Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac
By Steven D. Smith
(Eerdmans, 386 pages, $29.99)
Paganism is the answer.
Not to life or well-being or faith or — make no mistake — a pleasant afterlife. But to the confused morass of ethical and moral issues that unsettle and harass our every waking moment, which we usually attribute to progressivism and other aggressive isms.
Paganism explains modern American dysfunction. Call it the unified field theory of civilizational meltdown in early 21st century America.
At least that is the position taken in a 2018 book titled Pagans and Christians in the City, by Steven D. Smith (full disclosure: I work for the publisher of this book). I quote from a review of the work by Laurence Larvik, writing in Philosophical Investigations (April 20, 2023):
Instead of seeing civilizational conflict primarily in terms of Capitalism v. Communism, Left v. Right, Black v. White, Male v. Female, or LGBTQ+ v. Straight, Professor Smith sees the crisis resulting from a clash of civilizations between Paganism and Christianity. It was going on when he wrote the book, as it was going on in the 1960s, 1940s, 1920s, and well before.… Viewing current events through this lens, movements like Transgenderism begin to make sense — as a return to a form of Pagan Values predominant before the spread of Christianity.
Smith debunks a thesis promulgated early last century by sociologist Max Weber and further popularized in the 1960s by Peter Berger (who later recanted), termed “secularization theory.” This hypothesis holds that civilizations, as they grow more sophisticated, tend to secularize. Religion, formidable during the early years of a civilization, loses cultural and social heft and is marginalized as personal belief, sidelined from the “worldly” affairs of the polis.
The clash in 21st-century America, though, is not one pitting the secular against the religious but a struggle between religiosities. Writes Smith, “The parties and factions on all sides of the culture wars exhibit qualities standardly associated with ‘religion’: an uncompromising zeal or passion, a tendency to view issues in ‘good versus evil’ or ‘light versus darkness’ terms, an eagerness to demonize opponents.”
Even atheists and the militantly anti-religious espouse truth claims and fundamental beliefs that are inherently religious. The current scene consists simply of two religions fighting for cultural supremacy: one pagan, one Christian (or at least monotheistic); one immanentist, one transcendental.
Don’t look, however, for the paganism of old in Smith’s book, even though that paganism is in ascendancy and prominent enough to warrant a lengthy exploration in Commentary magazine. It has grown from 8,000 adherents in 1990, to 340,000 in 2008, to currently “about 1.5 million Americans professing an array of pagan persuasions, from Wicca to the Viking lore,” writes Liel Leibovitz. Indeed, as reported by The American Spectator’s Ellie Gardey, the lingua franca theologica at one mainline seminary seems to be just this sort of paganism.
But Smith is not talking about sacrificing white bulls to Zeus, or about the Burning Man Festival, or even about a nice, quiet drumming circle around ye olde bonfire. “The pagan orientation,” Smith says, is “the commitment to the immanent sacred.” This orientation “beatifies and sacralizes the goods of this world.”
Smith begins his examination in ancient Rome. The Romans, contrary to popular opinion, were intensely religious. The gods were essential to society and state. “In this perspective, the gods were real, and powerful, and prone to intervene for good or ill in the affairs of mortals.” The pagan epics — the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid — place the fate of their characters in the hands of the gods. As Cicero suggested, “the sense of the holy” was maintained by worship of the gods; without this, he writes, “Our lives become fraught with disturbance and great chaos.” And while not all in the populus bought wholly into the mythical elements — which the philosophers, the writers, sought to downplay anyway — all, common and elite alike, respected the ceremonies and festivals, and participated in them.
The Romans were also exemplars of pluralism, celebrating the inclusion into their society of gods other than their own. Except for the God of one group: Christians. Because adherents of the young faith demanded worship of only one God and repudiated the culturally approved pagan ceremonies, they quickly became anathema to the Roman hierarchy. Rome was cool with new gods in the pantheon, but adherents to those new gods had to bend the knee to the old ones too.
This, of course, became fatal to Christians in the empire. In numerous periods in the first three centuries of the church — sometimes stretching for decades — they were offered the stark choice of recanting their religious beliefs or losing their lives. Why that happened is one of the more interesting aspects of Smith’s book, and the one that seems directly applicable to today’s culture wars.
Although overcome when Christianity was established as the state religion in the fourth century, paganism was never eradicated and continued in a vestigial state for centuries, through the Middle Ages and even the Enlightenment.
Its present manifestation, embraced largely by the Left, centers on a sacred that exists “in this world and this life.” While Christians have never denied the goodness of this world, they insist that its goodness derives from a transcendent source, God; the immanent good is not central. The culture war we see today in America, contends Smith, pits against each other immanent and transcendent accounts of goodness, value, and meaning.
