Pagan Britain
I read somewhere that neopaganism is the only successful and original religious export from Britain. Sure, we came up with Anglicanism, but that was mostly just a rehashing of Catholicism with a little bit of Protestantism sprinkled in, as a treat.
Really there are two sorts of British paganism, lets call them Hard Paganism and Soft Paganism. Hard Paganism is the stuff of real weirdos, or wannabe real weirdos; a Hard Pagan dresses up in a silly costume and worships the stars, if they had the courage of their convictions they would sacrifice an animal or a person to the Gods they claim to worship, but generally they don’t. They all seem to be a bunch of hippies who wouldn’t even eat a rabbit if it died in front of them, so they have little chance of resurrecting the Gods of the druids, who famously loved to eat the flesh of the weak.
Soft Paganism is a more insidious force. It tends to have its strongest grip over those who claim to be atheists. Needless to say, no one is really an atheist, not even the Buddhists. Despite the name I’ve given it, Soft Paganism seems likely to prove a far more vigorous force than Hard Paganism, mainly because it is less self conscious. While Hard Pagans know that they are engaged in an effort to recreate the past, perhaps a mythical past, Soft Pagans have no idea what they are doing at all.
Before I explain what exactly the Softies believe, I will explain why they exist. Britain used to be a basically Christian nation.
It all started with the Romans who brought Christianity to most of Britain. Then they left which lave the Christians open to attack from the pagan Anglo-Saxons who invaded but were later converted to Christianity by Augustine. They had a bit of an argument over when exactly Easter was and decided to agree with what the Roman church said. Before the Norman conquest, the Catholic church in England was uniquely close to the Papacy, for reasons I don’t remember. Despite this closeness, the Church was quite worldly. The Normans used this fact, and the fact that there was a sort of movement in the Church towards a more pure spiritual sort of vibe in the Church at the time (it was all the fault of the Germans as usual), to get the Pope to support their scheme to conquer England. Anyway, this all went very well for them. We’ll skip just a little bit of history now and zoom forward to the English Civil War of the mid 17th century.
The Civil War had a bunch of causes, but significantly for us, it was the partly caused by a dispute between Laudian Anglicans and Puritans. The Laudians had a bit more of a Catholic flavour to them, they liked altar rails and wanted churches to look pretty, while Puritans were a bit more upset about people having fun and generally wanted to ban Latin and make churches look like something out of an 80s Soviet social housing block so people could think more about how God loved them. Oh, and they hated Christmas. Anyway, say what you will about these guys, they really believed in Christianity. They thought there was some kind of special destiny for Britain for example.
After the Civil War and the restoration, when Charles II came back over the water and became King, the whole idea of being a religious nutcase started to go out of fashion. The clergy started to condemn ‘enthusiasm’ and the wishy-washy theological position of ‘latitudinarianism’ started to become all the rage. As the name suggests, these chaps though everyone really ought to calm down a peg and stop ranting and raving about their nutty religious beliefs, at the same time, normal people should probably stop being so nasty to people who believed nutty things. The toleration act which was passed after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 set this sort of idea into law: basically, it was ok to not be an Anglican so long as you still acknowledged the trinity and weren’t a disgusting Catholic. This sort of attitude grew over the eighteenth century, there were even clubs for the well to do where they made fun of Anglican religion and celebrated the Greek gods.
This sort of unenthusiam left a big mark on British religion, while the Evangelical movement and the Methodists tried, in their way, to bring back Christianity as a central part of life, they basically failed, and now Britain is probably the most secular country in the world. If there’s one thing that seems pretty obvious about Britain, its that its inhabitants have an unmatched love for animals. We literally left people to die in Afghanistan so we could save some dogs. David Attenborough, a guy who films cool animals and narrates them with a posh voice, is probably the most popular public figure in the country and the RSPCA has probably killed people in its quest to make sure the owners of sick dogs are punished to the fullest extent of the law. If you ever need to make a Briton angry, tell him about someone beating dogs or something, it works every time. As well as loving animals, Britain is a big country for NIMBYs, we love to leave things the way they are, classic pagan trait. What else? Well we have a hereditary mostly ceremonial figurehead who we all really like, bit of a pagan vibe don’t you think. We also have a lot of paedophiles, just like those weird Greeks.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ve convinced you that Britain is riddled with pagans, even if they are the sort who don’t really know they are pagans yet. With luck, this new religion will organise itself and do some cool stuff, if not, we are ripe for some fun crusades just as soon as the Catholics organise themselves a bit better.