John Daniel Davidson > Quotes

“Many young Americans are spiritual seekers, it’s just that the places they look for awe and higher truths aren’t necessarily institutions or scriptures but increasingly in nature and in themselves.” Teenagers are turning to things like witchcraft, Boorstein suggests, as a way to exert some measure of control over their lives at a time of great uncertainty in the world. These new forms of paganism, what one might call “identity-based witchcraft,” are also a way for naturally self-obsessed teenagers”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“very real contest between the pagan empires of the world and Christ’s Church, which had now taken up the mantel once worn by the Israelites as God’s chosen people, and under the banner of Christ would set the pagan captives free.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“if the states and the federal government were required to remain strictly neutral on religious matters, if they were not allowed, as the Supreme Court ruled in Everson, “openly or secretly, [to] participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups, and vice versa,” then in what sense, really, was America founded “upon the spirit of God”? The answer was: in private matters, and private matters alone. This was the idea, at any rate, that emerged in the middle of the century.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“three distinct aspects of Christian marriage as fides, proles, and sacramentum, or “fidelity, childbearing, and indissoluble unity.” These distinct features of Christian marriage would revolutionize family life in late antiquity, and in time the Christian idea of family and marriage, forged by Catholic dogma and later refined by scholastic theology, would supplant Roman law and custom. Eventually, the Christian idea of marriage and family would transform the pagan societies of Europe by bringing in new social arrangements that would form the foundations of Western civilization,”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“the number of Americans who say religion is “very important in their lives (58%)...is little changed since 2007 (61%) and is far higher than in Britain (17%), France (13%), Germany (21%) or Spain (22%).”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“even slaveowners in the South, understood the Declaration to mean what it plainly says. The Revolution that followed transformed attitudes about legal slavery, such that by 1817, every state in the north and west had either banned slavery outright or committed itself to eventual abolition.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“A solid majority (56 percent) of evangelicals in the “State of Theology” survey deny the doctrine of original sin, claiming that people are “good by nature,” thus endorsing—whether they realize it or not—a form of Pelagianism, a fourth and fifth century heresy that held human beings are capable of not sinning and, by divine grace, can achieve perfection in this life. Like Arianism, Pelagianism enjoyed considerable support among the Roman elite, and might have become entrenched if Saint Augustine had not attacked and ultimately discredited it.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“The practice is not permitted anywhere in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. Indeed, the establishment of a government euthanasia program as part of a national health care system is far too dystopian and barbaric for poorer countries of what used to be called the Third World. It is even too barbaric for communist dictatorships like China and North Korea. Those regimes might kill their people with impunity, denying them a basic right to life. But they are not so depraved as to confer on their people a basic right to suicide.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“More than a quarter of Americans older than sixty are living alone, a higher share than ever before. In Europe, older adults are slightly more likely to live alone than in the United States, but they are also more than twice as likely to live with extended family than their American counterparts, who, as a group, are perhaps the most isolated people on the planet.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Other news reports told of Canadians facing homelessness or credit card debt, or requesting help with disabilities, only to be offered euthanasia instead by Canada’s national health system. The country’s Department of Veterans Affairs was prolific in this regard, recommending euthanasia to veterans struggling with depression and PTSD, and in one case suggesting euthanasia to a former Paralympian in response to repeated requests for a home wheelchair ramp. “Madam, if you are really so desperate, we can give you medical assistance in dying now,” the caseworker allegedly said.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“pits, seventeen in total, all of them in the vicinity of the king’s palace, were enormous: twelve feet in diameter and forty feet deep. Seven of the pits contained human sacrifices, fifteen to twenty victims in each. Such victims were found by the hundreds “in nearly every portion of the city, some of the bodies being most brutally and cruelly mutilated.”16 The entire city was a charnel house, its pagan altars caked over with human and animal blood.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“That 1963 case struck down a Pennsylvania law requiring public schools to read from the Bible at the beginning of each day, something most Americans today can hardly imagine, so thoroughly has the idea of state neutrality taken hold.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“perhaps the fullest realization of Lewis’s “Materialist Magician” is to be found in the Satanic Temple, founded in 2012 by two men who describe themselves as “nontheistic Satanists” and for whom the invocation of Satan is really just a radical affirmation of a materialist, rationalist philosophy that amounts in the end to an elaborate form of self-worship.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Second Great Awakening brought with them long-lasting efforts to apply Christian doctrine to social problems. It is not too much to say that the major social reform movements of the nineteenth century had their genesis in the camp meetings of the Second Great Awakening.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“By promising that his Catholic faith would not guide or even inform how he formulated public policy or governed as president, Kennedy was relegating religion to a strictly private sphere, just as the Supreme Court would do two years later in Engel v. Vitale, striking down prayer in public schools, and, a year later, banning the reading of the Bible and the Lord’s Prayer in Abington School District v. Schempp.