Là-Bas and Déjà Vu: Notes on the Twilight of Neopaganism

[ecosophia]

For some time I've been watching, with wry amusement, the antics of a certain subset of Neopagan witches who have apparently decided to embrace the Christian notion of what witches are, i.e., evil. These are the folks who have been posting long earnest essays online insisting that witches have to curse people and do other forms of nasty magic, since after all that's their heritage, and it's justified at least sometimes, and real power means the power to harm, etc. etc. Me, I'm an old-fashioned occultist and not any kind of witch, so what witches do is really no business of mine -- not my circus, not my monkeys -- but as my academic background is in the history of ideas, I'm intrigued to watch this particular remake of a familiar pattern. 

A few days ago one of the Neopagan witches just mentioned, one who's sufficiently on board with the idea of witches being evil that she's embraced the term "banefolk" for herself and those who agree with her, posted a lengthy diatribe on her blog that denounced Neopagan witches for being, well, evil. Specifically, she accused them of making up traditions and then lying about their origins, of making money off witchcraft, and of various kinds of sexual improprieties -- all of which, in her eyes, are apparently sins far more serious than (say) using magic to hurt people. 

There are plenty of things that could be said about the diatribe in question. It's amusing, for example, that she starts out by denouncing the habit of equating "pagan" with "Wiccan" and then goes and does exactly that, treating habits and teachings specific to modern American eclectic witchcraft (such as the "Thirteen Principles of Neopagan Belief") as though they're common not only to all Neopagan traditions, but to unrelated phenomena such as the Druid Revival and chaos magic (!). Still, the thing that struck me most was a powerful sense of déjà vu. 

I don't know how many of my readers are familiar with the French author J.-K. Huysmans, a very popular literary figure at the turn of the last century, or with his most notorious novel, Là-Bas. (Down There is the usual English translation, though it's very rough; the French idiom "là-bas" is pretty much untranslatable.) It's a novel about Satanism -- specifically, the fashionable Satanism that became wildly popular in French occult and countercultural circles at the end of the 19th century. The viewpoint character, Durtal, disgusted by the banality and crassness of modern life, lets himself be drawn by the mysterious Mme. Chantelouve into Paris' devil-worshiping underground, attends a black mass, and then tears himself away from Satanism to return to the Catholic faith of his childhood.

Là-Bas once had a lurid reputation, though it's frankly pretty tame by modern standards; the thing that often gets mislaid by modern readers is that it's a profoundly Christian book, and it accepts as a basic truth the orthodox Christian attitude toward occultism -- essentially, that if it's serious it's devil worship, and if it's not devil worship it's just play-acting and dress-up games. The Paris occult scene at the time Huysmans was writing was large, active, and those people who weren't playing at Satanism were by and large involved in serious work; the Martinist tradition and the modern alchemical revival are just two of the things that were getting under way then and there; but you won't learn that from Huysmans. 

What's more, Huysmans spoke for a significant movement in the counterculture of his time. There really was a big Satanist scene in late 19th century Paris; last I checked, most biographers of Huysmans agree that he probably based the black mass in his novel on one he actually attended. That movement had a predictable outcome, too, one that W.B. Yeats wrote about in his visionary essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae. In his early visits to France, he recalled, "one met everywhere young men of letters who talked of magic." Fast forward a few decades, and that had changed: "It was no longer the soul, self-moving and self-teaching -- the magical soul -- but Mother France and Mother Church." 

Satanism was the intermediate step between those two conditions, and it's easy to see why. If you embrace the idea that Christian orthodoxy is right about the nature of occultism, it's a very short step to embracing the idea that Christian orthodoxy is right, period. Once people got tired of the fringe benefits of being evil -- in turn of the century France, those mostly involved plenty of cheap sex and the opportunity to shock people, more or less the same as today -- they could then go through a fine melodramatic repentance, renounce their sinful ways, and be welcomed into a community of people who were eager to give them lots of attention and encouragement. This they accordingly did. 

It's far from the only time that's happened. Some of my readers are old enough to remember the twilight of the hippie scene at the end of the 1960s. Peace and love and brotherhood got chucked overboard by a significant faction of hippies, who took up in its place the kind of evil-hippie image made permanently famous by the late and unlamented Charles Manson. This was followed, after an interval of a few years, by the transformation of a great many hippies into "the Jesus People," and after another brief interval most of the latter ditched their countercultural values and settled down to get jobs and raise families as ordinary Christian Americans. 

