I READ IT SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO: "PAGAN THREAT" BY LUCAS MILES

KANT, MARX, LUCIFER AND ALL THE OTHER DEMONS OF "WOKE", AND OF COURSE THE COSMIC WAR

From time to time, I review books relating to the hoary and ultimately destructive old Story of the Cosmic War. These are books I did not want to read. This is “Pagan Threat: Confronting America’s Godless Uprising with a Foreword by Charlie Kirk” by Pastor Lucas Miles. It is the book de jour for the Christian right, because its foreword was the last thing Charlie Kirk wrote. This makes it a timely read, but it is also timely because it is one of several influential books expressing concern that Paganism is overtaking Christianity in the USA, and that Christian hegemony is at risk. From my end I sense the return of the Satanic Panic, and this worries me as the Story of the Cosmic War becomes more prominent and more absolutist.

This article has a soundtrack, I’m sorry to say. It is the song “Pagan Fears” by the rather sketchy Trv Norwegian Black Metal band Mayhem, with its superbly operatic vocals by Attila Csihar, from their classic “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas” album. I have this blackest of all Black Metal earworms in my head as I write

Kia Ora Koutou, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with me, Karen Effie.

Here is the best sentence in “Pagan Threat”.

“But more often than not, this diverse godless spectrum between mystic and scientific collides into an alchemical belief system driven by Leftist scientific propaganda and Luciferian religion. The glue, of course, that holds them together is Marxist ideology.”

I laughed and laughed.

Of course it is.

Even worse of course is Leftist religion and Luciferian scientific propaganda but let’s just not. And he forgot about Woke, but don’t worry, he makes up for that in spades elsewhere.

So, this gives the tone of the book and the writing style and so on and probably encapsulates what keeps Lucas Miles awake at night.

Lucas Miles is a pastor and media personality, who has been described by Charlie Kirk as “a fearless warrior for Christ”. He is senior director at Kirk’s Turning Point USA. His previous books include “Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity”, so I figure Pagan Threat is his sort of thing and I suspect he writes the same book over and over, pretty much.

Lucas Miles begins by talking about “Woke” which he sees as the “modern fruition of Paganism”. He does not define Woke, but assumes we understand him when he lists a cluster of things he dislikes such as critical race theory, gender identity and Earth worship. He uses the word parasite to reify Woke. Woke is a thing.

Well, bro, I hear you, because I could never be woke. I don’t have the history or the culture. According to Dr Neal Curtis:

…‘woke’ is a term rooted in the experience of African-Americans. Early in the 20th Century, the idea of staying ‘woke’ appeared in songs, most notably ones like Lead Belly’s Scottsboro Boys recorded in 1938 about a series of events in 1931 that saw a group of young black men accused of rape. It became a simple warning to black people travelling through deeply racist states in the US that they needed to be very careful and mindful; to ‘stay woke’.

So, I don’t get to do that. I don’t get to be woke. I am an older Pakeha (white) woman, and I have never had the need to stay awake and aware of danger in the way that Black Americans have. I have never been automatically discriminated against, and I have never had racism against me. I cannot claim that brave title of woke.

Lucas Miles does define Paganism: as “those who have abandoned mainstream forms of religion for esoteric practices, often rooted in polytheism, ancient rituals, worship of nature, spell casting, sexual acts, and altered states of consciousness”. Then he gives many examples. Most of these are described fairly accurately. He has done a bit more than watch WitchTok. He has done some reading. Interestingly, his examples of Paganism include Theosophy, Thelema, New Thought and Shamanism. It’s a definition he works with throughout the parts of the book that actually talk about Paganism, but it is weirdly broad. New Thought, for example, is loosely the idea that we can change reality by thinking about it, particularly thinking positive thoughts. Like attracts like. We can heal ourselves and better our lives by thinking in the right way. New Thought is behind some of the wellness movement, and some of the prosperity “Think and Grow Rich” idea that has influenced Christians as much as it has influenced anyone. Theosophy and Thelema are esoteric groups, but I am not sure that esotericism maps onto Paganism. Members of such groups may not describe themselves as Pagan. Thelemites are magickal practitioners and magic is not necessarily Pagan; it owes a lot to the mainstream religions it hangs off, as well as early science and classical philosophy. Shamanism is not exactly Pagan either, being associated with particular indigenous practices. Even Taoism, which is a whole religion, gets chucked in here, via yin/yang. Lucas Miles is doing what is easy, which is lumping together a lot of ideas and practices that seem intuitively to relate to each other because they occupy similar marginal spaces in our society. But New Age and New Thought and esotericism and Paganism are not quite the same, although they are kind of like fellow travellers in cultural space.

