When a book like The Pagan Threat: Confronting America’s Godless Uprising lands in the U.S. (16 September 2025) with a foreword by Charlie Kirk—assassinated on 10 September in Utah—it’s hard not to feel the weight of centuries of scapegoating descend all over again. Here in the UK, the book is officially released today (30 September). I don’t expect it to cause the same cultural earthquake here, but we no longer live in isolated bubbles. We live in a global community, and I have Pagan friends in the United States who now live in genuine fear for their lives.
Let me be clear from the outset: I condemn all forms of violence, whether physical, verbal, or ideological. We do not need more flames fanned in this already overheated world. Nor do we need a return to the witch-burning times. What we need is honesty, nuance, and courage.
A Foreword That Pours Fuel on the Fire
Charlie Kirk’s assassination made him a martyr for the Christian Right overnight. That the foreword of The Pagan Threat carries his name makes the book especially inflammatory. It ties a message of fear and scapegoating to a man whose death has already been weaponised for political ends. In that context, the book is not simply a theological argument; it becomes a rallying cry, a coded permission slip for hostility.
Lucas Miles’s text paints Paganism as an existential threat to society. It collapses witches, druids, tarot readers, animists, and polytheists into one monstrous “other,” portrayed as the root cause of civilisational decline. This is nothing new. Monotheistic systems throughout history have thrived on scapegoating outsiders—pagans, heretics, witches, Jews, Muslims, or anyone who falls outside their definition of the “true faith.”
But this time it lands in a global media ecosystem where fear spreads at the speed of a click. That’s why even those of us in the UK, where the book is unlikely to dominate headlines, must pay attention.
Why Monotheism Generates Division
Monotheism likes to present itself as a unifying force. Yet time and again, its track record shows otherwise. When you claim there is “one true God” and “one true path,” everyone else automatically becomes suspect. That binary—truth versus chaos—lays the groundwork for inquisitions, crusades, colonisation, and conversion by force.
Pagan societies were not perfect, but many demonstrated something precious: the ability to syncretise. The Romans folded foreign deities into their pantheon. The Greeks saw their gods reflected in the divine forms of others. The point was never to hoard gods as trophies but to recognise that all divine forms are symbolic representations of larger-than-life forces. Multiplicity was not chaos; it was wisdom.
Paganism as Part of the Solution
The caricature presented in The Pagan Threat ignores what Paganism actually offers.
- Pluralism and Syncretism: Paganism has always allowed for many truths, many gods, many names for the sacred. This fosters tolerance rather than persecution.
- Sacred Ecology: Pagans see spirit in rivers, stones, and trees, grounding us in the ethic of reciprocity that sustainability requires.
- Cycles and Balance: Seasonal rituals remind us that death and rebirth, decay and renewal, are part of the whole. This is not moral relativism but deep realism.
- Re-enchantment: Magic, ritual, and myth reconnect us to wonder in a world stripped bare by materialism.
If anything, Paganism equips us to face our ecological and social crises with humility, creativity, and respect for diversity.
My Journey of Breaking Free
This is not an abstract debate for me. I was christened as an infant in a nominally Christian Swedish home but, like the majority of Swedes, grew up outside of church life. My immersion into Christianity came during a high-school exchange year in the American Bible Belt. My host family “led me to Christ”—in reality, they threatened me with eternal damnation unless I submitted. Under that pressure, I was baptised as a teenager in a fundamentalist evangelical setting.
In 2020, during the pandemic, I returned to the faith of my youth. Faced with existential dread, I embraced evangelical Christianity once more. During my (re-)baptism, the pastor asked me to denounce witchcraft. I complied, and in that moment, I eradicated my magical will completely.
It has taken five years to rebuild. Today, empowered by my Uthark rune journey, I am reclaiming that will. And today, 30 September 2025, I publicly deconvert and renounce all three of my Christian baptisms.
Yet I do not discard the teachings of Yeshua. The Gospel of Thomas remains dear to me, a text that speaks of inner light, of the kingdom within, of freedom. Yeshua did not create a religion; Rome did. My quarrel is not with the wisdom of a wandering sage and spiritual rebel but with the system that weaponised his words into dogma, division, and fear.
Not Here to Burn Bridges
I’m not writing this to pit Christians and Pagans against one another. We share many values: love, compassion, justice, reverence for creation. What I’m rejecting is the fear narrative—the us-versus-them story that serves power but destroys community. Paganism is not the threat. Fear is. And it is fear that kills witches, burns books, and justifies violence in the name of order.
I’m here to build bridges—between past and future, between those who still find nourishment in Christianity and those of us who no longer can, between the visible world and the living, ensouled earth that Pagans honour. My choice to step away is not a call to war; it’s a commitment to walk in truth without demanding that others walk the same road.
Today I choose to break free and rebuild my magical will—not in defiance of anyone’s faith, but in loyalty to the living Light that speaks through trees, tides, seasons, and the quiet wisdom within. The “Pagan threat” is a story told to keep us afraid. The Pagan promise is a practice: reciprocity, plurality, and care for the more-than-human world. That’s the bridge I’m choosing to stand on—and to extend, hand outstretched, to anyone ready to cross.
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