Camus is famous for espousing that “Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted”, echoing the nihilistic worldview of Nietzsche. This is the perspective at the heart of paganism – the belief that nothing is true (it’s all relative) and everything is permitted. In his milemarker book “Pagan America, The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age To Come”, John Daniel Davidson spares nothing in his historical descriptions of the brutal, savage and sadistic paganism of the Vikings, Aztecs and Benin of West Africa. Here is a summary description of what Cortez encountered upon entering the Aztec capital,

Nearly five centuries after the Swedish king Inge the Elder, a devout Christian, destroyed the pagan temple at Uppsala, Hernán Cortés arrived in the Aztec capitol of Tenochtitlan to scenes of pagan ritual butchery that far surpassed what even the most pious Viking pagans undertook. In the dismal annals of pagan butchery, the Aztecs are in a class with the Carthaginians, who enslaved their neighbors and regularly sacrificed infants to Baal.

I will spare you the more graphic descriptions of the horror that Cortez encountered upon entering Tenochtitlan.

Davidson writes of the impact of Christianity upon these barbaric cultures,

The Vikings of Trelleborg, the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan, and the Benin of West Africa are separated by great expanses of time and geography. They share almost nothing in common except a particularly bloody form of paganism—a willingness to sacrifice fellow human beings, even children, not just to appease their gods but also to maintain a social order through the control of anxiety and the deployment of ritual violence. But they also had this in common: their encounters with Christianity eventually brought an end to their pagan religions, and in this they were not unique. The advent of the Christian religion as a small and obscure sect within the sprawling Roman Empire, despised even by the Jews from whose number its first adherents came, heralded the end of a pagan order that had prevailed in most societies and among most peoples since the beginning of recorded history. The civilization that would bloom from the Christian religion was the result of a moral revolution that upended and rendered obsolete the moral foundation on which paganism rested, as well as the cosmological vision that gave it coherence.

Power and fear are the hallmarks of paganism. The danger is that as Christianity recedes from the public square and American mindset, paganism will inevitably return . . . but with a vengeance and renewed ferocity. Nothing will be true and everything will be permitted.