WI: Neopagan/Folk Christian Right in America

Suppose that by the early 1980s, a majority of white conservatives (Anglo-Saxons, Scots-Irish and other ethnic Western Europeans) are a combination of Heathenist, Celtic Reconstructionist Pagan, and folk Christian (that is, Christian with stronger "folkish" neopagan elements). This would be in gradual reaction to the social change from the 19th century onward: the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, desegregation, etc. What might such a conservative movement look like?
 
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Yeah, going by Sinclair Lewis("When fascism comes to America, it will carry a cross"), the scenario is ASB. However, despite the acronym in the title, the OP reads more like a WI than a challenge.

What might such a conservative movement look like?

Aestehtically, picture the imagery of the church-burning Norwegian skinheads, grafted onto the agenda of the OTL Religious Right. They'd probably have all the same issues and agendas, but instead of wearing suits and waving around Bibles, their spokespeople would wear viking outfits and wave around...the Edda?

As for how you make this happen, well, the USA has already given rise to at least one pagan/Christian hybrid faith, Mormonism, which, except for a few dogmatic holdouts, is now accepted by most of the Religious Right as authentically Christian. At least for the purpose of alignment against gays, feminists and liberals.

Of course, Mormonism has had to tone down some of its more exotic elements(and not just polygamy) to make itself palatable to Middle America. But, given the right circumstances and leadership, I could still see another pagan/Xtian merger arising in the 20th Century. They'd likely have to be less hostile to traditional Christianity than the aforementioned Norwegian headbangers.

I could see a lot of under or semi-educated Americans(no offense, but that's the country under discussion) falling for an essentially paganzied form of Christianity, which kept the figure of Jesus Christ front and cnetre, but reworked him as an Aryan hero, maybe claim he went to Northern Europe and sailed with the Vikings for a while. As long as you otherwise had the standard pop-culture image of Jesus(which was Europeanized to begin with) and the invocation of his name, fronting the operation.

That said, the explictly racist aspect of that might alienate a lot of people, even among those who take positions like anti-Affirmative Action etc. Because one thing we've seen is that the Religious Right is quite eager to embrace any black or POC spokesmen they can find, eg. that pizza tycoon in 2012 and Ben Carson these days. Making Christianity synonymous with "white" would make such alliances impossible.
 
Also, it is hard to see how or why neopagans would predominantly become associated with reactionary causes, Of course there is some overlap OTL But in my personal experience a neopagan, or even a "folk Christian" which I think I have also encountered, is much more likely to have a left-wing hippie sort of vibe about them, insofar as they take politics seriously at all.

Now if Aleister Crowley or L Ron Hubbard were the major template for neopaganism as practices, or "neopagans" were identical to the kind of people called witches in movies like "Rosemary's Baby," then yeah I suppose they might be quite reactionary. Certainly the Nazis OTL dabbled in all sorts of New Agey stuff which might suggest that New Age was inherently reactionary somehow. But again my personal experience with the New Age scene in the 1980s and '90s suggests no connection or common interest with right-wing American political causes of those decades.

I suppose I am fishing here for what your definition of "neo-pagan" might be, and how you'd get a continuum with conservative Christianity, which would perhaps explain how you see a linkage between this and "conservative" politics which I've been calling "reactionary." I have chosen to use the latter term, which I note is line with your scenario in that you suggest all this is a reaction to what a liberal or radical would describe as "social progress," because I don't think what we call "conservative" in the modern US political spectrum generally corresponds to a simple desire to cling to things as they have been in living memory as a superior state to the sort of society we are progressing toward; rather people who are for some reason or other upset by some of these trends create a myth of an imaginary Arcadia in the past that historically did not exist and extoll this made-up past in order to denounce and oppose what they dislike today, and as a model of the goal they seek to "re"construct. True conservatism, as expressed by say Burke in his polemic against the French Revolutionaries, requires that the old system one defends is present now, and change one hates is recent. Americans have been living at a pretty fast rate of change and generally welcomed, or even fostered, the recent changes and so there isn't much to "conserve" in any generation.

Christian fundamentalists in the USA have generally not been defenders of some bastion of old ways that they inherited and seek to protect; rather more often than not, they have been people who recognize that to implement and live the radical message of the Gospels their ways have to change. The various waves of Christian revival we experienced in the 18th and 19th centuries--Methodists, Baptists, camp meeting revivalism, etc, have generally been associated with political progressivism as much as any sort of wave of reaction. The sword cuts both ways. The trajectory of such movements has generally been that the actual time of revivalism is seen as a threat to the established order, and causes one would associate with reaction such as reinforcing the racial hierarchy have in fact been threatened in the early years of enthusiasm. Wesleyites and Baptists in their early days were known for free association of whites and blacks, for instance. Then, over time, the cult becomes "respectable" to the degree that they drop their more radical importunities and get with the mainstream program; thus these radical denominations would back off, holding up racial equality as a vague ideal for the kingdom of Heaven where it was safe to do so and finding Biblical justification for race hierarchy where that was necessary to fit in.