Smith explores this dynamic via recent American legal activity in two areas: sex-based contention (primarily wedding-vendor conflicts) and First Amendment freedoms.
First, the sex. In ancient Rome, sex was presumed to be a necessary and healthful enterprise — men were encouraged to do it, and that they did, with any and all (including their wives, mainly for purposes of procreation); women, not so much, although the respectable ones played by the rules of a one-way monogamy (and found it prohibitive not to). The ubiquity of erotic imagery — paintings, mosaics, frescoes — in Roman ruins underlines the importance of sex in Roman society.
The Christian view of sex hit Rome as radical, indeed incomprehensible. Monogamous relations between spouses (no double standard); condemnation of homosexuality and pederasty; discouragement and regulation of prostitution; commendation, in some quarters, of celibacy — all were antithetical to the Roman mind. Moreover, Christians embraced a whole new set of sexual rules in direct conflict with Roman mores. Writes Smith, “In its underlying logic, Christian sexual morality did not rely on the assumptions that informed Roman attitudes and practices, but instead was grounded in an entirely different set of premises.”
This took direct aim at the Roman sexual system, and more ominously, at the pagan religiosity on which Rome was founded. The Christian theology threatened to blow the whole immanentist thing up.
In today’s America, the theme is the same but the threat is reversed. Instead of the new ethic undermining the old, as in Rome, the old, now on the outside, discredited and dangerous, threatens the new.
Thanks to a sexual revolution initiated in the ’60s and ’70s and still going strong, a conservative sexual regimen — unchallenged and universally accepted for decades — unspooled into a liberated sexual ethic that is now triumphant. The Christian theology — heterosexuality the norm, one man–one woman marriage the sole sanctified relationship — casts judgment on the libertine sexual ethic, even by its silence and, lately, by its desire to coexist in peace, apart from the tempest.
The Left, having thrown down the temple of Christian purity, has no intention of seeing stone stacked upon stone once again. They will brook no such challenge. Like the Roman analogue, any noncompliance with the newly established sexual regime threatens to take down their hard-fought sybaritic empire.
Those monitoring the wedding-vendor controversies can attest to this. One cannot help but notice the tenacity of same-sex couples seeking wedding services from vendors they vehemently disagree with. The litigants against bakers, florists, website designers, photographers, and marriage counselors who hold to traditional biblical marriage beliefs and, based on those, refuse service to same-sex customers or clients insist on pursuing services from those vendors — to the point of taking them to court — even though they have myriad alternate, nearby options, from vendors who are totally onboard with their sexual preferences.
One has to ask why. Why would same-sex couples seek the services of those who disagree so wholeheartedly with their lifestyle? Especially when at close hand were dozens of vendors who unreservedly endorsed their marriage?
Writes Smith, “The injury … comes from the message implicit or perhaps explicit in the denial of services; the injury is the affront to the ‘dignity’ of the same-sex would-be customers or clients.” The refusal casts them as “sinners.” Continues Smith, “Ultimately, in fact, it is not merely the overt expression of the offending view that inflicts injury, but rather the fact that someone holds the offending view and is known to hold it.”
It is understandable why activists and litigants would want to drive overtly Christian employers and professionals out of the public square and the public marketplace. Their goods and services may or may not be needed, but their message is a standing affront to dignity, and their presence is an irritant and an insult to the kind of community to which modern progressive pagans aspire.
The other front of the pagan assault in the culture war deals with public religious symbolism. And under attack, primarily, is the Constitution’s Establishment Clause.
Writes Smith, “We have observed a shift in American law from a legal regime consonant with the long-standing civil religion … that was Christian or at least biblical in character … toward a regime more resonant with an immanent religiosity or, as [T. S.] Eliot put it, ‘modern paganism.’”
That paganism seeks to neuter public messages and symbols about religion that earlier generations deemed — and many in the current generation deem — entirely acceptable, even laudable. We have lived through decades of assaults on crèches and crosses and Ten Commandment displays on government property, as the Left attempts to curtail the free practice of religion, which it sees as a challenge to immanentist hegemony.
*****
Whether in sexual ethics or the law, the craziness of our current cultural crisis begs for analysis. While liberal Christians tend to anoint the prevailing culture, however whacky it grows, as God ordained, and place themselves steadfastly “on the right side of history” in the process, conservatives are forever trying to figure out why everything they hold dear keeps getting trashed.
Steven D. Smith’s book provides a plausible answer.
