Podcast Episode: Paganism In The Church

Pip: If you have ever wondered whether your Christmas tree has a complicated past, cj has been doing the research, and the answer is yes, very.

Mara: This episode follows a four-part series on paganism and the church — how ancient worship practices found their way into Christian tradition, what Scripture says about that, and what it means for how believers worship today.

Pip: Let’s start with how deep those roots actually go.

Church Traditions And Pagan Roots

Mara: The central question running through this series is whether the church has absorbed pagan worship practices so thoroughly that most believers no longer notice — and what the stakes are if that is true.

Pip: The fourth and final installment puts it plainly. After hundreds of years of this mixing, the post reads: “So much so that the majority in the church are so blind to it that when you even point in its direction, they become defensive and irritable. Precisely the devil’s plan.”

Mara: So the argument is not just historical contamination — it is active spiritual vulnerability. If the deception is embedded in familiar tradition, the people most attached to that tradition are least equipped to see it.

Pip: And the series does not start with Christmas. Part one lays the theological foundation first — tracing Satan’s two-front strategy of religion and materialism, and mapping a striking pattern across ancient cultures.

Mara: Right. The opening post lines up mother-and-son deity pairs across Babel, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and Rome — Semiramis and Tammuz, Isis and Horus, Venus and Cupid — and argues that each mirrors the Christian nativity story, with each son dying and being resurrected. The claim is that Satan has been running a counterfeit since Genesis.

Pip: That is a lot of mythology to carry into a December shopping mall.

Mara: Part two is where Christmas specifically comes under examination. It traces December 25th not to Scripture but to Constantine, who set the date in pursuit of unity between Christians and pagans, and to Emperor Aurelian’s earlier “Natalis Solis Invicti” — the festival of the birth of the invincible sun. Saturnalia, Yule, and Egyptian sun-god worship all feed into what became Christmas tradition.

Pip: Part three follows the same thread to Santa Claus — tracing the figure through Saint Nicholas, Sinterklaas, Father Christmas, and Odin. The post is candid that the author once dressed as Santa and staged annual nerf-gun battles, and still does not call that pagan worship. But knowing the lineage changed the calculus.

Mara: The series closes by invoking King Hezekiah from 2 Kings 18, who tore down the high places and even destroyed the bronze serpent Moses had made, because Israel had begun worshiping it. The application is direct: worship that is tainted by pagan cultural influences needs to be torn down, not accommodated.

Pip: The warning is not aimed at people who celebrate Christmas. It is aimed at anyone who has never asked why they celebrate it the way they do.

Mara: And that concern about unexamined worship — about what we carry into our practice without scrutiny — is exactly where this series leaves us.

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Pip: The through-line here is accountability — not condemnation, but the idea that one day we answer for how we worshiped, not just that we did.

Mara: Which makes the question less about tradition and more about attention. Whether we are actually looking at what we are doing and why.

Read Each Post at the links:

Paganism and the Church Part One

Paganism and the Church Part Two

Paganism and the Church Part Three

Paganism and the Church Part Four