So, would there be a lot of people who were conservative Christians from generations back, but also clung to 'folk' traditions that you seem to imply are actually pagan in origin? I'm not sure what you mean by that--traditional medicines? Yuletide holly and ivy? If anything that seems to describe more moderate, casual traditional Christian practices. Fundies who take the Bible very seriously would tend to frown on such things rather than cling to them. The only people who have ever seriously conducted a War on Christmas were---Christians! Specifically I'm thinking of Scottish Calvinists here, who banned traditional Yuletide celebrations because they thought they were suspiciously pagan (if not Popish). (In its place a whole new holiday tradition rose in Scotland, Hogmanay).

The closest thing to what you seem to be wanting to get at would be the fundamentalism of the South, as in the Scopes trial against teaching Darwinism in the 1920s, where William Jennings Bryan came to assist the prosecution and Clarence Darrow stood for the defense. But the political values of these people cut both ways for the most part.

The modern Christian Right strikes me as being half "astroturf." I don't doubt a widespread grassroots base exists, but I do doubt that this base controls the agenda. Rather, we have here a conjunction of the power of upper class people who may or may not participate in the base churches, but do support them financially whether they believe or not, in favor of a more corporate-compliant civil order. They seek to disrupt or challenge public social services by pointing to private charities that don't need to follow public rules about fair treatment of all. They seek to discourage labor solidarity by fostering a mythos of individual accomplishment and inattention to systematic social mechanisms that limit the prospects of entire classes. But these upper class patrons are not the grassroots; those are formed from discontented and disconnected poorer people, many of whom might be suffering resentments that can be channeled to blame modernity and specific manifestations of it as the work of the Devil or human corruption, and thus be mobilized to fight battles for causes that don't address their own concrete circumstances.

Now, would it make any sense for such an "astroturf" movement to form that uses either radical neo-heathenism or some impure mix of hard-shell fundamentalist religion blended with wacky old pagan practices? I can see a place for one or the other, but how would the USA evolve in that direction?

The Nazis are quite infamous for their members dabbling in all sorts of New Agey stuff--in Wotanism, in Crowleyian Magick, in beliefs about the Tibetans that took some seekers there (along, apparently, with Soviet citizens and the US liberal/progressive Henry Wallace). Anything apparently but appealing to Christian values. By Hitler's race logic, Christianity was an offspring of Judaism, therefore tainted through and through by values deadly to the Aryan spirit. However the Nazis did not seek to systematically extirpate Christianity as such from Germany the way the Bolsheviks (in waves, between more tolerant periods) sought to dethrone Orthodoxy (and any rival cults) in the USSR. They did seek to control what the Christian hierarchy said and did, and punished excessive deviance from the Nazi line. But whenever possible the Nazis were happy to coopt Christians rather than suppress them.

What was going on there, I suppose, was the general weakening of Christianity as something to take seriously in Europe that led the Bolsheviks to believe the moment to put an end to it was at hand in Russia. Traditional people would continue to be moved by Christian appeals, but there wasn't sufficient passion left to sustain a powerful movement on Christian grounds. So Hitler could afford to cut himself loose, and then his followers to scramble around looking for some alternate spiritual base as they saw fit, which left them free to gin some up that fit more closely with the Nazi doctrines of power as an end in itself, struggle, and all that jazz.

So I suppose a neo-pagan reactionary movement might get somewhere in a USA where Christianity as such was generally discredited and ignored. Note I've been using the general catch-all of "New Age," because I don't see any reason to suppose that American reactionaries would hit upon "Heathenist" (whatever you mean by that, care for a definition?) or "Celtic Reconstructionist Pagan" as a template, much less "folk Christianity." No, they'd be more likely to go for something more novel, or even for hard-core militant atheism, I'd think. In fact they'd possibly wind up like the Nazis, where the spiritual/metaphysical underpinning can be any brew you like as long as it is not inconsistent with Nazi principles of rule and will to power (or arbitrarily ruled to be such).

