mexico City and, “They all, with no exception just lament what Constanzo did and he caused them so much harm and so much damage (to their religion).” Zavaleta said he recently talked to a “santero,” a person who practices Santería, who also is a “palero” and a “padrino.” And in talking about the 20th anniversary of the Rancho Santa Elena massacres “he went into a rant about Constanzo, about ‘ese loco,’ ” Zavaleta recounted.”

Now, compare that excellent bit of journalism by Emma Perez-Trevino with the report by local television station KVUE.

“…the work of a satanic cult, the leader, a Cuban-American who promised drug traffickers protection in exchange for human sacrifices … the satanic cult’s so-called godmother was a student at Texas Southmost College, now U.T.-Brownsville … Many still refer to it as the work of the devil, just across the border from a Spring Break paradise.”

Even though KVUE also interviews Zavaleta, they don’t include any information from him about the formation of this cult, satisfied to call it “Satanism” and move on. Now think about how many people saw that television newscast as opposed to reading the two in-depth pieces from The Brownsville Herald and you start to see how religious misinformation starts to spread. I suppose “Satanist” has a bit more “zing” than “twisted and isolated offshoot of Palo Mayombe”, but it isn’t correct and clouds the true facts of this horrible event. As horrible as this case was, and no doubt as much as ethical practitioners of Palo and related faiths wish this wasn’t in their history, the truth can ultimately benefit them. If labeled “Palo”, ethical journalists can at least find and interview modern practitioners who can explain the distorted nature of Constanzo‘s insane cult. But if they are “Satanists” then people make all sorts of troubling associations, and most likely triger interviews with “Satanic Panic” peddlers who have a vested interest in inflating a largely imagined threat (or genuine modern Satanists who will have little to no knowledge about the case).

While I acknowledge that there are many decent and tolerant Christians out there, it is a fact of life that extremists, loud-mouths, and the badly behaved often get the lion’s share of news coverage. While I’m normally content to ignore the occasional wacky thing said by some conservative Christian or Catholic somewhere (lest my blog become a WorldNetDaily watch), occasionally you encounter such a great confluence of anti-Pagan/occult hysteria that you have to point it out.

Let’s start over at Catholic Culture, Dr. Jeff Mirus explains what is “animating” the “dissident” (read: liberal-leaning) Catholic dioceses and communities.

“The leaders in the worst dioceses and religious communities, in addition to having permitted themselves to be shamefully co-opted by the larger secular culture, are frequently animated specifically by personal vice (often homosexuality) or by various hybrid spiritualities with pagan roots (sometimes Wicca).”

Sometimes Wicca! Gasp! Choke! At least they aren’t using… Ouija Boards!

“After a few minutes, I found myself in the board game section. There, to my shock and dismay, amidst the games of Operation, Battleship, and Snakes and Ladders was a pile of Ouija Boards. For those of you who may not be familiar with a Ouija Board, it is a “game” where the players seek to contact spirit entities for guidance. I felt my stomach tighten within me as I imagined innocent children being lured into the occult by this dangerous “game” at a place where children should be safe — a toy store.”

Looks like Baptist pastor Richard Jackson has been watching “The Exorcist” a few too many times. It could have been much worse though, they could have been Hawaiian.

One of the “preachers” told a Korean student that he is going to hell for his Buddhist beliefs and told Hawaiians they are going to hell because they worship false gods and believe in witchcraft, she said.

That lovely bit of racist theology came from the rabidly anti-gay folks at Bema Ministries. It almost makes the routine rantings of the conservative Anglicans at VirtueOnline seem quaint.

“New Age themes of self-deification animated the biennial “Sacred Circles” conference on women’s spirituality at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. on February 13-14. Rather than the masculine “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” of Christian creeds women sought out the “the Feminine Divine” within themselves. But this time, ecclesiastical support was not limited to Protestant denominations. The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, offered continuing education credits through its Center for Spirituality and Social Work to intrepid women journeying towards the Feminine Divine.  In contrast to its supporters, the event never purported to be Christian. Instead, the conference was possibly “the largest interfaith women’s spirituality gathering in the world.” Church sponsors included the Episcopal –run National Cathedral, which devoted a paid staffer as the “Sacred Circles” convener, the Episcopal Church Office of Women’s Ministries, which offered scholarships, and Catholic University’s Center for Spirituality and Social Work, which offered academic credit for attendance.”