I'm pretty sure that's what's going on in this case, too. Countercultures die when their members give up their own independent value judgments about the counterculture, and accept the (usually hostile or dismissive) judgments of the mainstream culture from which they previously distanced themselves. Now that a significant fraction of the Neopagan scene seems to be embracing the notion that witches are evil, and a few early adopters (like the author of the essay cited above) are generalizing from that to denounce the whole movement for its sins, I don't think we'll have long to wait before the current trickle of defections from Neopaganism turns into a flood. Conservative Christian denominations, on the off chance that this post of mine comes to their attention, might want to brace themselves for the arrival of a great many loudly repentant sinners in the years immediately ahead. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I note something else there: she seems to assume magic doesn't exist. Of course, if you're taking your cues from the mainstream culture....

[ecosophia]

Hmm -- I may have missed something. Where do you see that assumption in her essay?

[(Anonymous)]

So noted.

If my denomination can decide what it is, anyway.

(You want to watch a schism in slow motion by committee? Look up the United Methodist Church. Schism is happening-the "must perform gay marriages" side and the "gay marriages will get us executed" side aren't going to be able to hold together. The only remaining question is who gets to keep the UMC label and property division, and that, we'll see.)

BoysMom

[ecosophia]

I'm sorry to hear that, though not really surprised. Still, both sides of the Divided Methodist Church will probably get their fill of ex-Wiccan converts.

[smwils1]

As someone who went to a gay-friendly Presbyterian church just to get his mom out of the house until he just couldn't anymore, I really don't see why all the mainline denominations insist on staying separate. IDK why all the gay friendly Presbyterians, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, etc. can't all join hands like the United Church in Canada did many years ago, while the anti-gay Presbyterians, Methodists, Disciples, etc. can't do the same.

[ashareem]

Lawless has lost a large segment of her following over her recent posts. However, the Luciferian current has been strong in *traditional* witchcraft for a very long time, whether it predates Huysman, Leland, and Michelet, I don't know with any certainty, but it isn't a new thing. It's specifically spelled out in Leland's Aradia, as part of the "powers of the witch (to bless and to curse).

Wicca, of course, is its own thing, separate from such, although some have begun to use the term Traditional British Witchcraft in connection with it, which is only going to blur those distinctions even more.

The Jesus People, influenced by the likes of Hal Lindsey and his ilk, didn't just "to get jobs and raise families as ordinary Christian Americans." They became the seeds of the Dominionist movement in Protestant Christianity, and we are seeing their fruits in the like of the American Family Association, and the takeover of the Republican Party by evangelicals who do not practice the teachings of the Christ.

[ecosophia]

The idea of witchcraft as an antinomian cult is all through Michelet, but I've always thought that he was strongly influenced by the secret societies of his own time, the Carbonari and their kin -- J.M. Roberts' very solid book The Mythology of the Secret Societies, which explores that mostly forgotten world of 19th-century belief and practice, covers a huge and mostly unrecognized part of the prehistory of modern witchcraft. Like everyone else, of course, I've heard the claims that traditional witchcraft goes back before Michelet, but I have yet to see any evidence for that -- quite the contrary, everything I've seen suggests that what was called "witchcraft" before Michelet's time was the sort of thing documented in great detail in Jim Baker's The Cunning Man's Handbook, which has essentially nothing in common with what passes for traditional witchcraft these days. (This is not a criticism of modern traditional witchcraft, btw; as a Golden Dawn initiate and a Druid of the old-fashioned Druid Revival type, I know perfectly well that a tradition can be fibbing about its origins and still be a really effective, potent, worthwhile system of magic and spirituality...)

With regard to the Jesus People, yes, some of them went that route, but by no means all, or even a majority. I've met a fair number of ordinary middle-of-the-road Christians who extracted themselves from the counterculture via that route, settled down, got jobs, and wish the American Family Association would go away because it's giving Christianity a bad name.

[(Anonymous)]

When I hung out with pop Neopagans about a decade ago, they seemed they were, mostly, defining themselves in opposition to what they saw as mainstream culture. There was an anti-Christian stance, but often this merged into something very similar to new-atheism, at least in the circles I participated in. I noticed an intense and rather brittle hatred of Christianity, which struck me as bad faith. Everything got blamed on the Church in a way that seemed Satanic, in the old school sense of Christianity inverted. Indeed, Christ seemed to be the looming deity that people engaged in serious ritual with, even if it were oppositional and adversarial ritual.