How does "folk Christianity," the way you imply it work, come into play at all? Well, that's exactly what radical Protestants accuse the Roman Catholic Church of being--an ungodly amalgam of disconnected and out of context Christian phrases with pagan practices and whims decreed by Popes, a demonic parody of true Christendom. So I guess a society with a powerful "folk Christian" movement is a way of saying that a powerful Christian cult that Protestants would deem to be impure and burdened down with all sorts of rococo bric-a-brac with no Biblical source or justification attracts a strong reactionary following. If the Born-Again movement had led to conservative fundamentalists flocking to the Roman Catholic Church in droves, and these types, deeply devoted to their new-found practices of praying the Rosary and the Stations of the Cross and a bunch more stuff my own Catholic upbringing didn't even bother to explain to me (the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary for instance) drove out all the liberal Catholics or silenced them and turned this Church, consolidating most of the right-wing Christians in its incense-scented aisles, toward political reaction unambiguously, decreeing once again that "liberalism is a sin," I suppose that would be a realization of your vision. But there would be no place for neo-pagan fellow travelers! In the Church--or out!

I can think of some other typical American branches of Christianity that might take the place of Catholicism and look pretty much the same to an outsider; I might argue that while Catholicism's "folk pagan" Baroque touches were acquired authentically over a couple thousand years, newer cults are making it all up on the spot. But if it works psychologically, it hardly matters, does it? Robert Heinlein's 1940 story "If This Goes On..." with its Church of Nehemiah Scudder is clearly a conception of this type.
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But neopaganism, as i have encountered it in OTL, while it might well lend itself to white supremacists and Neo-Nazis here and there, had not generally appeared as a refuge for disgruntled but conservative seekers dislodged from their comfort zones by liberal modernity. No, the impression one gets far more is people who want something that is if anything in advance of what contemporary modernity offers.

It may be that if I understood the grass-roots origins of say "Celtic Reconstructionist Pagans" I might shudder. All I know is, their emulators in the USA have utterly failed to attract the support of corporate sugar daddies nor have they generally been attractive to people who want to hide their racist agenda under a respectable cloak. For that, "Christian Academies" suddenly became far more popular than they had been when public school desegregation began being seriously enforced in the 60s and 70s.

If the USA had, over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, become gradually secular in the sense of people rarely going to any church, and gradually atheistic in the sense of a majority of people proclaiming they did not believe in any religion, then perhaps the sort of white panic that swelled the enrollment in conservative Christian schools OTL might instead lead to a sudden rise in claims of religiousity of some kind or other, to cover the withdrawal of children from public schools. If atheism were the norm in 1960, these new religions might be non-Christian--but why would there not instead be a revival of traditional Christianity (in a new form reflecting the modern concerns of people seeking shelter from aspects of modernity)? Surely if people want to manufacture a fake past Utopia to get back to, they would do better to turn to a reasonable facsimile of their actual past, as historical memory would have it? A reactionary panic in an atheist mid-20th century USA would probably hark back to the staunch Christianity of the Founder generation of Patriots. (In this they'd be wrong to an extent, considering the mild Deism of so many of them, but among the Revolutionary generation and the Framers of the Constitution one can find sufficient examples of serious and devout religious observance to put a cloak of a religious consensus over the whole lot, if one doesn't look at the counterevidence too closely).

For those harking back to devout Catholicism, you might find plenty of "folk Christian" elements to gratify yourself I suppose. And despite the historic antipathy between Catholic and Protestant, I daresay that neo-Puritans and neo-Tridentines will have enough common ground in civil politics and society that they will waive the doctrinal wars (perhaps to another generation that might take it all more seriously) in favor of their joint political alliance against social modernism.

But the sort of neopaganism i found ready to hand when I was a kid and young adult in the 70s and 80s would hardly serve a conservative purpose. What attracted my pubescent eye was of course the spectacle of naked women, either allegedly running around ritual fires summoning Baphomet or whoever, or stripped under the prurient eyes of dour Inquisitors. Once I tried to raise my own prurient gaze to a higher level, I perceived the revisionist pro-witchcraft tolerance of modern times as a form of feminism.

I frankly disbelieve that much of the "reconstructed" paganism one finds nowadays, since mid-20th century eccentric Britons sought to trace a lineage between medieval and early modern "folk" practices back to Druidism, has much to do with what ancient Druidists actually believed and practiced. The emotional appeal lay mainly, I think, with female empowerment, setting wise women against the follies of patriarchy. Male gaze gawkers like myself would be part of the movement but the main drive of it clearly has been women appealing to women.

That's feminism. It might be a goofy, soft, unscientific sort of it but that's the appeal, I believe. Whereas your reactionary Americans would include feminism in any form as one of their grievances against modernity. The patriarchy of a hard form of Christianity would be far more appealing to them.