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“The proclamations of Eisenhower and the influence of the Protestant mainline notwithstanding, American society by the mid-1950s had already embraced the fallacy that religion is ultimately a purely private, subjective matter—just as it had embraced the fallacy of strict state neutrality toward religion.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Suicide, at least as depicted by Simons and the Canadian government, is not tragic or shameful, but beautiful, dignified, brave, idyllic. And more than that: it is sacred, holy. It is, in this telling, the closest thing you can get to a sacrament in a post-Christian society.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“The classical liberal order, so long protected and preserved by the Christian civilization from which it sprang, is already being systematically destroyed and replaced with something new.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Survey data show more than 70 percent of nones believe in God or some other higher power, despite having no desire to find a church.37 A majority of millennials, who are substantially less religious than older generations, say they believe in God “with absolute certainty.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“American children in general are not okay, and haven’t been for some time now. Studies and surveys all show the same thing: rates of anxiety and depression among young people under age eighteen are the highest ever recorded.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Here, then, is a real-world glimpse of Lewis’s “Materialist Magician.” Bennett and Hansend and millions of others have managed to “emotionalise and mythologise” their understanding of science so that seeking out Hecate or Odin or any other blood-drenched demon from the pagan past is transformed into a kind of therapeutic spiritual practice. Seen in this light, such a practice need not undermine a fundamentally materialist worldview, or open the mind to “belief in the Enemy” (Screwtape’s term for God).”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Today, there can be no doubt that America has definitively entered a post-Christian era, and that means a post-liberal era, because liberalism depends on a moral framework and moral principles that are thoroughly Christian.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Benin shows us, at any rate, that there is nothing inherent in human nature that inclines away from paganism and much that inclines toward it, and there is nothing inherent about the development of human societies and cultures that mitigates against even the worst and most violent forms of pagan ritual. The passage of time, even the advent of modernity and the Industrial Revolution, is no cure for the shaman’s bloody altar, no guarantee against the impulse to spill innocent blood for protection or propitiation. Neither is technology or “progress.” Indeed, some of the most technologically advanced pre-Christian pagan empires were among the most brutal, from the Aztecs to the Carthaginians, and even the Romans.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“What’s more, in contrast to the later theorizing of Hobbes and Locke, they did not form this social contract in a “state of nature,” as if they had arrived in the New World as amnesiacs from nowhere, carrying nothing and transmitting nothing from their civilization. No, the men of the Mayflower were Englishmen, even if they were not all Puritans, and they brought to the New World the traditions and customs of the English, which is to say they brought their Christian faith, and specifically a form of Protestant Christianity that enabled them to form a common covenant and establish a self-governing polity.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Although divorce is becoming less common among younger Americans, driving the overall divorce rate down in recent decades, it’s increasingly common among adults over the age of fifty. Since 1990, the divorce rate for this age cohort has more than doubled.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“what greater sign of devotion and piety could there be than offering what you most cherish, what is most irreplaceable? There’s a kind of logic to this, and it has the added virtue of assigning a motive to pagan peoples other than absolute depravity. But it’s also possible that they offered children to their gods because that’s what the gods demanded, and the gods demanded this because they were absolutely depraved and evil, animated not by a concern for the well-being of mankind but by a ravenous desire to subjugate and enslave and bend all things to their will, placing the entire world under their power through fear and terror. And what better way to do this than to demand, over and over, the blood of innocents?”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural school house, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty,” he said, noting that “we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future.”22 That was in 1954.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“a Dominican friar named Bartolomé de las Casas would argue that the indigenous peoples of America, despite their practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism, were free men by nature, possessed of reason, and could not be forcibly converted to Christianity or enslaved. They were no less human than the conquistadors, and must be treated as such. Indeed, they had what today we would call human rights. In arguing this, las Casas was echoing arguments that Alcuin of York had made to Charlemagne about the pagan Saxons in the late eighth century—arguments based entirely on Christian doctrines that would in time prevail. They would eventually provide the basis for the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and in our era would find expression as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Alone in their rooms, literally left to their own devices, young people are developing strange and dangerous pathologies. The U.S. surgeon general, in a rare public advisory issued in December 2021, warned of a “devastating” mental health crisis among American youth.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come

“Left unchecked or unchallenged by the Christian faith, a society can linger indefinitely in paganism, even paganism of the worst kind. There is no natural evolution out of it, even as technology advances.”
― John Daniel Davidson, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come