There is also a bit of a problem with how Lucas Miles sees Paganism as an abandoning of mainstream forms of religion. While many modern Pagans may have abandoned Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Judaism or Christianity, many come from the “nones” category of religious belief. And, historically, Paganism came first, surely, so Paganism was the religion that was abandoned. Even looking over the history of modern Paganism, it seems to have had a complicated relationship with Christianity throughout. Modern Paganism is often seen as being an expression of anti-Enlightenment Romanticism that developed its own rituals and systems only in the twentieth century, but it is hard to say where it came from. Pre-Christian Paganism never quite went away, but it intertwined itself into Christian practice and survived in pockets all the way through the last two thousand years.

Lucas Miles expounds on Paganism. Paganism is bespoke, flexible, and individualistic. It treats people as divine; most particularly it invokes the divine feminine in the form of the Goddess. It is revolutionary: Lucas correctly identifies that Pagan strand of Romantic thought of Shelley and Swinburne as potentially upending society. For modern Pagans, “everything is sacred” and this inevitably leads to the sanctioning of abortion, because if everything is sacred, so is every action. Pagans worship the Earth, and value the earth more than humans, leading to an anti-human, Malthusian, even eugenicist devaluing of human life. Paganism is also somehow Marxist. I don’t quite get the connection here, but it seems to be that Paganism is Woke and Woke is Marxist therefore Paganism is Marxist. Marxism is never defined, and Miles assumes we understand its badness in our very bones. Miles does not engage with Paganism much, but he engages not at all with Marxism. It is a way of saying Boo.

Worse, Paganism has infiltrated Christianity. Lucas Miles gives a long list of practices he considers to be Pagan, including yoga and crystals and even some forms of intercessory prayer. Miles also has a chapter on how the idea of yin and yang leads to “transgenderism”, when yin and yang are Taoist ideas, and I don’t think Taoists would agree they are Pagans. He also goes into UFOs as angels, claiming that in fact UFOs are Nephilim. (More bloody Nephilim! I can’t get over how I keep running across these damn things, and I will NOT explain all over again how non-Biblical this Nephilim stuff is). My point here is that UFO culture is kind of New Age adjacent and Pagan adjacent, but not really Pagan. He is wandering around a bit. He also expresses concern about other things that aren’t about Paganism at all, such as “directed evolution”, “emerging global tyranny”, “evolutionary leaders” and “tech advocates”. Here I suspect he is writing what he always writes; I can imagine him saying “and another thing that grinds my gears is….”

Another point worth making is that not all Pagans are Woke libtards. While it is true that Pagan communities have more than the usual number of LGTBTI+ people, people with disabilities and those who are not neurotypical, and differences are more likely to be welcomed, this is not always the case. Consider the influence of Julius Evola, the uber-Fascist, or Stephen Flowers and Stephen McNallen with their white racist form of Heathenism. Eco-fascism is Pagan adjacent. When navigating Pagan spaces, it pays to ask questions. Lucas Miles does not mention these strands of Pagan thought. He does not see Paganism as monolithic, but he also is unaware of the breadth of it. Because he has not really engaged with it.

