Is the West Post-Christian, Secular, or Neo-Pagan?
Rethinking the Map of Western Spirituality
I’ve finished reading Graham Tomlin’s interesting piece Are We Secular, Christian or Pagan which is stimulated by the imagery and clips from the Paris Olympics.
Tomlin provides examples of writers who see political liberalism as sowing the seeds of its own destruction because it refuses to make moral judgments which leads to a vacuum that is filled with new expressions of the old pagan gods. The danger is a “pagan totalitarianism” that takes over from a post-Christian society. (See my 7 Myths about Paganism!).
Tomlin follows Peter Gay in claiming that the Renaissance, and thus modernity, was not the birth of a rational new age, rather, it was the rebirth of the old pagan one.
Furthermore, paganism was pluralistic, you could have as many gods as you liked. Plus, the gods were not powers outside the world, but the mightiest forces within it. And while we do not have temples to Zeus, Jupiter, Aphrodite, Diana, Hermes, and others, we have a culture that is absorbed with status, power, wealth, and sex. Things that have become gods because they are worshipped and all-consuming.
There are two books that I think confirm Tomlin’s observations. First, Anthony Kronman’s Confessions of a Born Again Pagan, which is about how the head of Yale’s law school rediscovered paganism in a new and fresh way. I’ve also reviewed Steve Smith’s Pagans & Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac which argues that paganism hid, but it never really went away.
You only have to read/watch Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief to know that the pagan gods have a certain dramatic quality with attractive features. Plus, I hear in France that there is a big surge of new age, witchcraft, and alternative spiritualities.
There are parts of Western culture that do look like paganism 2.0. Nero was involved in two gay marriages; Roman culture made sex a commodity, about power and lust, and not about love; infanticide was widely practiced; paganism was pluralistic but not tolerant of others.
In fact, consider this advice that Augustus was given as a young man:
“You should not only worship the divine everywhere and in every way in accordance with our ancestral traditions, but also force all others to honor it. Those who attempt to distort our religion with strange rites you should hate and punish, not only for the sake of the gods … but also because such people, by bringing in new divinities, persuade many folks to adopt foreign practices, which lead to conspiracies, revolts, and factions, which are entirely unsuitable for a monarch” (Dio Cassius, Hist. Rom. 52.36.1-2).
That said, I think it’s more complicated than whether we are (a) Christian; (b) Secular; or (c) Pagan. I believe there is a sense in which we are all three!
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First, I think our countries are secular in the two senses that Rowan Williams expresses. First, there is a procedural secularism that allows all religions to exist without coercion, or harm, as part of a “live and let live” ethos. But sometimes secularism has a programmatic or coercive force so that religion is reduced, redefined, and removed to a matter of interior mental existence. It is the more aggressive variety of secularity that we need to combat.
Second, yes, there are elements of our culture that do seem neo-pagan. It is not the popularity of pagan myths because Western civilization has always been infatuated with Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Virgile, Horace, Seneca, Cicero, and the classical world of antiquity. We are very much children of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem! However, most of the culture-war disputes we encounter are over sex and death, which are very much pagan themes. Yes, some of this is about expressive individualism, respecting agency, a result of a society where right and wrong are measured in a pleasure/pain dichotomy and not in duties, virtues, common goods, or piety. Yet, as long as sex is vaguely consensual, almost anything goes; an orgiastic feast is available to anyone who can find willing partners. The unbridled pursuit of lust stands in stark contrast to an institution like the church that has championed fidelity, chastity, and even celibacy. We blaspheme the sex god more than anyone else. Precisely why the nastiest of secularists would relish turning a church into either a brothel or a studio to make gay porn. The religious adage of a world where sex is worshipped is: “There is no god but sex and orgasm is her prophet.”
It reminds me of the exhortation in 1 Peter 4:3-4:
For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry. They are surprised that you do not join them in their reckless, wild living, and they heap abuse on you.
Third, there is a sense in which the world is still very Christian. It was G.K. Chesterton who said “The world has gone made with Christian ideas.” Wokeness has been considered a form of “hyper-Christianity” as it focuses on victims, power inequalities, and justice, but pursues it in a secularized and ultimately incoherent way. Instead of the equality of all human beings, we have a moral hierarchy of identities. Also, for all the rhetoric of tolerance, diversity, and inclusion, there is a puritanical need to cancel, humiliate, mock, intimidate, or even hurt anyone who is not the most progressive person in the room. Precisely why I changed my mind on woke!
What do you think?
It seems to me that Smith's contribution, pointing out that paganism never went away, is significant (although I don't quite make the distinction he did... Christianity - particularly in the incarnation - is both transcendent and immanent). Like Voldemort, paganism hid in the shadows, inhabiting spaces subversively, but secularism and the crumbling of Christendom have allowed an avenue for its return to prominence in the west. Viola also contributes to this conversation, by noting the places where pagan practices were syncretized with Christian liturgies over the centuries.
It seems to me this is what Paul was correcting in 1 Corinthians 12-13, where he basically tells the churches there to stop trying to worship Jesus using the same excitable methods and fervent rituals they had previously performed in their attempts to summon the presence of their pagan gods. Paul goes so far as to say it's a slap in the face to Jesus when churches attempt this.
One other factor that comes into play is that if the west is truly returning to the pagan pluralities of the Roman era, then that means Jesus' church is, perhaps truly for the first time since the 4th century, back in an apostolic age, where Christianity no longer casts the single, compelling vision and organizing framework for the west. Which to me, would indicate a need to rediscover the apostles' teaching in a fresh way and shape our churches and networks around it.
I think we are primarily secular in the U.S. and in most developed countries. But I think our “minority” (by %’s) Christianity is also mixed with either or both secularism and paganism. We serve in the Amazon with indigenous peoples, whey they become Christ-followers they renounce their paganism, although it is deeply embedded in their cultural worldview.