Paganism has made a comeback.
This doesn't mean that kids have started making sacrifices to Zeus and Thor (though interest in Wicca and other modern forms of playacting at witchcraft has surged, especially among young women). Rather, as Louise Perry has explained in these pages ("We Are Repaganizing," October 2023), paganism is better thought of as mankind's default outlook on the world. The pagan worships the immanent, including worldly gods and worldly things, and so what he ultimately comes to worship above all else is power: power in the world and over it. In Perry's words: "To put it crudely, most cultures look at the powerful and the wealthy and assume that they must be doing something right to have attained such might. The poor are poor because of some failing of their own, whether in this life or the last." It was Christianity's "topsy-turvy attitude toward weakness and strength" that made it so revolutionaryand so anthropologically odd. So now, as societies revert to the pagan mean, moral beliefs we mistakenly thought were unshakably foundational, such as that every person possesses inherent human dignity, or that unwanted babies shouldn't be abandoned to die, are being upended in favor of the old ways. Thus we end up with growing public support in the West for policies such as state-facilitated euthanasia.
"As Christianity fades in America," Davidson warns, "so too will our system of government, our civil society, and all our rights and freedoms." The state will no longer allow the principle of individual rights or conscience to override its desires, and it will not hesitate to use force to get its way, even if that means violating previously sacred norms by, say, threatening to break up the families of those who refuse to submit.
The pagan state, on this view, will not pretend to maintain any sort of liberal neutrality. Instead, Davidson argues, "We will have a public or state morality, just as Rome had, which will be quite separate from whatever religion one happens to profess." What will this state morality consist of? Davidson believes we can already see it being instantiated everywhere: a solipsistic focus on self-expression, self-empowerment, and pride; a radical emphasis of unabridged individual autonomy and liberation from all customs, taboos, and constraints, including all duties and relational ties; an extreme aversion to boundaries and limits on desire, and the self-creation not only of all aspects of personal identity, but of the body, nature, and reality itself; and ultimately an undiluted worship of the self and the will to power, hidden behind a mask of empathy, tolerance, and the language of the therapeutic. Under this regime the strictest of commandments will be that it is forbidden to forbid anything.
Davidson observes that this state-enforced morality reflects the occultist Aleister Crowley's old dictum, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." As Mary Harrington has put it elsewhere, it is becoming hard to resist "the startling conclusion that post-Christian America is an increasingly Satanist regime."
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/05/dark-enchantment 