So if instead we somehow have a pagan revival for these people, it would be pretty distantly related if at all to the sort of neo-paganism we commonly see today. Nazi style Wotanism might fit. But why bypass a rich heritage of Christian bigotry, intolerance, and absolutism to revive a primitive cult that lost out to the Christians in the first place?

Neo-conservatives most of all want to associate with winners, not martyrs. The Vikings might look more manly and stark compared to martyr-ridden Christians--but the Christians of the Modern period were triumphant.

Perhaps my negativity has shown paths to what you are looking to explore that I simply refuse to go down myself. I just don't see it, not anyway in the inclusive package you offer. Some of those elements, perhaps, certainly not all of them together.

And the probable thing is OTL, a revival of old-time Christian religion, not a New Age.
 
One idea that I think could work is having a synthesis between various New Age counter-culture beliefs, in particular the hippie movement, and the New Right. Given that a large part of those movements was centred on the affluent urban middle-class, a demographic that can be as much a source of reactionary conservatism as liberal progressivism, it wouldn't be too hard to develop a right-leaning hippie movement. Even IOTL there are quite a few right-wing hippies, such as John Mackey.

A large part of the reason why these ideas became part of the counterculture was as a reaction to the conservative Christianity of the 50s, which is also why it tends to be associated with the political left, and the New Left in particular. In order to have this backlash turn to the right it is necessary too have the political left be much stronger in America and with a greater degree of mainstream influence and support. In addition this stronger left should also draw heavily upon Christianity. Maybe Huey Long becomes President and/or Christian Socialism becomes a mainstream trend in US politics? As a result, Christianity is more associated with left-wing values. In addition, the mainstream left is also quite socially conservative, which ends up alienating a lot of the New Left. When 60s and 70s counterculture rolls around the right, capitalises on disaffection with the social conservatism associated with the left, as well as integrating elements of the New Left that the mainstream left hasn't taken seriously. Under these conditions a right-wing New Age movement could arise.

This alt-right hippie movement, which would include various neopagan and non-Abrahamic religions, would probably be much more aligned to the libertarian right, rather than the traditional conservative right. In later decades the association of neopaganism with the political right could morph into a more conservative form, especially as the baby boomer generation grows up, which could lead to the embrace of ethnonationalist forms of neopaganism.
 
Well, as others have said, it's essentially ASB. Neopaganism has never been a significant force in the US.

That said, some reconstructionist attitudes in Europe have historically been heavily associated with nationalism and ethnocentrism (the Nazis are the most famous, but they come from a long tradition in that respect, and my understanding is that at least some modern European skinheads lean that way). Indeed, quite a bit of "getting back to ancestral ways" inherently excludes those whose ancestral ways are different.

So, I suspect if ASBs made it so, you could have a xenophobic/militarist/nationalist movement associated with this neopagan community.
 
Contra the various "how could neo-Paganism possibly be right-wing?" posters here, it's actually a major element of neo-Nazi and other extreme right politics in Scandinavia and Germany. Some neo-Pagan elements like the Celtic cross are banned as Nazi symbols in Germany. Within Scandinavia, public fascination with Norse mythology is usually a far right dabble. The social equivalent of American neo-Pagan hippies is secular anarchists and communists (one LARPer I know asked that instead of giving them birthday presents, people donate money to communist Kurdish rebels). Society is sufficiently secular here that, on the one hand, the left doesn't need the "spiritual but not religious" workaround, and on the other hand, the populist right doesn't wrap itself in the Bible.

I still don't think it's very likely to happen in the US, though. The reasons that lead to this association here don't work in the US:

- American society is one of the most religious in the developed world, so, as per the already-mentioned Sinclair Lewis quote, fascism wraps itself in the Bible and Jesus.

- Unlike in Scandinavia, in England Christianity completely erased pre-Christian Paganism. In English, 12/25 is called Christmas; in Swedish, Jul, i.e. Yule. England's ethnogenesis is too wrapped up in Christianity - it's not like Scandinavia, which looks to its pre-Christian Viking heritage. Of note, the extreme right in the UK does not use neo-Pagan symbols either, unless it's truly hardcore neo-Nazis who are importing them from Germany. (Incidentally, although Romance Europe has its Roman history to look back to, approximately nobody there practices Roman neo-Paganism.)

