Why *are* some people turning to paganism?

Exploring some theories

I interrupt your scheduled Canadian nationalist and history enthusiast programming to discuss a broader phenomenon across the Western world. I hope to give some insight for my Christian followers on the secular experience, as it was something I personally went through. It is difficult to say with precision what is driving the turn to paganism for many, but several ideas are worth sharing. This article was sparked by a response I gave on X to an American Christian who posted. I responded to them with the quoted text, but wanted to elaborate.

The United States of America vs the World

First, I believe there are two factors at play. One is the divide between the United States and the rest of the Western world. The United States still has the highest percentage of weekly churchgoers in the West, at around 24 percent. In the U.S., Christianity remains a living tradition. Millions still attend church, or at least try to. Many people share a common faith, believe in God, and are familiar with Christian references in public life, politics, and law. In contrast, in countries like Canada and much of Europe, regular church attendance is closer to 5 percent. That number often includes recent immigrants who tend to be more socially conservative. Among native-born Canadians and Europeans, especially in urban areas, church attendance is even lower. Religion in these places is often kept alive only by older or rural populations. Among the youth, it has largely faded. Second, many Western countries have experienced secularization for much longer.

I believe this first one is not obvious to a majority of people. There are significant cultural differences and experiences within in the United States and outside of it. I believe it would be appropriate to say that the U.S. is still a Christian country, and not just nominally, regardless of whether or not it was established on Lockean principles and Greco-Romain inspiration (some would say revision), of the liberal enlightenment. Sure, the faith is not what it used to be, but probably the majority of Americans at least understand Christian references in common parlance.

I can share a personal anecdote that I believe is fairly typical.

I was born and raised in a region where Christianity had long disappeared from everyday life, following a slow process of state secularization. My great-grandfather was Catholic, but he changed denominations to marry my great-grandmother in the 1930s. It was a utilitarian choice. He believed in God but didn’t care for the petty tyrannies of ethnic and cultural association by denomination. His son, my grandfather, saw hypocrisy in both Catholic and Protestant institutions. As a boy, he was told he could not be friends with a Protestant by a the Catholic priest of his best friend, and he was kicked out of the house by his mother for attending Catholic mass with his girlfriend, even though his father had once been Catholic. My parents were irreligious agnostics. They were not hostile to Christianity, just indifferent, because they were not raised in it. As for me, I grew up in a post-liberal, post-Christian society. I believe in the divine and understand the importance of religion to civilization, but I have no living connection to what came before. In my country of Canada and among my people, Christianity is no longer part of the cultural fabric. I believe this to be the case in Western Europe as well.

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There is a common joke that if someone likes paganism so much, they should try the most pagan tradition of all: converting to Christianity. But the unfortunate reality is that secular liberalism has exercised a longer and deeper influence in the modern West than many realize. In response, one could just as easily say that the most Christian tradition of all is converting to secular liberalism, which has formally shaped the cultural and institutional framework of the West for more than 275 years.

For people raised in multi-generational secularized liberal contexts, there is nothing to return to. Christianity is not a living tradition. They cannot come home to Jesus the way many Americans still can, and they cannot undo the liberal Enlightenment. They can only move forward through it. At best, something new might be reinterpreted or reformed from its remnants. But Christianity was never part of their lived experience. It was not seen, heard, or practiced. Churches were never attended. Christmas and Easter functioned as civic holidays focused on family rather than faith. Christianity resembled a historical artifact, something like a beautiful mantelpiece in an old house. It had aesthetic and historical value, but no emotional, cultural, or spiritual presence. This situation is common in much of the non-American West.

This is why many contemporary efforts at Christian revival often feel disconnected. They are built on the assumption that secular individuals are lapsed believers who simply need to be reminded of what they once knew. But these individuals are not returning exiles. They are cultural natives of a secular world. They did not lose the faith, it was never given to them. There were no prayers at the dinner table, no hymns embedded in childhood memory, no sacred calendar shaping the flow of life. Organized religion belonged to the past, replaced with secular civic cults they’re largely unaware of. It was something other people had, something no longer meant for them. This group is not necessarily hostile to Christianity. In many cases, they admire it. They recognize its role in shaping art, architecture, law, and moral tradition. When foreigners attack these, they defend them. They understand its civilizational significance. But the faith speaks a language they do not understand. Its metaphors do not resonate. Its moral claims appear without context. Its stories feel distant.

A useful comparison can be found in the Heliand, a ninth-century Old Saxon gospel poem that re-imagined the life of Christ using the language and imagination of Germanic warrior culture. In that version, Christ is not a wandering teacher from a distant land, but a noble chieftain surrounded by loyal retainers. His mission is framed in terms of honor, loyalty, kinship, fealty, and sacred duty. The gospel message is not altered in its substance, but it is reshaped so that it resonates with the values, social structures, and poetic traditions of a people for whom neither Scripture nor Roman religious order had any living relevance.

