Pagan Revival in Christian America

Edited transcript from a lecture given at 198 Young Hall, University of California, Davis sponsored by Grace Valley Christian Center Thursday evening, May 7, 1998

The subtitle of my book, Spirit Wars, is Pagan Revival in Christian America, which is what I have entitled this first lecture. This lecture and that of May 8 will be a pair. First I would like to set the scene by making a number of descriptive comments about where I see America in this particular day as it moves, I believe, towards a form of spirituality that I call neo-paganism. Then I would like to be a little more systematic and try to show the coherence of a neo-pagan world view. This lecture has four points: the first point is that Christianity is in trouble in America; the second point describes a new religious option for America; the third point will be a retrospective on the sixties revolution; and the fourth point, which really leads into the next lecture, is simply a quick evocation of the new paganism.

American Christianity in Trouble

It seems to me that Christianity is in dire straights in what we always used to call, particularly in Europe, “Christian America.” To say this one generation ago would have raised, I think, reactions of total disbelief. America was the great Christian nation of the modern age. It was the place of the sending out of the great missionary force in the modern period, as well as being the culture that seemed to preserve a very vibrant form of Christianity when Europe was collapsing under the force of atheistic humanism. Indeed, that impression still remains.

These lectures that I am giving are actually the result of culture shock. I first came to America in 1964. Who else came to America in 1964? The Beatles. Now, some of you would be interested to know that I almost was a Beatle. For obvious reasons, I didn’t make it. But I did have the wonderful chance of being John Lennon’s friend in high school for six years; we even used to play music together. But my parents wouldn’t let me go to the dances where the band played, so I couldn’t be part of the group. I came here in 1964 when the Beatles arrived, but nobody knew that I was arriving in America.

As a young European coming to America in 1964, I was struck as to how spiritual, how “Christian,” America was. I remember as a young man in Liverpool, England, going to church on a double-decker bus. It was about a twenty-minute trip, so to alleviate the boredom I would often try to count the number of pubs I could see from the top of the double-decker bus. As I recall, my count was about eighty pubs as this bus went down those streets. On the corners of virtually every road it seemed that there was a public house.

When I came to America, I didn’t see any pubs. Instead of pubs, it was churches. Churches seemed to be absolutely everywhere. It seems to me that the impression that I had then as to how “Christian” America was, in many ways could remain now. There are vast networks of Christian colleges and schools. At the school where I teach there are two large bookcases totally filled with catalogues of Christian colleges and seminaries; I think it’s fourteen shelves filled with tiny little catalogues. And of course that would only really include the Protestant Christian schools and wouldn’t include the Roman Catholic and orthodox institutions. When I say that in Europe, people are shocked, but I see you are not shocked at all. It is an indication, is it not?

One can get an impression of great strength and force and power of Christianity in America. Vast networks of Christian colleges and schools, all kinds of Christian home-schooling groups, publishing houses, radio and television stations, and an unprecedented number of churches all conspire to give the impression that Christianity in America is in very good shape. The polls, too, could not be more encouraging. Ninety-seven percent of Americans believe in God. Ninety percent believe that God loves them. Mega-churches are bulging at the seams, and our president goes to church with a big fat Bible in his hand. The economy is booming, the “cold war” is over, and America in a sense is the unique, undisputed world power. America, then, being the leader, is in the business of exporting civil rights, democracy and social justice to every corner of the planet. As the third millennium approaches, Y2K, are we not then entering a golden age of American civilization which will indeed civilize the planet? Surely Christianity will be in the vanguard!

Well, there is another scenario, one I have indeed attempted to describe in my book. In one generation an anti-Christian pagan spirituality has invaded the culture. Glaring into every home on a daily basis is the networks’ message that Christianity, once the backbone of the nation, is now only its bigoted marginal fringe.