- Ethnic Americans love ethnic heritage, more than their co-ethnics abroad: for example, on 3 separate occasions, I've seen Jewish Americans design or run RPGs about Jewish history or mysticism, but when I asked in an Israeli roleplayers' group if they do the same, they unanimously said that no, when they RPG, they want to play someone who isn't like them. The same happens in the US vs. Scandinavia re Norse mythology themes. The end result is that there's a much larger base of Americans with interest in Celtic and Norse mythology who are not right-wing nutjobs. (And just to clarify, in Israel, someone with that interest in Jewish history would not typically be a right-wing nutjob, but would still be viewed as weird.) This may conflict with my earlier point about England vs. Scandinavia, but it underscores a key difference: in Scandinavia it's part of nationalism, whereas in the US it's part of ethnic identity rather than pan-American or pan-white-American nationalism.

- The mythological heritage of the US is not a religious mythology, but the whole arc of the Puritans and the Founding Fathers. The equivalent of Nordic neo-Nazis waving Pagan symbols is US anti-immigration extremists calling themselves the Minutemen; the softer, more moderate equivalents are Reagan talking about a shining city on the hill and the Republicans demanding that every Congressional law cite which part of the Constitution empowers it to pass it. Its religious component is the KJV-only movement, especially in the stronger forms, which view the KJV as more canonical than the Hebrew and Greek originals.

- Finally, the US is more exceptionalist than any European country. The result is that it's less likely to dialog with other countries about heritage. Hitler mandated that German schools teach English because he viewed the English as Germans' racial cousins; American far-right conservatives hate any teaching of foreign languages (as do many people who are not on the far right). This means that direct import of neo-Nazi symbols is relegated to the fringe. It's not like in Scandinavia, where the far right happily dialogs with PEGIDA and equivalent movements in France, Britain, and the Low Countries.
 
The neopaganism I refer to here is the "folkish," ethnic-identity variety (not full-on white supremacist/nationalist; obviously, a mere pat on their shoulder would be political suicide, except perhaps for a populist Republican). I can't see conservative Euro-Americans reaching out to the "universalists"; more likely they'd call them faux-pagan hippies. My focus is less on how it could happen (a pre-1900 POD, yes, being most plausible) than on the contemporary results.
Yeah, going by Sinclair Lewis("When fascism comes to America, it will carry a cross"), the scenario is ASB. However, despite the acronym in the title, the OP reads more like a WI than a challenge.
Edited accordingly. And if this thread qualifies as ASB, then by all means, move it there.
The equivalent of Nordic neo-Nazis waving Pagan symbols is US anti-immigration extremists calling themselves the Minutemen; the softer, more moderate equivalents are Reagan talking about a shining city on the hill and the Republicans demanding that every Congressional law cite which part of the Constitution empowers it to pass it.
I'm thinking more of populist Republicans, the Tea Party crowd, who see the conservative establishment as Democrat-acquiescent snobs.
 
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For those harking back to devout Catholicism, you might find plenty of "folk Christian" elements to gratify yourself I suppose. And despite the historic antipathy between Catholic and Protestant, I daresay that neo-Puritans and neo-Tridentines will have enough common ground in civil politics and society that they will waive the doctrinal wars (perhaps to another generation that might take it all more seriously) in favor of their joint political alliance against social modernism.

As a "neo-Tridentine" of sorts myself, I doubt in the near future such an alliance outside things like the pro-life movement (which has over time become more ecumenical anyway) will materlialize. I mean, with trads, you're talking about a culture who use "Protestant" as pretty much the worst slur you can call a fellow Catholic, especially as anti-Semitism has become much less acceptable.

Not to mention that some things the neo-Puritans might try to use to rope us in would likely fall flat, especially racial politics - like the broader Church at large, Trads are rarely the monolithic white-Anglo phenomenon these days.
 
Being tricksy in interpreting the OP, could you perhaps keep America as wholly Christian (or nominally Christian), while having a majority of the white, conservative population follow another tradition?

What if, for example, white people were a minority, and a minority of the white people could be labeled conservative, and a fractional majority of those could be labeled neopagan or folklorist-Christian?

So say you somehow never see the expansion of the definition of "white" to include Southern or Eastern Europeans, or Catholics. We can fiddle with immigration all we want and make the "white" population basically anything by 1980. I'm gonna go with a comfortable 30% just for the purposes of example.

Then let's say that due to various factors of economics and culture, "whites" are largely moderate-to-liberal, politically. Let's say that perhaps a third can be considered decidedly right-of-center, and maybe half of those truly hard-right.

So at this point we're talking 5-10% of the population in 1980 are "white" conservatives. Imagining that a majority of them (roughly 2.6% - 5.1%) are part of a weird, offshoot folk-Christian sect isn't too out of the question, especially if that sect has had a long time to germinate.

That's still a tremendous change, but this board routinely underestimates the power of change.
 
Being tricksy in interpreting the OP, could you perhaps keep America as wholly Christian (or nominally Christian), while having a majority of the white, conservative population follow another tradition?
Aha! Now this is more like what I intended. A small but very vocal group; a majority of the minority, so to speak.
 