Shocking! Next think you know Catholic nuns will be tolerating the presence of goddess-worshipers!

Fear of a Pagan planet can be used in an argument against just about anything, even marijuana.

“If we could remove the stigma, they say, then people could love God and love marijuana as well. I am not convinced, nor should you be. Marijuana use fits well with certain religions that worship the earth. Several pagan religions use marijuana to enhance their “spiritual experience.” But this cannot be the case with Christianity.”

Pot as a gateway drug to idolatry? Gateway to ordering a pizza maybe, but Paganism? Still it’s obvious things are getting bad, I mean, Christian cops who claim to see demons roaming their headquarters are getting their guns taken away!

“A cop who allegedly once claimed to have seen a demon in Police Headquarters is suing the NYPD, saying brass stripped him of his badge and gun because he’s too religious … His religiosity “escalated to point where he neglected his job and schoolwork, isolated himself, did not eat and focused exclusively on religion.” He also fasted for weeks at a time, and by the time he was committed to a psychiatric ward, he had dropped 20 pounds … He contends he’s now doing better and wants to be restored to full duty. The medical board rejected his request in December, noting a doctor’s finding that ‘he appeared to identify with God and acted as if he was superior to others and God-like.’”

Yes, this is obviously a man who should be given a gun and allowed to police a multi-religious city.

I suppose the real question is why Christians are so overly concerned with “the occult” and “Paganism” when actual real-live modern practitioners are such a tiny fraction of the population. I think that writer (and fellow Pagan blogger) Gus diZerega hit on it when he said that modern Pagans “represent the rise of something Christian leaders thought they had vanquished long ago”. The fall of (European) pre-Christian paganism was supposed to be Christianity’s first big victory, it is something that many Christians still brag over (because barbarity, inhumanity, and intolerance ended when the Christians took over). But if the Pagans are returning, and according to some hysterical Christians (and overly optimistic Pagans), growing at explosive rates then that could call into question the inherent superiority of the Christian “truth”. A final unraveling of Christian dominance. That seems one of the only logical reasons why this small group gets so much attention from Christian book publishers, evangelists, and various pundits.

ICANN, the organization that manages and assigns new top-level domains (like .com, .org, and .net) has recently been going through a process that would (in theory) make the proposal process for new extensions easier and (relatively) cheaper. While that would certainly make some people happy (namely registrars), other groups are concerned about this more open process. One influential organization in particular has made its concerns known.

“The Vatican warned the internet address-making body of the “perils” of allowing new internet domains such as “.catholic, .anglican, .orthodox, .hindu, .islam, .muslim, [and] .buddhist”. ICANN, frequently accused of mission creep, could find itself having to decide who gets to represent an entire religion on the internet, His Holiness pointed out, in a letter from Monsignor Carlo Maria Polvani.”

That’s right, religiously-themed top-level domains have become a very real possibility, and the Vatican is concerned about who might end up holding the reigns of those new extensions.

These gTLDs could provoke competing claims among theological and religious traditions and could possibly result in bitter disputes that would force ICANN, implicitly and/or explicitly, to abandon its wise policy of neutrality by recognizing to a particular group or to a specific organization the legitimacy to represent a given religious tradition.

In other words, what if an organization headed by a schismatic or Independent Catholic group got control of ‘.catholic’ (not that I see the Vatican letting that scenario go down without a fight), or, what if a rogue Subgenius had control over ‘.pope’ (charging twenty dollars per domain obviously)? More likely, what if control over religious top-level domains went to the groups with the most money?