I would therefor not be too terribly surprised to see a "return of the repressed," or perhaps better phrased as the "return of the repentant," in which people stumble their way back into the Church they so angrily left a few years ago. The story of the Prodigal Son comes so easily to mind!

[ecosophia]

That makes a lot of sense. I haven't spent much time in the pop Neopagan scene in recent decades, so didn't have that data point.

[smwils1]

Whatever you contemplate, you imitate. Neoconservatism was just the inverse of communism...

The artwork

[(Anonymous)]

JMG,

Is the artwork you put up on the post from the book? It looks very similar to the artwork (that I am very fond of) in an edition of Faust I have, illustrated by a Harry Clarke. Would you happen to know if this is the same artist?

Dean Smith

Re: The artwork

[ecosophia]

No, it's not from the book. Permit me to introduce you to Aubrey Beardsley, one of the premier artists of the Decadent movement at the end of the 19th century. I don't believe Beardsley ever illustrated an edition of Là-Bas, which is unfortunate -- Beardsley and Huysmans were very much birds of a feather.

(Readers of The Weird of Hali: Kingsport may recall that my fictional English translation of "The King in Yellow" by Oscar Wilde was illustrated by Beardsley. Wilde was very much a man of the same era and attitudes...)

[(Anonymous)]

I wish you and Sarah could be friends, you have many things in common.

[ecosophia]

Well, I wish you could understand that there's a difference between criticizing the ideas someone expresses in a piece of writing, on the one hand, and disliking the person, on the other. I suppose we all have our unfulfilled wishes...

[(Anonymous)]

Her use of the term "banefolk" seems to be in reference to her interest in ethnobotany, mycology and herbal medicine:


> Bane is an Old English word over a thousand years old with even more ancient Proto Indo European >origins. Its ancient roots mean “death”, “bringer of death”, and “the devil”. Through its history >“bane” is often used in reference to poisonous and psychoactive plants like henbane and wolfsbane.
>
> The bane folk are those who feel the mysterious draw to these poisonous herbs and work with them >closely in gardening, medicine making, sacred herbalism, and spiritual ceremonies.
>
>baneful-herbs-sarah-anne-lawless
>
>Bane Folk is the creation of Sarah Anne Lawless: artist, author, and maker of flying ointments. ... >Sarah is known for her occult black and white artwork but also hand carves antler, bone, and wood >into original talismans and ritual tools.
>
>Sarah has worked closely with poisonous plants for 15 years now. She began producing flying ointments >in 2010 as historical reconstructions, but a few years later, word of her ointments’ effectiveness >spread and she began selling her nightshade ointments more openly and teaching about baneful herbs at >conferences. Aside from poisonous plants, her life is consumed with foraging, mushroom hunting, and >teaching about local wild edibles and medicinals. Sarah currently lives in a small village of 600 >people in rural Ontario with her mycophile partner Alex and their two little boys. Together they run >the online shop and are wilderness educators under the banner Fern & Fungi.
>
>sarah-anne-lawless
>
> “I am a witch and embrace its full definition. I grow the poisonous plants associated with the >witch’s art for millennia, I make medicines and magic potions, I collect bones, I work rites of folk >magic, and I read tarot cards, tea leaves and palms. I can be found in the woods, under the >moonlight, by a fire, and in forgotten graveyards. You can see healing herbs in my garden, a >soothing elixir to heal a broken heart in my pantry, and me in my kitchen cooking delicious meals for >my loved ones.”

[ecosophia]

Duly noted. I'll remember not to accept an invitation to dine at her place. ;-)

hmphf

[dfr1973]

I noticed how she tries to head off any and all who were there and would say Wicca isn't all what she claims, by saying: "if your group didn't do any of this (sexual abuse) then you weren't hanging out with the cool kids."

Ya know, if the "cool kids" were all she's alleging, then I'm quite relieved to have been in the backwaters east of the Mississippi.