One rather interesting anecdote (worth what anecdotes are worth) which would perhaps indicate where Christianity really is in the culture is the example of Dartmouth College. Dartmouth College was founded in 1750 by Eleazer Wheelock, a leader of the First Great Awakening, who said that the purpose of the college was the spreading of the knowledge of the only true God and Savior, and making this knowledge as extensive and common as possible. The first charter of Dartmouth College was granted by our great sovereign, George III. The charter gave to Dartmouth College the following purpose: the civilizing and Christianizing of children of pagans. As late as 1945 the then president, Ernest Hopkins, declared, “Dartmouth is a Christian college founded for the Christianization of its students.”

Since that time things have changed. In 1997 the current president, James Freedman, described these Christian origins as “obnoxious ghosts from the past, to be exorcised from the institution’s consciousness.” Ominously then, Dartmouth, once the most prolific provider of Christian missionaries in America, seems now to be producing missionaries of a different sort, bent on removing even the memory of Christianity in Christian America. One could perhaps represent Dartmouth’s present purpose as having been turned totally on its head from the original one- namely, the paganizing of the children of Christians.

That, admittedly, is an anecdote. But in the last few years a number of other anecdotes are worthy of our interest. In this land – settled, in many regards, by those believing in the orthodox affirmations of Christianity – the head health officer declared in 1993 that “America must end its love affair with the fetus.” In 1993 six thousand Christians, Moslems, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and all kinds of pagans met in Chicago for the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the centenary celebration of the unity of the world’s religions, at which I was present as an observer. I observed these six thousand delegates holding hands and dancing around the enormous conference hall to the beat of an American Indian shaman’s drum.

That same year in Minneapolis the RE-Imagining Conference was held, bringing together two thousand mainline Christian women. It featured a standing ovation for lesbians, a eucharist of milk and honey offered to the goddess Sophia, and a much applauded presentation denying the atonement of Christ. The whole conference burst into laughter and applause when it was pointed out that during those three days the names of God the Father and Christ the Son had never been mentioned. At the most recent RE-Imagining Conference all the worshipers bit into the sacramental apple at the celebration of the “Ladies Supper.”

One more anecdote which would suggest that things are not quite Christian in Christian America is the famous Burning Man Festival. I don’t know whether you are aware of this particular festival. It was begun in 1995 with five thousand people in the Nevada desert. In 1996 there were ten thousand. Last year there were seventeen thousand people, computer experts and all kinds of folks, gathered together to celebrate the worship of Satan. The weekend crescendoed on Saturday night in a drama where the seventeen thousand people engaged in a seven-stage descent into the abyss of darkness. The center stage was transformed into “the vestibule of hell,” and the guest of honor, “Papa Satan,” appeared, bowing in derision before a placard which read: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.” And then, before the crowd, “Papa Satan” had sex with a woman, Zoe, which led to scenes of general public copulation. Finally the crowd called upon “Papa Satan” to take them to hell, and the burning man effigy, a forty-foot high effigy of a human being, was ignited.

A New Religious Option

These are anecdotes, it is true, yet it seems to me they indicate that something has happened in Christian America within the last thirty years. I am not talking about nostalgia or sentimentalism for some period that’s gone by that we should try and resurrect; I am talking about a major change of world view that is coming over many Americans. They evoke a new religious option: “When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” When I was a student in the sixties, I thought that was a great song. I sang it. I enjoyed it. I had no clue what it meant. I’m not sure I even know what it means now. But it still was a great song with a wonderful melody. It was a smash hit from the musical Hair. It seems to me that there we have a sort of eschatology of a new religious vision, a new spirituality, that looks to the stars for inspiration.

There is afoot in America today the search for a whole new spirituality. One book that I would suggest you read, if you are interested in this, is the book by Tony Schwartz, a journalist from Newsweek who ghost-wrote the biography of Donald Trump. Having made an awful lot of money doing that, he gave himself a two-year sabbatical, and after doing two-years of research he wrote a book which has this title: What Really Matters? Searching for Wisdom in America, New York, Bantam Books, 1995. He went around America interviewing the representatives of this new spirituality. In it he talks about the flowering of a more comprehensive approach to wisdom, uniting the best of the East and the West, and this, he says, represents a historic first. “Never before have we had access to so many technologies of transformation, so much knowledge about the full spectrum of human possibility. It is not just that there is wisdom to be found in America,” – and get this, all you patriotic Americans – “but that these comprehensive approaches are emerging primarily in America.” At the end of his book he makes an interesting declaration. Really the message is this: that there is a wisdom in America that will save the planet, and that American know-how, tied to the ancient wisdom of the East, will save us. He speaks about “an emerging American wisdom tradition”, a new spirituality, a first, never before seen.