I don't know about neopaganism but if there were a right-wing ideology associated with the folk churches and rural traditionalists (Think Amish light with the obligatory bowl.of milk left out for the see folks of the woods...) ... Anyway, a right wing ideology grown out of the ancient cultural/folk tradition would not be much different from today's right Republicanism except that it would have a distinct environmental and social justice bent to it. They would still fight abortions and all immigration but they would also oppose fracking and fight for minimum wages.... The first because they care about the land, the second because it is their belief that a man should be able to support his family...
 
A "folk Christian" right wing in America is something I can actually see emerging in the future, as Africa, Latin America, and Asia become hotbeds of evangelical Christianity. OTL already provides us with syncretic faiths like vodou and Santeria, as well as radical sects like Eastern Lightning in China and arguably the Lord's Resistance Army in central Africa. Even within the US, you have the Mormons as a heterodox Christian group that's both conservative and viewed as "weird" by outsiders. Get some of this to trickle back to the US through both immigration and cultural exchange, and you can get an American evangelical Christianity that's unquestionably associated with right-wing politics, but has absorbed so many syncretic ideas that Catholics and mainline Protestants view it as heretical.

Neo-paganism, however, is trickier, and requires a pretty early POD. For why, you can look to the different religious histories of the US and Europe. Large parts of northern Europe still maintain continuity with their pagan past in the form of surviving traditions and rituals that were co-opted by the Christians. As such, there exists a small but vocal minority of European right-wingers who see the Christian faith not as the keystone of European tradition, but rather, as the force that destroyed that tradition. In their mind, Christianity is a religion of foreigners, brought over from the Mediterranean at the point of a sword and used to colonize and subjugate northern Europe by destroying the spiritual heritage of its people. (Any similarities to the more hysterical rants about the coming "Eurabia" are purely coincidental. ;) ) As such, pre-Christian religions hold a certain appeal to a subset of European reactionaries, particularly those of a more nationalist bent (such as neo-Nazis latching onto Asatru).

The English colonies that formed America, however, were founded at a time when the British Isles had long since been Christianized, with the main religious disputes of the day being between different Christian sects, not between Christians and pagans. One of the major groups of colonists, the Puritans of New England, was composed of separatist Christians. At the time of the Revolution, the only pagans in the young United States were either Indians, whose culture and religion were seen as suspect, or lone eccentrics. When the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were drawn up, paganism never came into the equation (conspiracy theories about the Freemasons notwithstanding); all of the Founders were either Christians or deists informed by the ideals of the Enlightenment. This is still true today, with both the "establishment" and the popular/folk culture dominated by, or at least paying lip service to, Enlightenment-era Christianity and its descendants. As a result, American neo-paganism (and secularism, for that matter) was inherently countercultural, and gravitated quickly towards left-wing politics. The only real strain of right-wing thought that existed in the American neo-pagan and New Age movements (that wasn't imported from Europe, at any rate) was in Satanism, courtesy of Anton LaVey's reheated Objectivism and his heirs.

Basically, you'd need a situation in the US where paganism and the occult are seen as part of the foundation of American society the same way that the Christian Right views America as an inherently Christian nation. And since this means establishing them as traditions with deep roots, it would take a POD going way back. The latest one I can think of would be by having the spiritualist movement (IMO the closest that the occult ever got to the American mainstream) manage to hold on and survive well into the 20th century rather than fade out. In OTL, it was mainly a fad of the upper and middle classes; the trick here would be to have it spread into folk culture, perhaps as part of the backdrop of the Third Great Awakening of the late 19th century. Before long, it absorbs much of the energy that the evangelicals and Pentecostals claimed in OTL. By the 1950s, conjuring spirits is seen not as a gateway to Satanic evil, but as a valuable faith-building ritual just like evening prayers. The President and the First Lady hold seances in the White House to demonstrate their respect for the traditional values of the average American, even if they themselves privately think it's baloney. As the emerging secular movement (as well as the Catholic Church) criticizes the spiritualists, they respond by spurning them as ivory-tower elitists (and furrin' papists) opposed to the culture of the "real America", the land of God, guns, and Ouija boards, and proceed to double down on their more whackadoodle beliefs. Before long, we've got the ACLU fighting to keep theosophy and "spiritual evolution" out of public school curricula, religious programming on TV dominated by "telemediums", and a popular "prosperity spiritualism" claiming that spirits can intercede in people's lives and provide them with personal gain, which leads to a lot of conservative, middle-class "respectable people" (the base of OTL's suburban/megachurch Christian Right) renewing their memberships in local spiritualist clubs and associations that use this marketing tactic.
 