“You have the right to contest any of these extensions by spending the  $50,000+, it will take to object to each and every religious domain extension that might be applied for. Just  ask the churchgoers to dig a little deep in their pocket to put more money in the collection plate, so they can fight each new extension religious extension. Seriously the many nightmarish problems and issues are just starting concerning these new extensions. What if multiple groups apply for a  .god extension, who gets to play god? Well I guess the highest bidder, according to the ICANN’s Guidebook.”

To say this is a potential minefield is a huge understatement. So long as you have groups that insist they hold the only “proper” or “correct” way of administering legitimacy regarding a faith, tradition, text, title, or teaching, your going to run into serious problems. Worse, what would happen if enemies of a particular faith controlled the keys to its top-level domain? After all does the Pagan community have hundreds of thousands of dollars to challenge an evangelical group from running ‘.pagan’ or ‘.wicca’? So in this instance, and perhaps not for the exact same reasons I have, the Pope is right. Religious-themed extensions under the current system would be a potential nightmare. Without the promise of an affordable and open challenge mechanism, or the certainty that religious extensions would be controlled by ideologically neutral parties, ICANN should stay out of the God(s) business.

A North Carolina UU Church has made the news over a minor controversy concerning a member’s hunting knife.

“A member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Franklin is prohibited from bringing his hunting knife to church after another member saw him with the blade at a Sunday service and got worried. The knife carrier, Charles Rowe, said there is no reason to be alarmed by his utensil. He simply wants to wear his knife to church because, “It’s part of me and part of who I am.” But even in Appalachia, where mountain men once thrived, Dr. Bill David, the complainant, said knives still shouldn’t be allowed in church … The debate has resulted in the church adopting a no weapons policy and sparked a vigorous discussion over an individual’s rights.”

Rowe is a Pagan and has been wearing the knife on his belt for the four years he’s been attending the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Franklin, but recent uneasiness about weapons in the wake of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church shootings have raised sensitivities about possible weapons in the church. It should be interesting to see how the implementation (or renewal) of weapon bans in UU churches affect UU Pagans. Is an unsharpened athame a weapon? How that question is answered could cause tensions within churches that house thriving CUUPs or UU Pagan groups.

My semi-regular round-up of articles, essays, and opinions of note for discerning Pagans and Heathens.

Over at the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog, panelist and Reclaiming co-founder Starhawk answers the question of whether we are our “brother’s keeper” economically speaking (in short asking if the fiscally “responsible” should help out the “irresponsible”). In her response, Starhawk wisely takes aim at the limiting binary of responsible/irresponsible when discussing the current economic crisis.

“Let’s not be too quick to judge other peoples’ irresponsibility. I don’t particularly want my tax dollars to bail out the overpaid CEOs and financial manipulators who got us into this mess. But I do believe we need to extend a hand to help people stay in their homes, renegotiate their mortgages, and find new jobs. The core teaching of Goddess traditions is simply this: we are all interconnected and interdependent. If we recognize that truth, if we acknowledge that we must all pull together, we can steer through even the heaviest rapids. But if we start pushing people off the raft and fighting over the oars, we will all go under, responsible and irresponsible alike.”

For other non-Judeo-Christian takes on the issue of responsibility in our current fiscal meltdown, check out the responses from Deepak Chopra and Susan Jacoby as well.

The Reuter’s FaithWorld blog covers Carnival celebrations in Bolivia, but while reporter Fiona Ortiz is awed by the sheer spectacle of the main events, she is even more impressed by the pervasive and simple offerings to the earth goddess Pachamama.

“Driving through the Andes, I saw Bolivians on streets, in the fields, and in the patios of their houses, getting together for ch’alla rituals, making offerings to the Pachamama and blessing their cars. Apparently Bolivians do ch’alla often when they drink — spilling or flicking alcohol onto the ground — but the practice becomes a full-blown ceremony on special days, such as at the end of Carnival, just before Lent begins.”

