The Rise of Metropolitan Paganism
Modern cities show how we still create gods from places and symbols.
Posted June 29, 2025 | Reviewed by Devon Frye
Walk through any major city in Europe or North America, and you’ll see that virtually every metropolis is pantheistic. Rarely is any religion dominant, but many are existing together. Temples, mosques, churches, synagogues, meditation centres, breathwork clinics, and yoga studios all occupy the same city.
In a sense, most cities have become pantheistic. When you live in these cities, generally the gods are many and varied, and you can take your pick, if you haven’t already. If you’re particularly enterprising or self-confident, you can invent your own. Many people choose none at all, but sample at least a few.
Interestingly, new idols and pilgrimage sites often emerge not from religious doctrine but from shared perceptions, shaped by hyperlocal culture, media attention , and collective emotion . This is a kind of metropolitan paganism where cultural and community meaning gets built around urban landmarks or reimagined national symbols. These aren’t sacred by tradition, but ordinary places can be quickly elevated into sites of significance through collective attention and emotional investment.
The Evolution of Belief
Religions evolve gradually and sometimes violently, like languages or technologies, but personal beliefs and those in small groups can evolve and spring up much faster. Institutions are often slow to adapt, but individuals are relatively quicker. People will find meaning wherever they can, often in ways that are personal, symbolic, and outside the boundaries of formal social or political rules.
Ancient Mediterranean cities were like our modern pantheistic metropolises. While a city might have its patron god, households often maintained their own personal shrines. Conquering armies would plunder not just gold but gods, taking statues and idols home as trophies, believing their military victory won the favour of new gods that they claimed as their own.
Then, as now, cities had room for many gods. You could pick deities for respectable prayers or join any number of fringe cults. Today’s gods may look different, but they still revolve around familiar human needs like belonging, desire, safety, fear , love, and control.
Many religions flirt with pantheism, even those that officially don’t. The Catholic Church, famously monotheistic, has its own pantheon of patron saints, angels, and cults of the Virgin Mary that sometimes outshine the main character. There are figures that can be called on to help with everything from illness and marriage to safe travel and lost keys. The impulse is always there.
The desire to link the material with the spiritual hasn’t gone away. People still turn to whatever tools are available, from decks of cards to patterns in the stars, for help trying to figure out how their own emotions and behaviour connect to the grander patterns of the universe. Whether it’s love, work, travel, or health, we look for patterns and symbols that make our choices feel part of something larger and more meaningful.
Modern Shrines and Rituals
Even in officially secular societies, we’re still building shrines everywhere. Some really are churches and cathedrals and officially sanctioned places of worship with preachers and pastors, bells and smells, or tote bags and scented candles.
Others are emergent and very urban shrines.
Take Grenfell Tower in London. In June 2017, a fire broke out in the 24-story public housing block, killing 72 people. The blaze was made worse by flammable cladding, long-ignored safety concerns, and systemic neglect, all of which turned a local tragedy into a national reckoning.
In the years since, Grenfell has come to be a nearly religious symbol in the national, but particularly in the local consciousness. It stands for inequality, state failure, and the dignity of a grieving community. Each year, people gather for memorials. The tower, left standing for years, covered in a white shroud, has very much become a spiritual monument that represents many things to many different people. Many oppose its demolition because it is seen to represent far more than the building; it has come to embody something sacred, fundamentally unresolved, and that projects people's hopes and fears onto the skyline.
Then there’s the Sycamore Gap tree, famously situated beside Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. In 2023, it was cut down in what appeared to be an act of vandalism. Before that, it was a picturesque landmark that was a backdrop for postcards and Instagram , but also a living connection to history and landscape.
Once felled, the public reaction was swift and almost religious: mourning, outrage, legal proceedings, calls for restoration. Artworks were made from the wood. People laid flowers. Other trees were planted in honour of the fallen.
What had been a photogenic and historical tree became a kind of martyr, and its destruction elevated it into a national myth. During Tree Week in 2024, 49 ‘Trees of Hope’ (saplings grown from the original tree’s seeds) were bestowed on carefully chosen recipients across the UK, each one planted as a living relic.
Meaning from Destruction
Across cultures and centuries, religious significance often arises through destruction, sacrifice, or loss. Saints become saints through suffering. Sacred places are frequently sites of death or disaster. When something is lost or violently transformed, it becomes easier to see it as transcending its material form. The burned tower, the felled tree become symbols because their destruction forces attention, grief, and meaning to coalesce.
Destruction, paradoxically, can be what elevates the ordinary into the symbolic. In the absence of a clear narrative, people create one. And often, those narratives take the shape of ritual, pilgrimage, or a kind of secular sainthood.
The Psychology of Sacred Symbols
Rituals, symbols, and shared responses to loss help people process grief, find connection, and make sense of chaos. Psychologically, these are defense mechanisms : ways to manage distress. When used effectively, they’re adaptive: a form of sublimation that turns pain into meaning.
But they can also become counterproductive, where the symbol overshadows what it represents. Often, rituals and pilgrimage sites offer some stability for people and communities when larger systems fail.
There certainly seems to be a rise in paganism, and some has a distinctly metropolitan and urban style. It likely finds a different form in cityscapes that have a different connection to the past than natural or historical landmarks.
Freud saw religion as a universal neurosis . Psychology as a scientific discipline has long struggled with belief, spirituality and religion, especially when it doesn’t fit neatly into empirical or material boxes. And yet shrines emerge everywhere, often in unlikely forms.
Cline, E. H. (2014). 1177 B.C.: The year civilization collapsed . Princeton University Press.
Holland, T. (2019). Dominion: How the Christian revolution remade the world . Basic Books.
McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the Western world . Yale University Press.
Ruskin, J. (1851-1853). The stones of Venice (3 vols.). Smith, Elder and Co.
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Ian MacRae is an independent researcher who focuses on work, personality, and emerging digital technologies.
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