Some truth here, but also an overestimation of the benefits likely to accrue from striving for respectability. https://twitter.com/Robin_C_Douglas/status/1334929195399573510

I think that Hutton doesn't sufficiently recognize the extent to which the consolidation of global monotheism, as an overarching goal of Western society, still needs to be actively displaced for polytheism to flourish. We won't just be accepted if we dress nicely.

For many of us, in any case, abandoning the "poor, persecuted and marginalised, the losers of history" is not really an option, either because we belong to one of those groups, or maybe just because we believe you should dance with the one that brought you.

The history of the pagan revival in the West, that it emerged as part of the counterculture, is not a bug, but a feature. It doesn't mean that we can't build a new, more positive and just culture; on the contrary, that's the whole point of resistance.

It's juvenile when people caricature the counterculture as this never-ending force of dissolution, rather than as an effort to undermine unjust institutions and replace them with ones more just. And no civilization, ancient or modern, has been without such strivings.

People often ask me why I think that Christianity came to power. The answer is complex, but part of its rapid early growth was certainly due to being an outsider religion that was well-positioned to capitalize on dissatisfaction with the Roman Empire.

This is not to say that Xtianity really was a resistance movement against the Empire. Many early Christians were themselves privileged. But it was able to present itself as turning the page, which has a distinct appeal when people have a strong sense that things could be better.

There were good arguments for simply being against change, as for simply ignoring politics, but this conservatism left the diverse pagan cults in the unenviable position of being discredited by association with an unpopular status quo that wasn't really benefiting them anyway.

Nevertheless, pagans then had a lot more to lose by change in the status quo than Western pagans today, and so if conservatism wasn't an effective strategy for them then, how effective is it going to be today, when we are completely and utterly marginalized?

Hutton is correct that Western pagans need to seize the center, but not by moving to the center themselves. Rather, as the center moves toward us by virtue of collective action on a host of issues, we need to seize it, to provide the new spiritual center.

The sustainable default setting for a genuinely pluralistic society is not secularism, but polytheism.