Tag Archives: Ronald Hutton

The appalling threat to today's society ... an unguarded flame in an enclosed space.

Slow news day at Nazi propaganda rag the Daily Mail, so they trot out another article about Paganism. Samhain, if you will recall, was twelve days ago … so basically what the Beaverbrook press have done is rehash a lot of what they did about a fortnight ago. It is obvious by the sting in the tail that the article is meant to leave the reader with the impression that Pagans are actively threatening Christianity (the journalist spoke to a supposedly-naughty pagan who conveniently “would not be named.”)

Yet despite trotting out various alleged Christian rentaquote people as well, the article is in fact surprisingly well-balanced – for the Daily Mail it is, attempting to give equal voice to both Pagans and the nay-sayers. They even try to be fair to paganism by asking Ron Hutton for a quote, so this might be a bit of a left-handed compliment after all 😛

IMHO, the Daily Mail is clearly secretly fascinated with something it doesn’t completely understand. I really think that Pagans, instead of reacting to every banal piece the Mail comes up with should instead aspire to remain aloof from its brand of journalism. One can no more expect the Daily Mail to produce a piece wholly uncritical of paganism than one can expect a dog not to bark. In that sense the Daily Mail does not deserve Pagans’ anger or hatred, but rather compassion instead, as one would show compassion to a wayward child. 😛