Davidson: ‘Moral’ abortion and euthanasia point to the rise of paganism in the United States

"In in the end there is only one alternative to Christianity, and that is paganism."

As if devout and discerning Christians need to be reminded, we are living in an increasingly secular and pagan society.

There is no question we live in evil times. It seems as if the devil is working overtime to corrupt the hearts, minds, and souls of men. While our society in the United States has always been far from perfect, it seems now that the presence of evil permeates practically every aspect of our culture. Think about the debate we have seen in recent years about things like racism and sexuality. We are told that everything we do is based on systematic racism and that sexuality and gender are somehow fluid and based on what an individual wants to be and not how God created them. This is not of God, but the devil.

The Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 5:15-16, “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.”

The “days are evil” at the end of Verse 16 refers to our current times, as opposed to the coming time when Jesus Christ will return and vanquish evil. So it is up to all Christ's followers to strive to walk in the light of the gospel and not to be deceived by the evil words of men of our present age: 

“Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not become partners with them;” (Ephesians 5:6-7).

Deception comes in lots of forms today. The mainstream media deceives the masses by telling part of the story, by manipulating facts, or through outright lies. It should be the duty of every Christian to seek truth in media and share the biblical worldview with co-workers, friends, and family living under deception and a false worldview.

A recent Tucker Carlson interview with John Daniel Davidson of The Federalist highlights the rise of secularism and paganism in our society. Davidson is the author of a new book, “Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come.”

“Everybody worships something. So as the state becomes aggressively less Christian, it doesn’t mean that religion has disappeared. Easter was replaced just the other day by the Biden Administration with the worship of transsexualism, “Trans Visibility Day.” So it’s a religion, it’s just different. In this case, it just happens to be a pagan religion. That’s the direction the United States is speeding right now, towards paganism,” Carlson said in introducing the segment with Davidson, adding that Davidson is someone who has “thought about this in systematic detail.”

“The question is what does that mean? Does it make anybody happier?” Tucker asks. 

Davidson replies, “Yes, because in the end there is only one alternative to Christianity, and that is paganism.

“And we should be clear about our terms. When we say “paganism,” I don’t mean a sudden resurgence of the worship of Zeus, (other pagan gods) or the resurgence of witchcraft, although that is happening as well. What I mean is a return of the pagan ethos, and the pagan ethos is and always has been a rejection of transcendent or objective truth.” 

He explains that ancient pagans were free to divinize and assign divine status to the here and now, to things, natural phenomena, and even to people.  

“And we are returning to that as the world becomes re-enchanted from this sort of secular hiatus that we’ve been on the past century or so,” Davidson said. “What that means in America, of course, is a radical moral subjectivity that we see in the trans movement, that we see in Black Lives Matter, and critical race theory, that we see all across our society asserting itself now — that rejects now what our fundamental and Christian claims of the human person, our relationship to one another, and our relationship to God.” 

Christian claims about the human person, our relationship to another, and our relationship to God is how Christianity is different from all other religions, Davidson asserts.

In a practical human sacrifice has been a constant throughout all recorded history of every non-Christian culture, so it should not surprise us that abortion and euthanasia have come to the center of our culture. Therefore, abortion and euthanasia as the most obvious manifestations of the return of human sacrifice in the new pagan cults, he explains.

For example, it is interesting that when you look at the justification for something like abortion after Roe v. Wade and even into the 1980s, it was “This is not a human being. This is just a complex of cells. You are not taking a human life. These fetuses aren’t viable,” Davidson said. “As medical technology progressed in the 1980s and 90s and over the past 25 years you see the justification change.” 

Davidson said advances in technology mean the original justifications make no sense.

“We all know undoubtedly now beyond any doubt, objectively, that an unborn human being is a human being. And so this justification has changed from ‘it is a clump of cells’ to ‘safe, legal, and rare’ to ‘shout your abortion.’ So now you have a positive defense of abortion as a moral good that we should brag about and that we should champion. And that is not a Christian value. That is a pagan value. And it is reasserting itself now in a modern context.”

Davidson continues, “We have a situation in the United States now when two children of the same gestational age where one if born prematurely have to be saved all medical technically is brought to bear to save that child’s life. … the same gestational child born in another state can be killed within a few days. The only thing that determines the humanity of this person is the desire of the mother to have the child or not have the child.

“And that is also quintessentially pagan, because in a pagan society what determines what’s right and what is morally correct is based on powers at hand. Those who have power do what they want to those who have no power. And that is their God-given right to enslave, or kill, or rape, or abuse, anyone who they have power over. And that’s the dynamic that we see returning now.

“At least start with a rational, or secular justification, as we saw with abortion. But as we are seeing now in Canada (with euthanasia) it quickly moves into a power dynamic where people who are inconvenient are simply being killed.”

The bottom line, Davidson says, is there is very little justification on a Christian moral basis, for it. There is a pagan moral justification, which is all about power and the force of the will. 

“There is no justification to allow healthy, young people, who are suffering from depression or maybe substance abuse or addiction, to kill themselves — to have physician-assisted suicide. That’s what is happening in Canada right now. They went down the slippery slope and it only took them a few years to go from only people with terminal illness to anyone who is depressed and lonely; and maybe people are costing the national health system a lot,” he said. 

“There are actually some studies in Canada that say how much will be saved expanding their euthanasia program. This is really dark stuff, and we have to understand it for what it is. It is the replacing of Christian morality with pagan morality. And the transformation of a republic of self-governing citizens into what is essentially a slave empire where those with power, the ruling class, rules over the underclass that are subject to that power.”

Carlson added, “In Canada, you have the state murdering its own native population, and overwhelming, the Christian population of Canada — people whose ancestors are Christian, churchgoers, and replacing them with people who are not Christians from other countries. So it is hard not to see that as part of them, that’s just a fact. I guess you could interpret it in a different way. But it is the Christian citizens that are getting killed by the state. I think this is true.” 

Davidson said Canada’s Prime Minister supported a hoax about the mass graves at indigenous schools as well, which unleashed a flurry of violence against Catholic Churches in Canada. “Dozens of churches were burned down, vandalized, and destroyed. And the Prime Minister encouraged it, he cheered it on,” he added.

“It was the same thing with the Black Lives Matter protesters here in the summer of 2020. The regime did nothing. They encouraged it. They wanted it to happen. They were willing to countenance (support) violence in the streets, and again, they used raw force to advance their agenda and cement their rule,” said Davidson.

“And then, unequally, apply the force of the state against Christians, against pro-life protesters, against people who were in the vicinity of the Capitol on Jan. 6. This is a pattern that I see repeated more and more often as we get away from this idea of traditional Christian morality. That is to say individual rights, the rule of law, consent of the governed; these are things that just exist in a secular, liberal utopia. They depend on an actual Christian society to sustain them. When Christianity declines, or when we enter into a post-Christian era, those things are going to go away. They can’t sustain themselves on their own. And I don’t think that we appreciate just how much we rely on our Christian inheritance for our specifically American way of life.”

Watch the Tucker Carlson interview with John Daniel Davidson of The Federalist on YouTube.