The book’s main themes are:

1. Paganism is about apotheosis, becoming gods or godlike, or thinking we can do better than God. For Christians, this is part of the original sin. Right at the start, when Eve ate the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, humans set themselves up as godlike. It’s been downhill ever since. Pagan practices encourage us to rely on ourselves, rather than God. I think Lucas Miles should study Islam. Islam is more monotheistic than Christianity and teaches more strongly about the problems when humans try to “join partners with God.”

2. Christianity is eternal, univocal, inerrant, and so on. Only by becoming what he calls “traditional” (conservative, high-demand) Christians can we understand this. Christianity provides moral absolutes and the submission to Christ that brings true freedom. The Church has also given us human rights and rationalism (while somehow remaining unchanging). This contrasts with the eclectic, flexible, individualistic Paganism, with its moral relativism. Often, Miles disapproves of ideas just because they are not Christian, and therefore not salvific. Christianity also gives us order, the proper social and moral order under God, and order is good and Godly, whereas differences and pluralism lead to chaos, and chaos is not just the fertile crucible of life prior to the creation, and not just the raw stuff of the universe as expressed at the beginning of the book of John: chaos is evil (as well as feminized), and evil is everywhere, and evil comes from outside of us, from dark forces. Or I should say, Dark Forces.

3. The Church must remain pure. A good third of the book is devoted to the need for a new apologetics, based on the Apostles Creed, and general conservative American-ness. True Christianity does not change, does not borrow, and is not syncretic. The result of syncretism is apostasy – and you know where that leads us. Yup, LGBTI+. Seriously, folks.

There is a lot of ignoring Christianity’s syncretic history here. I would only slightly be joking if I said to Lucas Miles that Christianity is merely Hellenism plus Judaism. All religions are syncretic.

4. We are in a state of spiritual warfare. Lucas Miles is kind. He acknowledges that many of those he calls Pagan are well-meaning with their Etsy spells and general woo. But the Church is under attack by dark forces. These are Marxism, Woke, Deconstructionism, Post-Modernism, and don’t talk to me about Hegel. Or Kant and his undermining of the Enlightenment. It is interesting that Miles seldom mentions Satan or the classical good vs evil Cosmic War, but he reifies the above ideas as if they are demons. He accuses environmentalists of wanting to end the world, but he hints at how Pagan practices signal “that we are in the Bible’s final chapter”.

Some in the Pagan community have responded to the book with alarm. “Pagan Threat” is not the only book of its kind, but recent events have given it more legs. We do not want another Satanic Panic. We do not want another QAnon. Real people genuinely suffer when these things happen, and most of them are not even Pagan. Conservative Christianity is in the ascendant right now. It continues to have a disproportionate influence considering its numbers. Persecution is baked into it. It needs its martyrs and its warriors and all the usual tropes from the Cosmic War which it has made its own. I just hope that for a while at least it leaves the rest of us alone.

Thank you for reading, and please read some of my other posts, because this one will make much more sense. Remember that the Cosmic War is 4,000 years old, that it permeates all the West Asian religions, and while it finds its fulfilment in Christianity, there are other places to look, other Stories to tell, and that we can do better. Ma te wa!

FURTHER

In no particular order:

- Ronald Hutton’s “Triumph of the Moon” about the history of Paganism and Witchcraft in the UK, and his newer book “The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present”.

- Joseph Laycock “New Religious Movements: The Basics”.

- Ryan Smith “The Wayward Wanderer” podcast where he and Elizabeth Sandifer unpack the book from a Heathen perspective.

- Manny Moreno’s article in The Wild Hunt “Pagan Threat is Talking About Us” is the start of the Pagan response to the book.

- Brent Nongbri’s most interesting “Before Religion”. Pre-Christians did not have religions as we would talk about the word. Religion in Greek was a word for duty or social obligation. The idea of religion emerges out of medieval Europe, when Christian thinkers worked to distinguish themselves from others.