Richard Gregg, a Roman Catholic theologian, professor at Sacred Heart University, recently wrote a book called When God Becomes Goddess – The Transformation of American Religion. His thesis is this: “The traditional Western notion of deity may be destined not for obliteration, but rather for transformation. Perhaps God will simply not disappear, but will in some fashion become goddess.” So we are in the presence, many now believe, of a new American wisdom tradition, a new spirituality uniting the techniques of the West and the wisdom of the East.

One particular way of explaining where this new spirituality has arisen – it isn’t a full explanation – is the influence of the sixties on American culture. It seems to me that we are living in the full flowering of the sixties revolution. What I am about to say I don’t intend to be at all a political statement. I’m pretty much convinced that the Democrats and the Republicans are equally bad in the sense that none of them seems to understand what’s happening. But it is true that in 1992 the people of the United States voted into the most powerful position on the earth a president who, as a left-leaning student, had smoked pot, dodged the draft, and espoused the sexual morals of the hippie revolution.

In the nineties, the anti-establishment, flower-power children of the sixties actually entered the halls of power. Those who were committed to the bringing down of the state finally found themselves with all the levers of power in the state in their hands. Hippies with short hair and three piece suits, having taken baths, have moved to Washington and are now living in very nice digs. A sociologist from UCLA says in her book, Do You Believe in Miracles? The Second Coming of The Sixties, that the sixties actually came of age in the nineties. It’s only in that sense that I mention the president – only in his capacity as social head of the nation and therefore a metaphor for our times. I was a student in the sixties, and quite frankly I thought that the sixties revolution was a total failure. There were radicals on the campuses where I was at Harvard and Princeton, but they seemed to be not very influential. As I look back, however, I would have to say that the sixties revolution was an amazing success.

New Age mystics like Marilyn Ferguson and UCLA physicist Capra consider the sixties to be extremely important for a changing world view. Says Ferguson, “The values that had powered the movement of the sixties could not be institutionalized without a shift in cultural assumptions. As consciousness changes, the world changes.” What does she mean by that? The thinking of the sixties could not be institutionalized – that is to say, made law, made to count, made to have power behind it – until the consciousness of the nation was changed. As consciousness changes, the world changes. It seems to me that from the sixties on, many of those radical thinkers of the sixties were able to take places of great power in the institutions, those places in society that determine the way we all think. Someone has described this as “the great march through the institutions.”

You would have to agree with me that, since the sixties, changes have occurred. Americans, like no other people, not only tolerate but have institutionalized divorce, abortion, homosexuality and radical feminism. All this has happened because the religious consciousness of America has changed. When Mr. and Mrs. Clinton entered the White House, they were alleged to have said, “This is our time.” They seemed to have understood what was happening. The question is, what does the word “our” mean? Well, certainly it meant, for instance, twenty-seven openly practicing homosexuals being appointed to the administration for the first time in American history. It meant access to the White House for some pretty radical people. Marianne Williamson, who popularized A Course in Miracles; Jean Houston, a New Age channeler, and others have all had important roles to play within the White House. It seems to me that we have indeed seen some of these changes taking place and that the sixties revolution has, in a sense, gone mainstream in the nineties.

Some of you are aware of David Horowitz and Peter Collier, who wrote the book Destructive Generation. I believe Horowitz was a Ph.D. student at Berkeley in the sixties. These two men were members of the inner circle of the radicals. They were editors of Ramparts magazine. They knew everybody who was anybody in the movement, from Huey Newton to Jerry Rubin to Tom Hayden to Jane Fonda. Having helped foment the revolution, they now are concerned with misgivings about what they did. Neither of them are religious people, as far as I can tell.