Re: hmphf

[ecosophia]

Yes, I thought that was a nice bit of evasion. I'm still trying to get my head around her insistence that chaos magicians are part of the Neopagan community and therefore subject to criticisms solely applicable to modern American eclectic Wicca...

rewriting our past

[ritaer]

Wow, that's some diatribe, no turn left unstoned. Too much to address here, nor is it the place. But, the sexual abuse--is there sexual abuse in Neopagan religions? Well considering that they are composed of humans--yeah there is/was/will be. Are all sexual relationships within such groups abusive by their very nature? One might as well ask whether the ritual meal of cakes and wine is abusive to diabetics and alcoholics? I mean, how dare you make a religious ritual out of something that could harm some members! I have heard of groups that spring the Great Rite (ritual sex in initiation) on people after years of study with a "do it or get out" attitude. Never actually encountered it though. I _have_ encountered people who never intended to go through with the Great Rite, despite knowing from the beginning of their studies that it was a requirement of the tradition they are studying in. They would string their teachers along and then opt out at the last minute and complain of coercion if challenged. But this doesn't get labeled as abuse although it certainly is an abuse of trust and of the teacher's time.

I am also getting pretty tired of people rewriting their own personal histories. Do twenty year old women get involved with manipulative partners? Yeah--they do it in book clubs, in church groups, in political action groups, college parties, and everywhere else that people meet and mingle. Do young people voluntarily engage in sexual activities that are stupid, self-destructive, not really that much fun, etc. Yeah. Sh*t happens. Just because you regret something does not mean you were abused. Own your past, mistakes and all. Yes, some Pagan leaders have been skeevy pervs, so are some insurance salesmen, volleyball coaches, college professors, etc.

But despite the occasional abuse some of us still believe that the idea of sex as sacred and holy is worth promoting. The actual Great Rite seems to be dying, but I would hate to see the idea of sexual intercourse as a channel to the sacred die out. It is, in my opinion, a necessary attempt to balance the anti-body attitudes of some parts of Christianity. The idea of sex as magically powerful is also well established.

Rita


Rita

Re: rewriting our past

[ecosophia]

Two solid points. First, you're quite right that Wicca's anything but unique, or even unusual, among modern North American subcultures in terms of the things that Lawless has criticized. You find the same things going on in ballet companies, university departments, alternative religions of all kinds, etc., etc. -- thus it's clearly not fair to insist that Neopaganism is uniquely wicked because it also has the same problems.

Second, the mere fact that something has occasionally been abused is hardly an argument for discarding it wholesale. Freedom of speech is routinely abused, and so are democratic elections -- should we discard them for that reason?

[(Anonymous)]

It's straight out of the Cosmic Doctrine, isn't it? Evil is the pull towards the Ring-Chaos and dissolution. If Brian Fischer were to start screeching about the evil evil witches, these folks would likely stick around for another decade. If no one makes a fuss, they'll give a welcome bump to the church-going population.

At least twice down in Phoenix, I had Wiccans tell me they didn't care about the gods and were going to focus on the four elements and/or mindfulness. I kept quiet, as they seemed oddly adamant, but it didn't strike me as a robust religious sensibility.
I figured it was not long before they fell back into the default atheism of my social circle down there.

On unrelated note, I looked up Beardsley. His illustration of Merlin was used as cover art for one of my favorite doom metal albums, by a band called (fittingly enough) Witchcraft. (The Devil does make a prominent appearance in the final track.)

-Cliff

[ecosophia]

True enough. In the cosmos of a counterculture, the Ring-Pass-Not is reabsorption into the mainstream culture, and opposition to a subculture on the part of the mainstream is the one really effective way to prevent that.

[konsectatrix]

Honestly, I'm not seeing anything in her essay that wasn't being talked about 15 years ago? 20 years ago? I remember some violent conflicts that fractured LJ communities over these issues. And the on-again-off-again rebellion against Victorian era and Romantic era attitudes, bad scholarship and New Age nonsense in magic is part of the origin story of most if not all of the modern reconstructionist religions.

"Banefolk", in her context I believe, refers to a focus on plant work, especially with the more maligned "weeds" and toxic plants and their uses, particularly as flying potions, etc. I sampled one out of curiousity to no great affect, but I respect the effort.

It's interesting to me watching women reevaluate their lot in life across all the different spheres they're involved in, in the wake of #metoo.

But I don't think the result will be a run to the not-so-loving arms of Evangelical Christianity, as it's dealing with a parallel series of tremors due to the abuses and hypocritical behavior of various leaders there as well (also, I've lived at that end of the pond for a while--that place is just as hollow and devoid of soul and deity to the point where it might as well be an aethist middle class men's club. I don't know if they genuinely believe their god exists. It's hard to tell.)

