The Darkness Does Not Just Fester Over There

First, and thankfully unrelated to anything below, today is my twenty-second wedding anniversary. I could not do what I do but for the support of my wife. I cannot express how much I love her. I can’t believe she’s put up with me for so long. Now, on to today’s post.

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There’s a virus spreading through our society. It manifests itself as surging paganism that is deeply detached from reality, science, and true religion.

At the University of Minnesota Medical School, a renowned doctor who serves as the dean administered an oath to the incoming class of 2026. The students pledged to "honor all Indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by Western medicine" and fight "white supremacy, colonialism, [and] the gender binary." Shamanism is back in.

As voices on the right began to complain about and express concerns about drag queen story hours for kids, it provoked a response from the left, which threw itself with gusto into providing drag queen access for kids. In more than one instance, the drag queen was someone with prior charges for sexual predation.

As the right has raised concerns about transgenderism, the left has rushed to alter science teaching to delete science and embrace pseudo-science. Humans are of the Hominidae family of mammals. None within the family can alter their genders. It is a settled bit of science. The pagans of the left, however, now claim Homo sapiens are either a new family of animals altogether or an exception within the Hominidae family of mammals. Somehow we can do what none of our closest animal relatives can.

If you point out basic science, you are a bigot. Medical doctors, psychiatrists, philosophers, biologists, and more are silenced, bullied, and badgered out of the academy for daring to point out the madness. The deviancy has become normal and normalcy is now deviant. Even popular celebrities are not immune to the pagan wrath seeking to silence them from speaking truth to lies.

In Atlanta, near where I live, a massive William-Sonoma is now one of the southeast’s largest metaphysical magic crystal shops. You can get tourmaline to ease your mental illness or sunstone to attract wealth and ward off evil spirits. Even their hiring section at salary.com appears in the metaphysical section.

Undoubtedly, many of those on the left who embrace the magic crystals have “In this house we believe in science” signs in their yard.

This virus, however, also is infecting people on the right. There is a resurgence of racism on the right in a movement premised on whiteness as a superior race. Ross Douthat wrote a defense of the religious right a few years ago and has noted that for those who hate the Christian right, wait till you meet the post-Christian right.

We are meeting them, and they are pagans like the left — suffering the same social virus dragging them into paganism. They embrace the same intersectionality and identity politics of the Marxist, post-modern left. They’re more alt-right than right. They’re on the right without conservative conviction struggling to define a new ideology without Christ or rewriting Christ, just as the left has done.

Now, instead of Christ being the weeping lover of the Alphabet gang who accepts all, embraces all, and tolerates all, Christ is the wrathful, vengeful Old Testament God whose tribe is white, not Jewish.

I have recently encountered this manifestation of the post-Christian right’s idol and redefined Christianity.

In Georgia, two black teens murdered a white high school senior who was with his girlfriend at a Dave & Busters. The parents of the murdered teen said they forgive the murderers. The murderers will face justice. The parents want the murderers to face justice. But the parents refused to hate and instead forgave. They summoned the peace that transcends all understanding to exercise a strength no pagan possesses to forgive those who did violence to their family.

This drew the wrath of post-Christian pagans and those in the Twitterbros circle of the right. I saw a tweet and commented on it in passing.

Jake Bequette @JakeBequette91

This kid’s body isn’t even cold yet, and the parents and girlfriend are already falling all over themselves to forgive the murderers and move on? No righteous anger? What a pathetic, broken culture this is.

Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 @JackPosobiec

Georgia high school football star, 18, is shot dead in mall parking lot: Two teenagers are arrested https://t.co/YuUH43657p

Erick Erickson @EWErickson

@JakeBequette91 I think it’s the epitome of Christianity to forgive even someone who kills your loved one.

It seems wrong to condemn grieving parents for their response to their murdered son and demand they engage in only one response. It is baffling that Christian parents should be attacked for showing forgiveness — a strength, again, that the pagans do not possess. We’re not even talking about theological forgiveness of God towards sinners. We are talking about Christian parents of a murdered son forgiving their son’s killers and the post-Christian alt-right are attacking the parents. This is as demonic as drag queen story hour — a manifestation of evil in another form — an evil that seeks to provoke bloodlust and shames the meek who will inherit the earth, shames the pure in heart who will see God, and shames the peacemakers who will be called children of God.

Behold the response it provoked.

Pedro L. Gonzalez @emeriticus

There is a disease of the mind that afflicts white people like Erick Erickson that makes them think it would be honorable to wash the feet of the murderers of their children especially if they are not white. It is beyond pathetic and deserves nothing but contempt and disgust.

Erick Erickson @EWErickson

@JakeBequette91 I think it’s the epitome of Christianity to forgive even someone who kills your loved one.

In John 13:2-5 we read,

During supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

Jesus washed Judas’s feet, already knowing Judas would betray him and lead to his murder.

Pedro, who has been a pretty vocal apologist for the white nationalist post-Christian right, would twist the reference to Christ in scripture, weave racial politics into it, and then declare it a bad thing.

This is not much different than the attempts by theological progressives to declare Christ didn’t really ever talk about marriage so gay marriage is okay.

These small twists, over time, become large heresies.

So many on the right are so focused on the darkness and evil spreading on the left they risk being surrounded by it on the right. The darkness is spreading. It is not spreading just on the left but across the political and apolitical classes of American society.

Paganism is rearing its head. It is moving quickly to infect, infest, and entrench itself into our lives. We have to be able to call it out on all sides and must resist the tribalism of the present age.

Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was not betrayed by either the Sadducees or the Pharisees but by one of his hand-picked Apostles. Do not hate the left so much that you ignore what festers on the right. The darkness is spreading. The only think that can stop it is the light of the real Christ of the real Gospel, not the invented Jesus of the intersectional gospels of the left and alt-right.

On a Related Note…

Erick Erickson @EWErickson

I have a bone to pick with some of my social media followers.