Certainly there were some excellent things in the sixties revolution. I think free speech is an excellent thing, and those original campus folks at Berkeley sought to get free speech. I think the sixties attack on racism is a wonderful thing. But the sixties revolution very quickly became radicalized, and we will look at what those radical notions were. But this is what David Horowitz and Peter Collier say – that that generation was a destructive generation: “The stones we threw into the water of our world in those days caused ripples that continue to lap on our shores today – for better and more often for worse.”

What was destroyed by this destructive generation? Nothing less, I believe, than the dominance of Western Christendom and civilization. This, at least, is the view of a spirit guide who channels messages to Ken Carey, who then gives them to Harper San Francisco, who produces books from them. Says the Spirit Guide: “Our communications during these closing years of the seventies are reaching past the social fringes of your culture that was contacted during the sixties. This time, we are reaching deep into the heart of global civilization . . . We are not in much contact yet” – and this was written in the eighties – “with the government officials, nor with world banks or international financiers. Our first contacts with them will occur during the most powerful transmissions of 1987 to 1989. Those who we are contacting now, nevertheless, are critical enough in the maintenance of your social systems to ensure that the world will make some incredible leaps in consciousness during the next decade.”

Impact of the Sixties Revolution

What was the impact of the sixties in terms of the destruction of the general Christian world- and life-view that was common in America to that date? I’d like to look at the sixties in its destructive element via three notions: the rejection of authority, the rejection of biblical sexual norms and morals, and the rejection of Christian spirituality. Let’s look at those three.

First of all, the rejection of authority. The New Left radicals of the sixties wanted to “bring the system down.” History will show that they did just that, against all odds, by simply taking it over. It is sort of quaint to see the old newsreels of the sixties, where the radicals rejected the authority of landlords, university senates, the police and the federal government. But that has gone mainstream in our time to such an extent that it’s sometimes heard on campuses: “Hey ho, wha d’ya know, Western Civ has got to go.” In other words, the entire structure of the civilization in its authoritative, canonical role now must be undermined. Today’s radical students reject the dead white male authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Jonathan Edwards, and so many more, and the general contemporary intellectual chorus calls for the dismantling of “patriarchy”. Again, the notion of authority as it was maintained in Western Christendom has been attacked in a profound way during this generation.

Of course, the sixties’ rejection of authority really is much deeper than what I’m saying, and is no doubt part of a whole intellectual movement called “deconstructionism”. Deconstruction is the tool whereby the modern world is deconstructed to give rise to what is now called the “post-modern” world. The deconstructed world of modernity arises because of the conviction that truth is merely power, that there is no authority, really-only social constructions, what people decide to impose on other people. A good example of this would be Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and homosexual, who argued for deconstruction, particularly on the level of homosexuality, by saying that there is no such thing as normative sexuality; there is simply the majority imposing their morals, their particular choices, on the minority. So it’s really a power play of the heterosexuals imposing their views upon the minority, the homosexuals. That is a classic expression of what is known as deconstruction. All authority is deconstructed and is viewed with suspicion because it is merely socially constructed.

We really are now in the presence of a massive rejection of authority in general. There is no authority. There is no absolute truth. Seventy-some percent of Americans no longer believe that there is any absolute truth. Even amongst evangelicals, forty percent no longer believe that there is any kind of ultimate truth. We really are in the presence of a massive change in the way people view authority.

The second great rejection of the sixties was the rejection of biblical sexual norms and morals. It began as a heterosexual movement; it was “anything goes” heterosexual love. One of First Lady Hillary Clinton’s spiritual gurus was Michael Lerner, who is now a Jewish rabbi, editor of the journal Tikkun, which is actually a term that comes from Jewish kabbalah, namely, deep mystical Judaism. In the sixties, Michael Lerner was the leader of the Berkeley Students for a Democratic Society. On his first wedding cake he had written: “Smash Monogamy,” which he proceeded to do, I guess, with a series of marriages. But of course that smashing of monogamy really has gone mainstream and diversified in the nineties. The sexual revolution of today goes beyond the sixties extra-marital, pre-marital and post-marital heterosexual activity. “Anything goes” has become the boundless expression of many kinds of sexuality – heterosexuality, sadomasochism, bisexuality, unbounded pornography, pedophilia – and surely bestiality cannot be too far behind.

Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council reacted to a government policy for the promotion of condoms in pornographic television ads by saying this: “For the first time in our nation’s history, a generation of young Americans is being told by the government leaders that, if they will just use condoms, promiscuity is perfectly safe, and in fact, no big deal.” It seems to me that the point of that small example is this: that the “free love” of the sixties radicals, marginals at the time, has now become official government policy in the nineties, and many of those radicals now head government agencies.

Finally, the rejection of Biblical spirituality. I think it’s important to note that the sixties revolution is a spiritual revolution. It is something that surely should touch us, even as we are critical of many elements within that movement, that there was a great search for spirituality in an America that, while seemingly so Christian, perhaps had lost some of the deep spirituality of true Christianity. So the sixties revolution was a search for genuine spirituality. Some of you older ones may even be those who were touched by the Jesus Movement of the sixties as part of that search for genuine spirituality.

But I must say that the most powerful aspect of that search for spirituality went against Christian spirituality, because the radicals turned East. Woodstock was a spiritual happening, the drug trip a search for the Garden of Eden, and the radicals went East to find a new, though very old, form of spirituality. You could have it on the fast track with LSD, or you could have it on a slower track with less danger to your body through the practice of meditation.

Richard Alpert, otherwise known as Ram Dass, is a classic example of this search for a new spirituality. Richard Alpert was raised in a very successful non-practicing Jewish family. He made it as an intellectual, and he was appointed as a lecturer at Harvard in Freudian psychology. One of his colleagues was Timothy Leary. Those men surely realized that what Freud was saying was such a reduction of the human being to a mere mechanism of sexuality, that they were searching for something deeper. They were searching for the spiritual dimension. Both Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary felt they had found that in LSD, and so they promoted LSD on the Harvard campus in the early sixties and were finally asked to leave.

Richard Alpert then, having been turned on to LSD and turned on to this kind of spirituality, went east to India and studied in an ashram and became a Hindu. He became a Hindu guru by the name of Ram Dass. I heard him give a lecture once in San Diego, and in that lecture he said that, thanks to Hinduism, he had finally discovered his true Judaism; he had become a true son of the covenant. Recently I was in La Jolla in a New Age bookstore – I tend to go in those kinds of places – and I picked up a book: The Jew in the Lotus. Remember that Hindu phrase, “the jewel in the lotus”? The Jew in the Lotus – again, another expression of a Jew who said he had found his true Judaism through Buddhism.

Richard Alpert describes his first spiritual experience through LSD: “I found the way that psychedelic drugs can prompt a shift of consciousness and a radically different view of one’s identity.” See, this wasn’t just like you often have on the campuses, a sort of alcohol binge where you simply lose your senses and do foolish things. This is a spiritual trip. Describing his first trip, he says this: As he felt his inner self sort of leaving his body, he didn’t know what was happening to him. He said, “At least I have my body.” But then he looked down at the couch where he was supposed to be, and his sense of his body had vanished as well. He said: “Nothing in my philosophical materialism . . .” You see that? He was a Freudian. “Nothing in my philosophical materialism prepared me for that, and I freaked. I started to call for Timothy Leary, when the thought went through my mind: Who’s freaking out? If I’m not my body, and I’m not all my social roles, what’s left? And then something suddenly connected for me. It was like a figure/ground reversal, a complete change of world view. I became aware of a part of me, an essence that had nothing to do with Life and Death.”

Think about that incredible spiritual experience: “A part of me . . . that had nothing to do with Life and Death.” That means you’ll never die, right? That means you’ve discovered something that will take away all the fears of the future and indeed explain to you all the mysteries of the past. ” . . . [A]lthough everything by which I knew myself, even my body in this life itself, was gone, still I was fully aware! Not only that, but this aware “I” was watching the entire drama, including the panic, with calm compassion. Instantly, with this recognition, I felt a new kind of calmness . . . I had just found . . . a place where “I” existed” -[notice this]- “independent of social and physical identity . . . And something else – that “I” Knew – it really Knew.” Here is a spiritual experience that gives Richard Alpert a sense of absolute knowing, absolute knowledge. “I felt like I’d come home.” Ram Dass, then, is a fantastic example of what happens spiritually to many, many people through that rejection of an old world view; in his case it wasn’t even the Christian world view, but it was the Judeo-Christian consensus.

