Poor Oppressed Christians - The Book!

The Wild Hunt has an article up about a new book called The Pagan Threat. I'm not going to post a link to the book because I have no interest in giving it traffic from the blog, but a simple web search should turn it up if you really want to check it out.

Basically the point of this book is to try and frame Paganism as some kind of existential threat to Christianity and by extension to America as a whole. That prompted me to re-use the graphic above, to point out that Christianity is by far the majority religion in America and is not even remotely under threat from the tiny percentage of Pagan believers in our population.

Back in 2017 I posted an article sourced from the Pew Forum Religious Landscape Study looking at the percentage of Christians in the United States. I further broke the current research at that time down to identify "Poor Oppressed Christians" - Christians who, despite being part of an overwhelming majority of the population, feel that they are somehow under attack by basic things like laws protecting civil rights for members of all religions.

Since I haven't covered this topic in a while, I'll clarify a bit. Being a Christian doesn't make you a Poor Oppressed Christian. I have no issues whatsoever with people adopting Christianity as their spiritual path if that's what works for them. What makes Christians count as Poor Oppressed is when they insist that they deserve special priviliges in civil society that they deny to anyone who believes differently than they do. This article, which shares this one's graphic, lays this out in more detail.

I haven't taken a look at Pew's research on religious identity since 2017, so it seems reasonable to give it another look for 2025. As this chart shows, it remains true that Christians are a large majority and, statistically speaking, Pagans are practically non-existent.

See that line on the graph labeled "Something Else" under "Other Religions" with 2% of the population? Pagans are a subset of that - so not even the full 2%. You can also see on the graph that the Christian majority has declined, but it's not from Christians turning Pagan. Paganism gained at most a percentage point - and probably not even that - between 2007 and 2024.

This next chart makes clear what is going on - Christianity is primarily losing membership to the "Religiously Unaffiliated." People in general are becoming less religious, and since Christianity is the largest religion by far, it has also incurred most of the membership loss.

So perhaps the Poor Oppressed Christians of yesteryear who mostly went after atheists had it right, at least in terms of where their membership was going. Then and now, singling out Paganism makes no sense.

Let me tell you, I write books for a market that falls under the Pagan umbrella that this new book is attacking, and what I can tell you is that statistically speaking I barely sell any books. If there were some huge number of powerful Pagans out there, let me tell you, my sales would be way better. Now here's what the Wild Hunt article has to say about the book.

Against this backdrop of escalating rhetoric, a new title from Humanix Books has entered the fray: Pagan Threat: Confronting America’s Godless Uprising Pastor Lucas Miles, author of Woke Jesus. Released on September 16, the book has quickly gained traction on social media, aided in part by the presence of the foreword penned by Charlie Kirk, the recently assassinated conservative activist.

Promotional copy describes The Pagan Threat as a work that “meticulously exposes the inherent dangers that challenge the core fabric of our faith and civic unity. From exposing an evolving techno-paganism to blatant idol worship, Pastor Miles navigates the intricate terrain of safeguarding the nation and the pulpit against the rising tide of paganism.”

Unlike earlier authors who hedged or dismissed their links to modern Pagan practitioners, Miles leaves no ambiguity in The Pagan Threat. The book is explicitly about today’s Pagan communities. He defines “paganism” in sweeping terms as “a blanket term used to describe those who have abandoned mainstream forms of religion for esoteric practices, often rooted in polytheism, ancient rituals, worship of nature, spell-casting, sexual acts, and altered states of consciousness (with or without psychedelic substances).”

And yes, people practicing all of those things taken together represent less than 2% of the population. It's a real uprising, folks! I'm envisioning tiny armies of like four people trying to lay siege to Christian churches - and my guess is that they would be holding posters. To be threatened by this silliness is just ridiculous.

As an aside, Woke Jesus sounds like a real winner too. Jesus really did do "woke" stuff like not railing against abortion and homesexuality, making no remarks about either, and was a strong advocate for helping the poor and downtrodden. Anybody who reads the actual Bible knows these things.

And yet, the crowd that is totally okay with "Prosperity Gospel" seems to have forgotten that whole thing about Jesus driving moneylenders from the Temple. And maybe, just maybe, this hypocritical interpretation of Christ's teachings has something to do with people leaving Christianity to become religiously unaffiliated. Smart people can only put up with contradictions like that for so long.

The real threat to America is the Poor Oppressed Christians themselves, since one of the central constitutional tenets of our country is religious freedom for all people. Beyond that, I've never met a Pagan who recruited - very much unlike many Christians. There's something seriuously wrong with anyone who thinks just wanting to be left alone constitutes a threat against them.

And yes, I know, charts and graphs and logical reasoning doesn't really influence the Poor Oppressed. They are overcome by grievance and consider the mere existence of different beliefs to constitute oppression. It's as if they need an enemy and are careful to select the least powerful, least numerous, and least threatening enemies ever.

What does that tell you about them?