For many years now, I’ve noted what other conservatives have seen as well: The West is reverting to paganism. However, I argue that our current iteration is infinitely worse than the old variety was. Why? Because the new pagan gods are worse than the original ones.

Because this recording originated as a talk I gave to a local group, I’ve appended the full transcript at the end of this post.

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My thesis is a simple one: The new paganism sweeping the West is worse than the old paganism because the new gods are worse than the old ones.

I was tempted to begin this talk with the most famous statement in the Western canon, the Bible’s “In the beginning...”

However, for humans, that wasn’t the real beginning. The real beginning was paganism, which developed to address practical concerns, whether the fundamental question—how did humans come into being?—or the practical ones: Why are there natural disasters? Why did the whole village sicken and die? Where did fire come from? The pagans developed huge armies of gods, all tied somehow to physical objects or phenomena, to answer these questions.

The difference between these myths and Biblical faith is profound, something that struck me forcibly when I read Stephen Fry’s Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece.

All of us probably know the top myths... Prometheus stealing fire, Pandora’s box, Daedalus and Icarus, etc. Fry, however, tells all the myths, which I found surprisingly boring. I realized this was because the myths have no narrative arc driven by objective moral principles.  Instead, they offer endless little retrofitted explanations for observable phenomena. People saw things (for example, spider webs, sunrises, different continents) and created ex post facto rationales for how they came to be.

The gods themselves are amoral and do not demand morality from humans. Instead, they are unpleasant, self-centered beings, both arbitrary and capricious. They interfere in human affairs only to satisfy their lust, anger, jealousy, and boredom, with occasional flashes of goodwill.

The other striking thing is how corporeal the pagan gods were, as opposed to abstract and spiritual. Their bodies were infinitely malleable, but they were still real bodies. They could take different forms, including sharing their shapes with animals or the opposite--and they were gods who were obsessed with sex. It was one of their driving motivators.

These same traits seem to apply to all pagan gods, whether in the ancient Fertile Crescent, pre-Columbian Americas, Africa, or the Celtic and Nordic worlds. They’re corporeal and amoral and woe betide humans who offend them or, through beauty or talent, catch their eyes.

However, while the pagan gods saw humans as subordinate sidenotes, their power over the earth made them centrally important to humans. People constantly tried to placate these volatile beings, including using the sexual rituals the Bible decries and the human sacrifice that the Bible stopped with the Binding of Isaac.

The Bible changed everything. The Biblical God is a non-corporeal entity who doesn’t need human sex or death to satisfying Him and make Him treat humans better. He is also an all-encompassing God who created everything, ending all those little tales to explain this phenomenon or that one.

Most significantly, the Bible’s God asks for only one thing from humans: Morality. He gave us Big Rules that didn’t require endless second-guessing. You can find these rules in the seven Noahide laws that God laid down after the Flood and the Ten Commandments that followed the Israelites’ Exodus from bondage in Egypt.

Rather than explaining where spiders come from or demanding human blood sacrifices, God’s big rules define man’s relationship to God, to family, and to society.

The religious worship that developed from the Bible reminds us that there is only one God—and it’s not us. Whether you’re in a Church or synagogue—provided that it’s a traditional one—the liturgy is the same: God is up there, and we gratitude-filled humans are down here.

This was the template for Western culture through the French Revolution. Humans slowly shed their violent past through an increasingly sophisticated allegiance to the Biblical ethos, a process speeded by the Enlightenment’s dawning awareness that we are all children of God, who deserve humane treatment and have inherent rights.

The French Revolution, though, marked a profound break from this Western tradition. Unlike previous battles across Europe, which often involved fights about religious doctrine, this was the first time a Western society rejected God entirely. As Denis Diderot explained, “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

When France’s revolutionary fervor slowed, it seemed as if God might return—and that might have happened were it not for Karl Marx supercharging the French Revolution’s attack on God. “Religion,” said Marx, “is the opiate of the masses.” As he said it, religion kept the masses from how the West’s socioeconomic customs oppressed them.

What Marx may or may not have realized is that, with God gone, people will inevitably fill what has been described as “a god-shaped hole.” As Émile Cammaerts explained in a quotation usually attributed to G.K. Chesterton, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.”

At first, the new Western belief in anything was fairly anodyne. People insisted that their reason would ensure that murder and stealing remained wrong. Many started saying that they weren’t religious, but they were “spiritual”—whatever that means.

And for a long time, there was a vogue for angels without God, a belief that was warm, cuddly, and had the virtue of making no moral demands.

However, the belief in anything soon became openly pagan, with increasing numbers of people declaring allegiance to the Druids or claiming they were Wiccans. The biggest leap, however, to paganism was Gaia worship through the medium of climate change. Rather than the Earth being God’s creation, a whole cohort of people in the Wst believe that the Earth is, once again, a deity that must be placated through extreme and arbitrary sacrifices.

Some of the worship rituals are familiar: Ending plastic straws, mandating electric vehicles, trying to outlaw gas stoves, terrifying children with the Apocalypse.

Some are more extreme, however. In 2025, “Ecosexuals” can marry the earth to show their commitment to preserving it like a lover. There’s also “hydrosexuality,” which does the same for bodies of water. (So, again, here’s the sex ritual.) You can even marry brine shrimp in the Great Salt Lake.

Harvard Law School offers a course entitled “Rights of Nature”—and I’m quoting here. This is right from the catalog:

Beginning from the premise that existing environmental law is inadequate to the problems of climate change, mass extinction, and habitat loss, this movement proposes strategies that include granting rights to nature through legal personhood and assigning property rights to wildlife.

It’s pure paganism. It’s animism all over again, but it’s worse even than you realize.