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The President and the First Lady hold seances in the White House to demonstrate their respect for the traditional values of the average American, even if they themselves privately think it's baloney.

You probably know Jack Van Impe, the TV preacher who uses Detroit Free Press headlines to demonstrate how the predictions of Revelation are supposedly being fulfilled today.

In notable contrast to other Christian doomsday prophets, Van Impe has been known to quote Our Lady Of Fatima, and, even more outrageously, Nostradmaus, for back-up on his teachings. So, evidently, there is a market, albeit probably a small one, among Christians for occultic visionaries, as long as they're presented as being in tandem with the Bible.

And really, if you can swallow the borderline occultic numerology and gnostic history of typical pre-millenialism(do a google on some of their charts to see just how off-the-wall it is), it shouldn't be that too huge a leap to go in for paganism whole-hog. Though you'd probably need a pre-1900 POD to get a totally non-christian version holding wide sway in the USA.

EDIT: According to what I've just been reading, Van Impe also quotes the Mayan Calendar, Chinese astrology, and Hopi Indian prophets as sources.
 
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The President and the First Lady hold seances in the White House to demonstrate their respect for the traditional values of the average American, even if they themselves privately think it's baloney.

Heh. This would sorta be the opposite of the OTL 1980s, where Ron and Nancy were consulting astrologers in the White House, while sending out dog-whistles to "local-control" fundamentalist Christians, who wanted to ban Dungeons And Dragons from their kids schools.

. In their mind, Christianity is a religion of foreigners, brought over from the Mediterranean at the point of a sword and used to colonize and subjugate northern Europe by destroying the spiritual heritage of its people. (Any similarities to the more hysterical rants about the coming "Eurabia" are purely coincidental. ;) ) As such, pre-Christian religions hold a certain appeal to a subset of European reactionaries, particularly those of a more nationalist bent (such as neo-Nazis latching onto Asatru).

The most "proactive" of the anti-Eurabia warriors, Anders Behring Breivik, apparently has listed his religion, variously, as Christian, Catholic, Odinism, and None, but mostly seems to be a cultural chauvinist who just hates Muslims, along the lines of Geert Wilders. Even living in Norway, he doesn't seem to have made a strong identification with paganism.

Before long, we've got the ACLU fighting to keep theosophy and "spiritual evolution" out of public school curricula

I'm trying to imagine the outraged parents' complaining down at the local donut shop...

"Y'know, if they wanna come to this country and worship Jesus or Moses or whoever those guys are, I got no beef with that. But, when they try to tell me that we can't have a picture of Aleister Crowley up in the school gym during the Solstice Pageant, well, ya gotta wonder whose country this is."

"That's fer sure, Bill."

That said, I do know of at least one case where the ACLU intervened to stop a school from holding an Earth Week activity that seemed to be crossing the line into Gaia worship. I've never been able to find anything about it on-line, though.
 
I'm trying to imagine the outraged parents' complaining down at the local donut shop...

"Y'know, if they wanna come to this country and worship Jesus or Moses or whoever those guys are, I got no beef with that. But, when they try to tell me that we can't have a picture of Aleister Crowley up in the school gym during the Solstice Pageant, well, ya gotta wonder whose country this is."

"That's fer sure, Bill."
Heh heh heh.
 
The most "proactive" of the anti-Eurabia warriors, Anders Behring Breivik, apparently has listed his religion, variously, as Christian, Catholic, Odinism, and None, but mostly seems to be a cultural chauvinist who just hates Muslims, along the lines of Geert Wilders. Even living in Norway, he doesn't seem to have made a strong identification with paganism.
I was thinking more along the lines of Julius Evola, Varg Vikernes, David Myatt, Alain de Benoist, and Troy Southgate in terms of European far-right ideologues who are/were opposed to Christianity, some of them quite militantly. Some examples of this leaking to the US include David Lane and Boyd Rice.

That said, it is interesting to see how even those far-right activists who are nominally Christian and/or secular (like Breivik) are at least friendly/open to reconstructionist pagan faiths like Asatru. For them, religion is second to nationalism -- and I suspect that a lot of their hatred of Islam has to do with it being a "foreign" religion as opposed to any of its specific tenets (like I alluded to in my earlier post). When it comes to subjects like holy war and gender roles (the two things that Islam is most frequently criticized for), a lot of these far-right activists tend to be of a like mind with the radical Islamists they claim to hate so much.

I'm trying to imagine the outraged parents' complaining down at the local donut shop...

