This new paganism seems to be an enterprise that traffics in terms emptied of all meaning. Soul, sacred, holiness, all are just a veneer on a sort of inescapable nothingness. This void is not well covered by jargon, regardless of how well-intended or articulate. It cannot be papered over. It can only be traversed by a transcendent love bright enough to outshine all our worldly aspirations and close enough to whisper to our broken hearts in all their futile grasping. 

The Apostle Paul tells us we’re all going to worship one of two things. We will either worship the Creator, or we will worship the creation (See Romans 1). It’s pretty simple. We will either allow the world to point us beyond itself to its source, as King David does in Psalm 19, or we will suppress the truth of God’s existence, that we all know deep down, and, in his absence worship some created thing, be it ourselves, someone else, or nature itself.

Christian author Peter Jones describes these options as oneism and twoism. Either all of reality is one thing, the Cosmos, hence oneism. Or, reality is accurately represented in the categories Paul gives us of Creator and creation, twoism. Every way of seeing reality can be boiled down to these options. Reality is either one or two. Choose wisely.

A magazine I regularly read is Aeon, a thoughtful online resource about ideas, philosophy, and culture. Earlier this month they published the article “A New Paganism: Now is the Time to Revitalise our Relationship with Nature and Immerse Ourselves in the Little Wonders of the Universe” by Ed Simon, an author who regularly writes about beliefs about God. Simon argues, in the absence of God, we need to turn our attention to the natural world to find a new expression of the sacred. This is the worldview of oneism.

Simon refernces an often quoted passage from the influential twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell in which Russell says it is only upon the firm foundation of unyielding despair that anyone can hope to find safe haven for their souls. Put aside for the moment the fact that Russell didn’t believe in any such thing as a soul, an immaterial part of the human personality that survives the grave. Simon quotes him to disagree with him. Though Simon describes himself as post-Christian, he rejects the idea that a world without God need be described as nihilistic. Simon writes:

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