It’s interesting that at that very time in the sixties was declared the “death of God.” I know because when I was at seminary they made me read this stuff, and I couldn’t figure out what it meant. Some people said, “Well, we didn’t even know he was sick.” But the “death of God” was a serious spiritual movement. One of the “death of God” theologians said this: that it was indeed at the death of God that we experienced the rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece. He said, “It may be that this need to recall an old symbol system [namely, polytheism] for new purposes may be behind the recent interest in the occult, in magic, in extraterrestrial life, in Hindu India and Buddhist Japan, in multidaemoned China, in sorcery, in new forms of multiple family life, in communes, in the “new religions,” and many other alternate life-styles and meaning systems which have been hitherto foreign.” That was said by one of these “death of God” theologians in 1971.

Searching for a New Spirituality

The sixties, then, represent not simply the rejection of authority, or a liberation, if you like, of the sexual morals of the Judeo-Christian world view, but also this searching for a new spirituality. The Beatles went East and the gurus came West. This is what has been happening religiously and spiritually in America in the last generation; in our time, the East and the West have been drawn together. There are very powerful forces that project the West to the East. What do I mean by the East? I mean, in particular, Eastern spirituality-Hinduism, Buddhism, and various Chinese religions. There has been a powerful movement of the West to the East, in particular as the West promotes its hard-earned notions of capitalism, democracy and technology. Those three elements the West has given to the East. You can go to the jungles of Borneo and you will find primitive peoples with transistor radios. The West has succeeded in exporting its great achievements to the East. Of course the big question is: How long can China resist? China is really the only great standout. But of course, already China has bought Western economics, so how long will the rest then stand? But apart from China, the East really has bought the whole Western approach to capitalism and technology.

But at the same time as the West exports its technology and its capitalism and even its democracy, the East has exported its spirituality. As the West has broken with its own spiritual roots, namely Judeo-Christian consensus, a new spirituality has flooded into the West – a very different spirituality, a very different world view. In my next lecture I will spell out just how different that is.

The superimposing of these two totally antithetical world views on each other produces an extremely confusing situation. Have you noticed how confused people are in trying to make decisions about morals or ethics, or even about spiritual things? We’ve probably never lived in a more confusing time. What was once at the center of Western culture now is pushed to the margins. What was the very backbone of the West – namely, Christianity – is now sort of simply expressed at the edges. That’s why we often hear that Christianity is a marginal, bigoted way of looking at things. This is the occasion for the institutionalization and the great spread of the new paganism, as we in the West accept many of the fundamental notions of Eastern paganism.

It’s true that the baby boomers are accurately called “a generation of seekers,” as the sociologist Roof wrote recently in that famous book, A Generation of Seekers, which many people have read. Only 4 percent of baby boomers are atheist or agnostic; 96 percent, he said, are into religion of one kind or another. So the real enemy of the Christian faith is no longer atheistic humanism. We all used to fear that that was going to be the great enemy-materialistic, Marxist atheism was the great enemy that was infiltrating into America. So you had the McCarthy era, of which really the sixties were an immense reaction.

But the real spiritual struggle is not between atheism and theism any more; it’s between theism and pantheism. It’s not “no God” versus the true God; it’s the true God versus all the other gods. In America in the nineties, in “Christian” America, the choice is not God or no God, but the choice is the God of the Bible, the God of theism, or the god of pantheism, the god of spiritual monism, the god of religious paganism.

In closing, while it is true that we are being called upon to adopt tolerance and inclusiveness, I would exhort you to see that behind that exhortation to inclusiveness there is a new but very old world view that is taking over, which seeks to include all the gods in a pagan pantheon. The two systems, monism and theism, stand in direct contradiction one to the other. My next lecture will develop what that is – the antithesis between pagan monism and Christian theism.