James Lindsay’s and Logan Lancing’s book The Queering of the American Child: How a New School Religious Cult Poisons the Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids zeroes in on something profound: Marx wasn’t advocating an economic doctrine; he was advocating a cultic, religious one. An economic revolution was simply how the cult would advance.

What Marx argued is that humans are unique among animals in that they function beyond mere instinct. By acting on their higher-level thoughts, they shape their own reality, and by doing so, reshape the world around them.

A good example is Elon Musk. He dreamed of an electric car and designed it. The car changed the world, as does the money that Musk obtained from his car. (Right now, thank goodness for that.) This power to refashion ourselves and our world by actualizing our thoughts—and “actualizing” is one of those ’70s touchy-feely Marxist word—but by actualizing our thoughts, we have become god-like.

Nietzsche got this. Looking at the Marxian world, he said, famously, “God is dead.” What most people don't remember is that he also said regarding this monstrous act of murder, “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” In other words, God is dead; long live the new gods...

These new gods exert their power in the West in two especially terrible ways: Abortion and so-called transgenderism.

Once, the argument for abortion was that it would save women’s lives, whether from the burden of endless pregnancies or from “back-alley abortions.” During the Clinton years, we were promised abortion that was “safe, legal, and rare.”

Well, it’s safe now (for the woman) and still mostly legal in large swaths of America. However, it’s anything but rare. Since 1973, the best guesstimate is that there have been around 65 million abortions in America.

It's not just the numbers, though. What matters is that the pretense of saving women’s lives is over. Abortion, instead, is for the woman’s convenience, to allow her to finish her education, hold on to her job, dump her boyfriend, or just have consequence-free sex.

Leftist women, like God Himself, now define life. If they want to remain pregnant, it’s a baby; if they don’t, it’s a fetus or a clump of cells. Disposable.

Two examples will suffice: In 2004, one woman wrote a very famous essay. At the time when she discovered she would have triplets, she thought to herself, “I’ll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise.” That thought was a death sentence for two of the triplets.

Eighteen years later, an abortion activist named Sarah Lopez testified before Congress that, and I’m quoting here, “Having an abortion was the easiest decision I’ve ever made. It was transformative, it was liberating, it was an act of self-love.”

What Lopez said is incredibly profound...in a bad way. While people once sacrificed babies to placate the gods, women now do so to placate and transform themselves. They are the new gods and, with 65 million dead babies, infinitely more bloodthirsty than the old ones could ever dream of being.

We see that same focus on godlike transformation with the LGBTQ+ movement.

And let me say, preliminarily, I am careful to distinguish the movement from just being gay, an orientation as old as humankind and one that doesn’t have to be entangled with radical politics. If you want examples, just look to Scott Bessant, Ric Grennell, and Scott Presler.

The movement, however, was about advancing homosexuality as a counterculture to the Western biblical culture. It quickly went from not hiding in closets to extraordinary promiscuity—there’s that pagan sex obsession again—to demanding marriage, and then, most significantly, to so-called transgenderism, a term that takes the old mental illness known as body dysphoria and makes it a virtue.

This worship for transgenderism allegedly represents humankind’s creative power to break free from the biological reality of our own bodies. This substitution of self for God permeates LGBTQ radicalism.

A gay rabbi, someone I once knew, has written a long article explaining that Joseph, he of the coat of many colors, was probably gay, and that wasn't just because he dressed flamboyantly. Instead, he resisted Potiphar's wife. Morality, though, had nothing to do with it. Homosexual repugnance was more likely.

And while the rabbi used to think it was wrong to project himself into the Bible, another rabbi assures people that, and again, I’m quoting, “Torah is not about somebody else.” Seemingly, it’s not even about God. It's about you.

This same self-worship appears in a catchy New Age Christian Quirky, Queer, and Wonderful. So help me. Here's what it says: “Quirky, queer, and wonderful, distinct, unique, and odd; all of our humanity reveals the face of God.” Yes, God shows up in the hymn, but he’s a bit player.

However, nowhere is the Godlike apex of self-creation greater than when it comes to transgenderism. Humans, with their godlike powers, will correct God's mistakes. They are greater than God. Indeed, transgenderism has become a grotesque parody of the resurrection, as you can see with the much-talked-about movie Emilia Perez. That’s the story of a violent drug cartel boss who leaves his past behind by becoming a “trans woman.” He’s been born again, not as a Christian, but as his own godlike figure. His violent death at the end of the movie, which I admit I haven’t seen, only cements that status.

But as I said, these new gods are worse than the old ones. Not content with transfiguring themselves, they are sacrificing tens of thousands of children to their cult by destroying the children's minds and mutilating their bodies.

It also goes far beyond the individuals who are harmed. Indeed, you could say that transgenderism is probably the major weapon in the left’s war for total dominance. If the left succeeds, it will have established at the point of a gun that it can control reality.

Transgenderism’s centrality to leftism is why one of the things DOGE has exposed is that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have gone to fund this ideology at home and abroad, and [it’s] why the Democrats are so hysterical right now and doubling down on transgender madness, even though it’s a loser in the polls.

There's good news, though. As Trump’s actions and soaring popularity demonstrate, this neo-pagan cultism may finally have reached its apex.

Thanks to Trump’s non-activist Supreme Court justices from his first term, abortion is being limited to hard-left states, and those states are losing their population as Americans leave and residents stop having babies.

Americans also love Trump's war on transgenderism in sports, education, and the military. So, at the end, I'll leave you with this: There are still many battles ahead, but the tide has turned. If we keep up the fight, we will do to the new pagan gods what the Bible did to the old ones.