This work was part of a broader process of the Germanization of Christianity, a phenomenon that has been studied in detail by scholars like James C. Russell and Fr. G. Ronald Murphy, SJ. Russell, in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, argues that the conversion of the Germanic peoples did not consist merely in the passive reception of Christian doctrine, but in a complex synthesis between Germanic folk-religious consciousness and Christian metaphysics. The resulting Christianities of the early medieval West were distinct, rooted in local mythic frameworks, and expressed through tribal loyalty, sacrificial kingship, and heroic virtue. Murphy, in works such as The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel, explores how the Heliand uses alliteration, formulaic verse, and martial imagery to make Christ intelligible to a newly converted warrior society. He shows how the gospel was not just translated into the Saxon tongue, but into the Saxon soul.

This is the historical precedent that today’s Church must study carefully. The peoples of early medieval Europe were not apostates. They were unbaptized, uncatechized, and culturally alien to Christianity. They were brought into the faith through through cultural immersion. Christianity did not ask them to surrender their world entirely. It entered their world, dignified their heroic values, and redirected them toward the divine. Only then did conversion become possible.

Even those outside the Church understand that this work is urgent. The crisis of meaning in secular liberal societies is visible. The desire for transcendence, rootedness, and spiritual structure has not disappeared. It has been redirected into political identity, consumer behavior, and digital escapism.

If Christianity is to succeed, the same kind of work is needed today. Christianity must once again become a missionary faith. This time, the mission field is not a remote foreign land, but the secularized cities and postmodern suburbs of the Western world. The people being addressed are cultural outsiders. Many were born into environments where the gospel was never lived, never spoken, never embodied. Christianity was not abandoned. It was never truly encountered.

A future for Christianity in the West will not be built on appeals to lost memory or civilizational guilt. It will not be recovered through progressive accommodation or through aesthetic traditionalism that treats churches, vestments, and relics as ornaments of cultural decline. It will only re-emerge through an act of deep cultural translation. That act must begin with an honest assessment of what has been lost, and a willingness to reframe the sacred in terms that can again be understood.

The alternative is a continued descent into spiritual confusion and civilizational forgetfulness. Christianity may continue to grow in the Global South. It may endure as a global religion. But in the West, it will only live again if it learns how to speak, once more, to those who were never taught how to listen.

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To the average secularist

Someone approaches and wants to talk about Jesus. They say he is the son of God who died for their sins. But the average irreligious person never asked anyone to die for them. They have no framework for substitutionary atonement. The idea that someone else's execution two thousand years ago could or should carry moral weight in their personal life is unintelligible. The very concept of being guilty before a cosmic authority they have never encountered or acknowledged seems absurd. And yet they are told that they are morally obligated to submit to a faith they were never exposed to.

Most have never read the Bible. The few passages they have encountered were likely isolated, quoted out of context, made into tattoos or rendered as pop culture allusions. The parts they do remember may seem abstract or harsh. Nothing like the heroic and tragic epics that shaped the modern Western imagination. Beowulf, the Iliad, the Norse sagas, the mythology of Tolkien, and regrettably, Game of Thrones or Star Wars have been far more present in their lives than the Gospels. These stories speak of loyalty, courage, kinship, sacrifice, and fate in terms that feel familiar. The Christian story, when heard for the first time in adulthood, often lacks that resonance. It feels foreign, sudden, and emotionally disconnected.

Despite this, the message is clear. Accept salvation through Christ, or face eternal punishment. Rejecting this revelation, even without having been properly introduced to it, is presented as a moral failure. The Father figure behind this arrangement is described as loving and merciful, yet imposes infinite consequences for disbelief. This figure has no role in their memory or imagination. He carries no moral authority, exerts no cultural influence, and is completely absent from their lived experience. There is rarely any theological or historical explanation. No invitation to explore. Just the demand to believe, followed by the threat of hell if they refuse.

To the secular person, the Christian is an outsider to their culture. The language used is symbolic and distant. Phrases such as “the apple of my eye,” “the blood of the lamb,” or “our daily bread” do not carry weight. These expressions are from another world, one that does not overlap with theirs. Even the rhythm and tone of religious speech can feel jarring, because the conversation is unfolding in a separate moral universe.

