On Monday, Chris Caldwell, a noted conservative thinker, asked in the New York Times whether Paganism was replacing Christianity. He was referencing a book written in French by Chantal Delsol, the title of which he translates as “The End of the Christian World.”

I have seen this movie before. There is a certain kind of conservative who is fixated on things like gay marriage and transgender people and is convinced that this suggests a return to paganism.

This is wrong on two fronts. First, it was St. Paul who announced the end of male and female. It was the Book of Acts in which God says to St. Peter, Peter, don’t tell me what’s kosher.

Second, the fundamental change that is in fact already arrived is not paganism, but nihilism.

C.S. Lewis understood this. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis called all theories of objective value, The Tao, and observed that all traditional value systems shared this viewpoint. For Lewis, the classical world of paganism and Christianity are closely linked in this way.

The abolition of objective values is the result of the Death of God and it has proved tremendously harmful to America and the West. This is the source of anger and division. When the story of God collapsed, nothing replaced it. Paganism has nothing to do with it.  

That is the story I tell in The Universe Is on Our Side. We need a new story. At the moment, we are adrift with no story at all.

It’s not paganism; it’s nothing.