The problem with a lot of what's going on is cultural, and the root cultural sicknesses are simply going to get dragged into the next quick fix--which I'm presuming will be animism. I have total faith in Noth Americans being able to screw up animism in spectacular and unforeseen ways, but I also appreciate the fact that the universe is bigger than us. This could be a very interesting development, indeed.

[ecosophia]

Nobody was predicting the Jesus People, either, or for that matter the turn toward Catholicism that became so fashionable among former occultists and Theosophists in early 20th century France. It won't necessarily be any more enduring than pop Neopaganism, and of course you're right that the same problems will be dragged into whatever's next.

I'm curious why you think animism will be the next big thing. I'd guessed that the next fad would be African diaspora religions such as Santeria, on the one hand, and Islam on the other -- but of course I'm quite prepared to be wrong.

Hmm... I can't see a backlash wave, either

[avalonautumn]

I don't know. Despite the problems with Wiccans and neopagans in general, I can't see a huge lot of them heading back for Christianity in their lifetime.

Too, Christian denominations of all kinds, both Protestant and Catholic, are declining in numbers across the board.

Where does one go when the old way of Abrahamic religions won't work, but the new pagan scene disappointed as well?

Myself, I started a group doing our own thing. Exploring as we go, connecting to place, and letting our discoveries lead us. Who knows if it goes anywhere? The search is powerfully engaging. I know I was never Christian-- my father was an avid Atheist and mother Agnostic/New Age. I never understood the appeal of the Middle Eastern origin belief systems to begin with, but attended a few churches of friends or family members in the attempt to figure it all out.

I've known dozens of pagans, Wiccans, and so forth, and only one person -- who originally grew up in the South, ever converted back to Christianity.

For now, I'm content to sit back and wait and see.

Re: Hmm... I can't see a backlash wave, either

[ecosophia]

Duly noted! We'll have to see how it works out.

[(Anonymous)]

So the pendulum swings the other way once again. Not surprising.

Paul Devereux on his web site while discussing the history behind ley lines and their curious evolution from Alfred Watkins' original idea to some of the later outright oddball concepts touted by various New Age groups pointed out that what we call 'New Age' is no longer new, vibrant
or fresh. Instead it has become stiff, stodgy and often outright sclerotic (your favorite word, I believe).

For any religion new or old to be viable for the long term, it is essential it be firmly embedded and participating in the civilization which gave rise to it. Ancient Druidism was an important element of Celtic societies which is why the Roman Empire made it a point to crush it when they came conquering. The void left was filled by later Christianity or Islam but industrialization has since undermined the connections these later creeds had with the societies they're part of.

Wicca never really took off as a religion but remained on the fringe simply rehashing old or manufactured material over and over without any sign (at least to me) of deepening its philosophy or working its way into
modern society to fill the void left by the currently decaying major religions. It didn't help that the dotty Gerald Gardner added his taste for nudity and bondage to the mix which inevitable attracted a number of people with darker appetites along with those genuinely seeking a different path.

It stands to reason the pendulum will eventually swing back yet again, perhaps in about thirty or so years with a renewal of interest in the occult. Whether Wicca experiences a resurgence or some modern reconstruction of Gnosticism makes an appearance is hard to say.

I'll probably be on a walker by then, but hopefully I'll still have enough marbles to watch what crops up.

JLfromNH

[ecosophia]

There's a bit of traditional lore among occultists that claims there's a 72-year cycle, with 36 years in which occult spirituality is active and public and 36 years in which it's private and rather secretive, so you may be on to something.

[(Anonymous)]

I had a friend who gave me a copy of the Celestine Prophecy about 10 years ago when he was all into manifestation thinking, etc. He did pretty well for a while until he got everything he thought he wanted and then his life fell apart. Last time I saw him he was deep into conspiracy theories and starting to thump the bible (calling women whores for wearing revealing clothes, etc) and I thought it was more about wanting to control people, but this is actually a better explanation.

A couple months ago I made a joke regarding the irony of me reading up about Jewish mysticism (his family is Jewish) and how it's almost like we were trading cultural backgrounds. He said something about all that stuff being satanic and hasn't spoken with me since.

That's a good lesson about "keeping silent" I suppose, which will probably become a profoundly more practical policy over the next few years.

[ecosophia]

Fascinating. Yes, this is very much the sort of thing I expect to see!

