I read it hoping it would have some funny stuff. It didn't. It was just bad sentence after bad sentence and in the second half of the article Brooks whines that more Americans should be religious Christians and he praises the "Judeo-Christian ethos".
Something’s going on in our culture. The decline of religious participation, which was so rapid between 2010 and 2020, seems to have stopped. There has been a relative surge in religious interest among young men. According to research by the evangelical Christian polling group Barna, 66 percent of Americans say they have made a personal commitment to Jesus — a 12-percentage-point jump since 2021.
There are a lot of pagans in Ukraine too and there are Christians who like using pagan runes.
I'd bet money that Brooks thinks he's oh so clever by starting his column on a pagan theme before seguing into how the US should be more religious and in particular more Christian. In fact - maybe he's got a "Paganism" book in the pipeline.