May 11, 2021

Ep 96: Gods, Wizards, Witches, & the End of Secularity (part 1)

53 minutes

As someone who loves cultural theology, I’m completely fascinated by ancient and modern myths and how those mythological stories serve as guiding stories for entire civilizations. Whether it is the ancient tales of Zeus and the Greek Olympian gods or the myths of virtuous super-human heroes and lazer sword wielding wizards that fill our comic book pages & big box office movie screens, I’m fascinated by what these stories reveal about our views on God, reality, what is good and evil, and what the telos of life is all about.

The secular narrative has claimed that human progress is hindered by religious narratives, and that just as Christianity displaced the old pagan stories, secularism has come to displace Christianity and will bring about a better world. But the era of secularity may be approaching its end as more and more people begging to question that story.

The clues that we are moving towards a post-secular Western world are increasingly finding their way into being embedded into our popular cultural stories. Take the recent DC comics movie “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” where the death of God, symbolically represented by the death of Superman, awakens an ancient sinister force to come and fill the vacuum of power- a sinister force that was once kept at bay by the old pagan gods.

In today’s episode, we’ll try to step into the ancient pagan world and understand their relationship to their guiding stories, grapple with the early Christian responses to pagan culture & mythology, and begin to see why the secular goal of creating a religiously “neutral” cultural space never actually creates a religiously neutral space.

For the article on C.S. Lewis and paganism that I quote in this episode, see here:

https://www.sacredarchitecture.org/articles/god_the_father_of_lights_c._s._lewis_on_christianity_and_paganism

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