It is not hostility that defines the reaction of the secular Westerner. It is estrangement or apathy. They are not actively rejecting something they once knew. They are encountering something they were never given, being told to surrender to a story they never heard, and being judged by standards never explained. The Christian message fails because it arrives without context, without meaning, and without preparation. If Christianity hopes to speak again in the secular West, it must begin with this awareness. It cannot treat modern people as rebellious children returning to a house they once fled. It must recognize that many never lived in that house to begin with. It must learn to speak again from the ground up, not by softening its message, but by patiently explaining it in a language that others can understand.

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Public perception

On top of that, what many secular Westerners see in the public expressions of Christianity only deepens their sense of disconnection. Every visible Christian authority appears to affirm the same progressive, left-liberal ideology that dominates the political and cultural institutions of the modern West.

The Pope kisses the feet of migrants on live television. The Vatican financially supports non-governmental organizations that help bring those same migrants into Europe, often in defiance of local customs or demographic stability. Anglican bishops speak less about resurrection or sin than about inclusion and equity. Female priests read from the Koran in Anglican cathedrals as a gesture of interfaith solidarity. Lutheran synods silence or expel their conservative pastors. Baptist churches hang pride flags beside their crosses.

To the secular observer, this does not appear as a religion in tension with modernity, but as one fully captured by it. Rather than resisting the moral and political currents of the time, these churches seem to reinforce them. Instead of offering a transcendent vision that challenges the dominant narrative, they echo it. This removes any perception of Christianity as an alternative. It no longer appears as a moral force standing apart from the state, but as a spiritual wing of the same ideological regime. The priest and the bureaucrat speak in the same terms. The sermon and the press release use the same language. The impression left is institutional conformity.

This perceived collapse into political fashion coincides with a dramatic rise in historical literacy among the average person. The internet has democratized access to historical material in a way that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Anyone with curiosity can now explore the entire scope of Western religious history. They can examine ancient pagan traditions, pre-Christian cosmologies, local cults, and folk rites. They can read the primary sources of Gnosticism, Arianism, Catharism, and dozens of other suppressed or heretical movements. They can follow the history of church councils, inquisitions, power struggles, schisms, and compromises. They can trace how doctrine evolved, how ecclesiastical institutions aligned themselves with political regimes, and how Christianity itself was shaped by the very cultures it sought to convert.

This exposure does not always lead to atheism or cynicism. In many cases, it provokes serious reflection. But it also creates doubt. It makes the claim of a single, eternal, unchanged truth more difficult to accept at face value. It invites the seeker to view Christianity as one tradition among many, rather than as the inevitable destination of all spiritual longing. Why would God gatekeep access or communion with him through a single religion, or denomination of one. To the averaged secularist, this is absurd. Combined with the absence of a living Christian inheritance in their own lives, this historical perspective reinforces the feeling that Christianity is a tradition they may admire from a distance, but not one they are bound to.

What replaces this shared tradition is not another unified worldview, but endless personalization. The internet has reshaped how individuals experience meaning. Online, no one is formed by a single community or narrative. Instead, people are shaped by what they click, what they scroll past, what they save, and what they consume. Their beliefs, desires, and identities are not shaped through curated feeds designed to mirror and reinforce their impulses. Algorithms decide what is relevant. Content is tailored to what flatters or stimulates. People no longer encounter the same ideas at the same time. They no longer live in shared symbolic worlds, existing in isolated cultural habitats that reflect their interests back to them.

As Martin Gurri observes in The Revolt of the Public, there is no longer one public, but many publics. Each is fragmented, self-reinforcing, and cut off from the idea of a common center. Likewise, there is no longer one society, but countless micro-societies. Each of these has its own language, its own values, its own authorities, and its own moral assumptions. This is observable even among online Christian circles, where members engage in endless theological, denominational debates concluded 1500 years ago. Some orbit politics. Others orbit aesthetics or fandoms or lifestyle brands. Religion becomes just another option in this mix. It competes with everything else, and it holds no privileged place.

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Bleak Demographics

Demographically, the future of Christianity no longer lies with the West.

Today, there are more Christians living in the Global South than in the traditional heartlands of Europe, Oceania and North America, and the gap continues to widen. The most active and fastest-growing Christian populations are now found in countries like Nigeria, Brazil, the Philippines, and South Korea. The demographic center of Christianity has shifted away from the societies that once defined its architecture, theology, and liturgy.

After decades of missionary effort focused on Africa, Latin America, and Asia, many Christian institutions have reoriented their priorities toward these growing nations. Seminaries, aid organizations, and ecclesial leadership structures increasingly reflect the concerns of these regions. The result is that institutional Christianity increasingly speaks with a voice that is more global, but less Western. Its imagination, moral emphases, and theological rhythms are being reshaped by cultures that have their own histories, their own priorities, and their own sense of the sacred.

