![]() ![]() “What’s important now,” one of its leaders, Sergeant Drake Sholar, told Phillips, “is showing religious respect and understanding across the board as Norse Pagans, or Heathens, return to a distinguishable religious practice.”Īmen, selah. So fast-growing, in fact, that my colleague Maggie Phillips recently reported in Tablet magazine about the thriving, and officially recognized, pagan faith groups within the U.S. A decade later, the Pew survey posed the same question, and, if it is to believed, there are now about 1.5 million Americans professing an array of pagan persuasions, from Wicca to the Viking lore, making paganism one of the nation’s fastest-growing persuasions. But the researchers asked again in 2008, and this time, 340,000 Americans said yes to paganism. The numbers were unsurprisingly small: about 8,000, or enough to pack your average Journey reunion concert. In 1990, scholars from Trinity College set out to learn just how many of their fellow Americans practiced some form of pagan religion. If you think the above paragraph is a little bit overblown, consider the numbers. ![]() Everywhere you turn these days, pagans are afoot, busily hacking away at the Christian and Jewish foundations of American life and replacing them with a cosmology that would have been absolutely coherent to followers of, say, Voltumna, the Etruscan earth god, or to those who worshipped the Celt tribal protector Toutatis. ![]()
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