Is Western society witnessing a return to paganism? Liel Leibovitz thinks so. His Commentary essay starts with the question of what pagans, both ancient and modern, believe: "The answer, while wonderfully complex, may be distilled to the following principle: Nothing is true, everything is permitted." Thus, constant change—one might call it "fluidity"—is the dominant motif of pagan cosmology.
Liel explores three seminal issues that unite pagan belief systems: tribalism, earth worship, and child sacrifice. These ancient tendencies have modern—and increasingly troubling—analogs.
What’s the solution? Liel offers up good old-fashioned biblical monotheism:
We were all, the Bible tells us, created in God’s image, and even though God elected one people to preserve and protect his Torah, the arc of history bends toward togetherness. God’s house, Isaiah wisely reports, “shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.” In other words, while people are different, and while their differences are meaningful and instrumental in shaping their unique experiences, they also form the bridge that could one day lead to a common house of prayer. The biblical story begins and ends with a universalist message; its meaty middle, the story of the chosen people and their travails, is a crucial reminder that cultivating our own tribal beliefs and rituals is, ultimately, an exercise in self-awareness without which we can never truly empathize with anyone anywhere.
Or to put it another way, in the biblical understanding, particularism orients us to the universal. God chose a particular people to bear a message for the whole world (to be a "light upon nations," to use another of Isaiah's beautiful phrases). But in the modern understanding, particularism is the end, not a means. We are to be oriented toward the tribe and ultimately toward the self—the antipole of the universal—with all its attendant cultural chaos.
The next time you see a poll or study about the "decline of religion" in the West, don't believe it. "When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything," Chesterton reputedly said. Nothing is true, everything is permitted. What is in decline is not religion, but biblical religion, and novel, more grotesque belief systems are rising to take its place.