As a consequence, the ability of the Church to speak meaningfully to secular Westerners has diminished. The language of Christianity now often reflects values and assumptions that do not resonate with them. The Church still exists in the West, but it increasingly feels like an import. It is being preserved in small pockets, but the broader culture no longer recognizes it as its own. It is becoming their faith, not ours.

When this shift is combined with other forces, the result is a profound spiritual dislocation. The slow erosion of Christian influence over public life, the rise of liberal individualism, the personalizing influence of the internet, and the perception that Christianity is either irrelevant or hostile to contemporary identity all contribute to a sense of alienation. Historical literacy deepens this divide. People now know too much to accept simplistic claims, but not enough to be guided through the complexities. They are aware of the contradictions, the shifting doctrines, the political accommodations, and the forgotten traditions. Their search for God, if it exists at all, is filtered through suspicion, loneliness, and abstraction.

At the same time, there is a growing recognition that secularism has not delivered what it promised. The promise was moral autonomy, political progress, technological comfort, and cultural pluralism. What emerged was fragmentation, confusion, spiritual dryness, and the erosion of deep identity. Many begin to understand that human beings require religion in some form, even if they reject the old forms themselves. Some turn to civic ideologies that function as replacement religions, complete with rituals, moral codes, myths, martyrs, and enemies. Others experiment with alternative spiritualities, ancient mysticism, or syncretic practices. Still others long for a more authentic connection to community, place, and ancestral memory, which organized religion once provided but now no longer offers.

The result is not a clean rejection of Christianity, nor a return to it. It is a confused, pluralistic, and improvised search for meaning. Some seek to reconstruct a past they never lived. Others attempt to create something entirely new. The West becomes a landscape of half-remembered liturgies, fractured moral instincts, online spiritualities, and institutional silence. People feel a pull toward the sacred, but they do not know where it lives. They seek God, but they no longer know what to call him. They crave communion, but have no altar to kneel before.

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Why paganism?

Some are turning to paganism as a sincere attempt to recover something that modern life no longer provides. This is not always ideological, and it is rarely about strict belief systems. It reflects a deeper cultural longing. In a world that feels fragmented, placeless, and spiritually barren, paganism appears to offer meaning that is immediate, embodied, and accessible.

Paganism appeals to those who feel estranged from both institutional religion and the abstract individualism of secular liberalism. It offers an intuitive spirituality rooted in the natural world, the cycles of the seasons, and the idea of the sacred as something woven into the landscape. Where modern Christianity often speaks in moral or doctrinal terms, and where secular society speaks in technocratic or therapeutic ones, paganism speaks in symbols, rituals, myths or philosophies. It presents a sacred cosmos that can be experienced rather than argued. It offers stories that are invitations to participate in something older, organic, and emotionally resonant.

For those who never inherited Christianity as a living tradition, and who associate it with cultural decline or institutional compromise, paganism feels authentic. It is rarely entangled in modern political narratives. It does not require allegiance to a global institution. It does not demand assent to creeds they have never read. It offers a spirituality that seems colloquial, ancestral, and sensorial. The Dii Consentes, the Olympians, the Aesir and Vanir, and the Fomorians are not abstract doctrines but mythic figures that inhabit the world as it is seen and felt. These are elements that speak to the body before they speak to the mind. In a disembodied digital world, this is no small thing.

Paganism also does not assume guilt or alienation as a starting point. Unlike many Christian formulations that begin with sin and redemption, pagan frameworks tend to begin with participation. The world is already sacred. The self is already part of the whole. There is no need for a dramatic conversion or a break from the past. There is only the need to remember, to reconnect, and to realign. This makes it especially appealing to those who feel that the sacred has not been rejected, but forgotten.

As I stated, the internet has played a role in this revival. It has allowed fragmented individuals to access forgotten texts, comparative mythologies, and local folk traditions. People can explore Norse sagas, Druidic rituals, Greco-Roman cosmologies, Baltic animism, and Slavic seasonal rites from their bedrooms. They can join online communities that share reconstructed festivals, devotional poetry, and handmade altars. What begins as curiosity can become practice.

What begins as aesthetics can become faith.

Of course, much of what is called paganism today is new. Neo-paganism is a problem. It is not a seamless continuation of ancient traditions. It is often a reconstruction, a creative effort to re-imagine what was lost. But that does not make it trivial. In a world where both Christianity and secularism have lost their ability to inspire collective meaning, even the effort to revive a dead language of the sacred must be taken seriously.

Paganism, for some, becomes a beginning. It is not the final answer to the crisis of meaning in the West. It does not resolve the metaphysical questions that have shaped Western theology and philosophy. It represents a willingness to search. It shows that people still want to inhabit a world that has depth, mystery, and purpose. It shows that the hunger for the sacred has not disappeared, even if the old altars lie in ruins.