America After Christianity
Neopaganism’s Dark Enchantment
Archbishop Fulton Sheen declared in a 1974 television address that “we are at the end of Christendom,” which he defined as “economic, political, [and] social life as inspired by Christian principles.” “That is ending,” he said; “we’ve seen it die.” A quarter-century later, Pope St. John Paul II said, “Even in countries evangelized many centuries ago, the reality of a ‘Christian society’ which, amid all the frailties which have always marked human life, measured itself explicitly on Gospel values, is now gone.”
However debatable Sheen’s assessment was fifty years ago, or John Paul’s was in 2001, it is undeniable today. Christendom is gone. Whether we realize it or not, the West has entered a new, post-Christian era.
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John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist and the author of Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come (Regnery, 2024).
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