[smwils1]

Yes, but as you've noted repeatedly, conservative Christianity is imploding precisely b/c of blowback from its own misguided actions of the last 30-40 years (luxurious consumerism coupled w/a spiritual void, playing politics at the expense of the gospel, moral complacency, etc.) How do the two interact?

[ecosophia]

Ah, linear thinking again! Of course the current mainstream is imploding; it always does. The next wave of American Protestantism, currently in the form of the Home Church movement and so-called "red-letter" Christians, is already taking shape. I expect to see it take over a couple of failing denominations in a decade or so, and go from there -- that's the usual route.

[eremon]

And there's already a response to Lawless' piece:
https://medium.com/@amyhale93/on-paganism-fakelore-and-tired-conversations-about-authenticity-10ab0c9537d0?fbclid=IwAR0vrICJFaPZfYFXm7maubIfKPKZfgx8ugh4_MiTswPI5Qf3QLxumu-QGBk

[ecosophia]

And a nice solid scholarly smackdown it is! Thank you for this.

[(Anonymous)]

What comes to mind here is BoysMom's comment on the "800-lb. gorilla" post: "The part of all this that really bothers me is this: when the average non-magical person comes to really believe This Stuff Works they start killing those who use it." So on top of that observation Wiccans are defining THEMSELVES as evil? This could end very badly.

Countercultures rise and fall, part 1

[joanhello]

I was confused by your description of the “demise” of the hippie movement at the end of the 1960s. I quit my job and went looking for the peace-love-and-brotherhood hippie subculture in 1987 and I had no trouble finding it. Sure, the media had consigned it to oblivion, but it seemed to be doing fine without the attention.

Then I remembered a conversation I once had with a woman who had been in the punk rock scene since its early days in the late 1970s. She was complaining about how the scene's popularity had ruined it. This was around 1983. I naively asked how a music scene could be ruined by more people getting into it. She explained that, in the early days, she could go into a punk club in any city in the world and know that she would find kindred spirits, but after The Village Voice and Rolling Stone started writing about it, the clubs filled up with the kinds of people who just go to whatever is trendy because it's trendy. And I know that that exact thing happened to the hippie movement, only more so; it started out with a small post-Bohemian core, then began to attract the attention of the mainstream media just at the time that the Vietnam War draft was instituted, bringing it to the attention of large numbers of young men who didn't want to be conscripted and thus wanted someplace to go and hide without the need for a passport or much of anything in the way of money or connections or even ID. The resulting growth got the movement even more publicity, resulting in the whole thing becoming a very widespread fad, even though the demonization had already begun. Then in 1973 the draft ended and the first oil shock hit. Suddenly the country had bigger things to worry about than lifestyle deviance. The lightweights dropped back into the mainstream; the remaining subculture fragmented, depending on individual preference, with bits going off to environmentalism, the drug culture, serious Hinduism and Buddhism, and, yes, the Jesus People movement, among others, until it was reduced, once again, to a committed core.

So I'm going to propose an expanded subculture progression here:

Re: Countercultures rise and fall, part 2

[joanhello]

In the beginning are the geeks. They build a movement around a thing, or a set of things, that they love and that no one else really cares about. This is all the further most of them will go. (Think of science fiction fandom.) However, once in a while one of them will fit the zeitgeist, if only in the sense of society's appetite for something to be shocked over. Sellers of scandal and titillation know what sells; they will start publicizing this subculture. This will draw a new kind of member, the trend-chasers, who are often out to shock the mainstream, and if it offers other benefits, such as lots of casual sex or safety from the law, so much the better. The movement will grow until enough mainstreamers begin to feel threatened by it. At that point, the demonization starts. It is seldom necessary to invent evils with which to accuse the movement; by this time it will be big enough to have produced its own bad guys, just by the statistical truths of human nature. Those bad guys will be made by the media into the face of the movement. This will be enough that the families of trust fund kids will pull them out of it, which will have a disproportionate effect because these trust fund kids will often have been supporting other participants. Landlords will evict. The cops will get rough. Pretty soon, the majority who don't love the movement enough to suffer for it will return to the mainstream and the movement will go underground for a while. To those who know of it only through the media, it will appear to have vanished.

[ill_made_knight]

late but sort of relevant..sort of
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/christianity-paganism-america.html

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/andrew-sullivan-americas-new-religions.html