The New York Times recently ran an Op Ed column suggesting that the United States is moving further and further towards a mass religious stance that believes behind the Christian scriptural narratives. An excerpt reads:
“But the secularization narrative is insufficient, because even with America’s churches in decline, the religious impulse has hardly disappeared. In the early 2000s, over 40 percent of Americans answered with an emphatic ‘yes’ when Gallup asked them if ‘a profound religious experience or awakening’ had redirected their lives; that number had doubled since the 1960s, when institutional religion was more vigorous. A recent Pew survey on secularization likewise found increases in the share of Americans who have regular feelings of ‘spiritual peace and well-being.’ And the resilience of religious impulses and rhetoric in contemporary political movements, even (or especially) on the officially secular left, is an obvious feature of our politics.”
Read the entire piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage.
Thanks to Hymenaeus Beta for the tip!
I was just at Spencer Gifts this past weekend and noticed over a half dozen books on witchcraft and occultism for sale in the store. At Barnes & Noble, there was an entire table with short $5 books on tarot, crystals, etc.
We’re works like that visibly being sold in “normie” stores a decade ago as well, or was I just not looking for such things back then?
Now, I’m sure that most of the contents were “fluffbunny” and likewise with most of the folks buying those particular works— these aren’t “Magick In Theory And Practice” tier after all. 99.9% of such books aren’t.
But all-in-all, it’s a positive trend.
Christians may retort that “pagans [sic] and occultists don’t have a real religion, they just do whatever they want and believe whatever they want to believe”.
That may be, depending on the school of thought in question, true, but the same applies to the majority of Christians— for instance, something like 80% of Americans identify as Christian, but a startlingly high percentage (40ish% IIRC) believe in things such as reincarnation as well as various ideas that have been condemned as heresy by various Eccumenial Councils.