"Y'know, if they wanna come to this country and worship Jesus or Moses or whoever those guys are, I got no beef with that. But, when they try to tell me that we can't have a picture of Aleister Crowley up in the school gym during the Solstice Pageant, well, ya gotta wonder whose country this is."

"That's fer sure, Bill."

That said, I do know of at least one case where the ACLU intervened to stop a school from holding an Earth Week activity that seemed to be crossing the line into Gaia worship. I've never been able to find anything about it on-line, though.
Tried looking up "ACLU Gaia Earth Week" in Google, and all I got were right-wing blogs and conspiracy theorists that said exactly what you'd expect. :rolleyes:

As for that imagined donut shop debate, though, that's exactly what I was picturing in my head. You can add nationalism to it as well by having the spiritualist boom of the 19th and 20th centuries get tied in with anti-Catholicism. I alluded to it above, but the Pope taking a hard line against the rising spiritualism could easily fuel anti-Catholic sentiment, producing an alliance between Protestant nativists and spiritualists that sees the latter's ideas start to enter Protestant circles. The diehard fundamentalists will complain as usual, but they will soon be marginalized rather than rising to positions of power like they did in OTL. The Catholics, meanwhile, will forge more alliances with secular liberals, socialists, and Jews as a response to protect their religious freedom, precluding the rise of OTL's Christian Right. TTL's "values voter" coalition is still nominally Christian, but Christians elsewhere in the world see them as heretics due to what they consider to be rampant occultism; the feeling is mutual. And when Latin American immigration starts up in a big way, religion will also factor into the nativist response. "Those damn Mexican papists are coming to take away our seances and replace 'em with godless rosaries!"
 
Tried looking up "ACLU Gaia Earth Week" in Google, and all I got were right-wing blogs and conspiracy theorists that said exactly what you'd expect. :rolleyes:

I saw it in Harper's, in that section at the front where they print the texts of documents, excerpts, transcripts, etc. from elsewhere. As I recall, the document was a list of suggested activities for Earth Week(or maybe "Day"), some of which seemed pretty close to encouraging kids to engage in goddess worship.

Contra the conspiracy theorists, I suspect it was something a lot less sinister, like some dimwit teacher figured she'd bring in material from her Jungian feminist collective, and didn't stop to consider the implications in terms of religious coercion.

As for that imagined donut shop debate, though, that's exactly what I was picturing in my head. You can add nationalism to it as well by having the spiritualist boom of the 19th and 20th centuries get tied in with anti-Catholicism. I alluded to it above, but the Pope taking a hard line against the rising spiritualism could easily fuel anti-Catholic sentiment, producing an alliance between Protestant nativists and spiritualists that sees the latter's ideas start to enter Protestant circles. The diehard fundamentalists will complain as usual, but they will soon be marginalized rather than rising to positions of power like they did in OTL. The Catholics, meanwhile, will forge more alliances with secular liberals, socialists, and Jews as a response to protect their religious freedom, precluding the rise of OTL's Christian Right. TTL's "values voter" coalition is still nominally Christian, but Christians elsewhere in the world see them as heretics due to what they consider to be rampant occultism; the feeling is mutual. And when Latin American immigration starts up in a big way, religion will also factor into the nativist response. "Those damn Mexican papists are coming to take away our seances and replace 'em with godless rosaries!"

I think you'd need some pretty significant culutral re-wiring to get protestants more readily aligned with pagans than with Catholics. As we saw in OTL, with the rise of the religious right in the 1970s, people one generation(or less) removed from rabid anti-popery had little problem linking up with Catholics, to stave off the threats of pornography, abortion, and homosexuality.

MAYBE if clerical sex-abuse scandals came to light in the 1920s, and were found to involve some very high-ranking church figures, and some MAJOR Catholic politicians. I mean, we're talking Al Smith and several archbishops caught having drunken orgies with altar boys. And Catholics police and media were found to have covered it all up. Might also help if there was some sort of military conflict with a Catholic nation, which Catholic politicians had generally opposed.

And THEN the Pope decides to launch a global crusade against spiritualism. But you'd still need to make spiritualism as American-as-apple-pie.
 
Here's another OTL case that would fit well with the alternate Pagan America scenario...

CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. — The ACLU filed a lawsuit Tuesday against a southeast Missouri city after a former library worker claimed she was disciplined when she refused to work at an event to promote a Harry Potter book due to her religious beliefs.

The woman, Deborah Smith, is a Southern Baptist who believes the Harry Potter books "popularize witchcraft and the practice of the occult," said Anthony Rothert, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri.

I wonder if the fundies were complaining about federal/ACLU interference in THIS case. (Think I know the answer to that.)

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