I don’t know about you, but the simplicity and pervasive integrated nature of their offerings says so much about the appeal of indigenous and polytheistic worship. Simple, direct, and rooted in everyday experience. Ortiz also notes that she saw many “Westernized” Bolivians partaking in offerings to Pachamama, and wonders if this is a result of Bolivian president Evo Morales’ government re-writing the country’s consititution to guarantee freedom of religion and removing Catholicism as the sole recognized faith.

Over at her Driving Audhumla blog, Pagan journalist Victoria Slind-Flor reports back from a gathering of the goddess group Gaia’s Womb in Racine, Wisconsin. What’s particularly interesting and noteworthy here is that the gathering was held at the motherhouse of the Racine Dominicans.

“The retreat was at the motherhouse of the Racine Dominicans, on the shore of Lake Michigan, just south of Milwaukee. As the number of vocations has declined, the community has turned to other ministries, one of which is making a large part of their home available for retreat groups … The Dominicans could not have been more hospitable, even when we did a ritual with loud drumming, chanted our way through the hallways and even some of us showed up at meals wearing the crowns created in my workshop … And all the nuns with whom I spoke talked about loving the energy we brought to the motherhouse.”

Remember my recent post about what might happen as religion becomes more female-dominated? Is the future when Catholic nuns and goddess-worshipers can peacefully commune in the same space already arrived?

In the UK, a Grantown Baptist Church is concerned about an year-long and escalating series of hostile notes, and more recently a dead rabbit, that they claim are “pagan” in nature. Many of the notes are apparantly marked with the “all-seeing eye” (or Eye of Providene) commonly used in a variety of fraternal orders and esoteric groups.

“There have been a series of pagan-style notes over the past year,” said Mr Fishwick, who has been deacon of the church for the past 20 years … “It seems to be the work of a bit of a crackpot. They only ever pick out our church; none of the others have had this, but we don’t know why. “The notes are heathen quotations: things like ‘Your days are numbered’, ‘Wrongs remain unrectified’ and ‘Judgement has been passed’.”

Seems to me to be the work of someone with a personal grudge, and not some sort of deranged Mason or cultist. If the police are looking for leads they should start with the membership roles.

In a final note, missional Christian blogger John Morehead interviews Terry Muck and Frances Adeney, authors of the book “Christianity Encountering World Religions: The Practice of Mission in the Twenty-first Century” about doing mission-work to various World religions when traditional evangelistic tactics have reached a standstill. At the end of the piece, Morehead asks for advice on how to approach modern Pagans resistant to the notion of “gospel as gift”.

“Terry Muck: Our offer of gifts will not always be accepted. Our motives will always be challenged by some. That shouldn’t stop us from doing what Christ commands, though, giving the gift of the gospel to any and all. Also, it may that there are ways to give in the context of Neo-Pagaism that we haven’t discovered; gospel gift-giving must always be contextualized so as much as possible cultural inhibitors are avoided and cultural opportunities are taken advantage of. Frances Adeney: Yes. A few years ago, one of the students in my evangelism class became quite involved with Pagans in the Louisville area. As she got to know individuals in the group she repeatedly heard from them that she was the only Christian they had ever met who listened to them and really cared about their beliefs and practices. That’s a good place to start.”

I’ve debated before with Christians about notions of proper “contextualization” in relaying the gospel to modern Pagans. In fact, I brought it up in my own interview experience with John Morehead.

“…stop thinking that we haven’t embraced the gospel because it hasn’t been “contextualized” properly to our community. Most of us are extremely well-read and have had numerous experiences (both positive and negative) with the Christian tradition, we understand the gospel message, we just happen to reject it as an exclusive truth (which according to recent Pew data is a growing attitude).”

The truth is that there is only so much narrative leeway in transmitting the gospel story. Too much change and it’s no longer recognizable as Christianity. Plus, once “Christianized”, those converts are then expected to be subject to the same theological limitations and moralities as the rest of the “flock”. No amount of metaphorical backflips will make a committed and content Pagan polytheist suddenly switch to a dominant (and patriarchal) monotheism.

That’s all I have for now, have a great day!