When I Was in Alaska…

I met a delightful woman at Theology on Tap (an old friend of John C. Wright’s) who was a convert from neo-paganism. We chatted for a while and when I asked her why she converted she basically remarked that the Catholic faith actually had a real history whereas neo- paganismis just a bunch of crap people made up a few years ago and then tried to pretend was “ancient”. That fact has always struck me as well. What has struck me further is how profoundly unserious serious neo-pagans are when you point this out. The response is essentially, “I don’t care. It works for me and so if I choose to believe we are recapitulating ancient paganism and not making up a bunch of crap (due to the fact that we know nothing about, say, Druid practices) then I will.” It’s a child’s game. And sooner or later, people who care about the life of the mind (like the woman I met) face this fact and recognize that the last thing the *real* pagans of antiquity did was get baptized.

I can understand a modern, raised in our theologically illiterate post-modern desert feeling his or her way toward neo-paganism for a season. It’s essentially sacramentality without God: the perception that there is indeed something about creation that is sacred and even a means of grace to us. But when you get past this semi-aesthetic wonder at creation and start seriously looking at the rites and rubbish of pagan practice and, still more, the doctrines and phony “history” of neo-paganism, any self-respecting person has to either turn their brain off or else laugh and go find out about real paganism and how it finally sought the cleansing power of Jesus Christ.

The problem is, as Peter Kreeft says, pre-Christian paganism was a virgin. Post-Christian neo-paganism is a divorcee. Happily, some of its children, like my friend in Alaska, see through the shell game and come to the One who is the Creator of all the beauty they rightly see in creation.