Is the West Becoming Pagan Again?
That was the eye-catching headline of Christopher Caldwell’s op-ed in the New York Times today.
I won’t lie. Paganism expert that I am, I clicked on it and read it.
It turned out that Mr. Caldwell was interested in a recent book by French scholar Chantal Delsol that announces the imminent death of Christian culture and the rise of something new which, as far as I could tell, is not paganism.
I found out after a little digging that Professor Delsol’s book is really about left-right politics and the moral despair of rightist Roman Catholics, something Mr. Caldwell was not very good at explaining.
In fact, the headline and the essay together obscure something that is pretty obvious but needs to be said.
Paganism is not coming back, and that’s a good thing.
I mean no disrespect to those who cherish the memory of pre-Christian and non-Christian ancient religions in Europe and the periphery of the Mediterranean Sea. To me, the definition of paganism does not only have to do with what divinity or divinities one worships.
It’s a whole mindset.
If you study the non-Christian ancient world from the perspective of its values, and especially Roman values, you find out that the general theme that emerges is one of brutal patriarchy, despair, and sadism.
The way that the people of the ancient world lived their lives was, to be honest, ugly. Poverty, sickness, enslavement, war, famine, ignorance, all of it was accepted and rampant, and the low life expectancy of people of the time reflects that.
That’s why I couldn’t watch the popular (2005) “Rome” series on HBO. It was too authentic. It really turned my stomach.
There are nice things about the ancient world, of course. We celebrate all those things. Art, architecture, law, democracy—there’s a lot to like.
Greek mythology, too. It became popular, I believe, partly because it could subvert and rearrange the despairing pragmatism of ancient life. It wasn’t revolutionary, but it pointed to a different way.
Christianity was revolutionary, however. It did point to a different, more hopeful way. And it became popular partly because of the exhaustion of the usefulness of the value system that the peoples of the Mediterranean world had lived under for hundreds of years.
That kind of ancient paganism is never coming back, because Christianity, along with a host of other influences, has given birth to an incredibly rich, new value system that is actually asserting a very strong influence on popular culture at the moment.
To be sure, Christians have not lived up to their ideals. That’s clear. I don’t know that any of us can. But the ideals themselves are inspiring and continue to be, especially now, at this moment.
Speaking as a Christian myself and someone who comes from the perspective of ancient times and with a knowledge of what paganism was, I can say that the modern issues of racism, sexism, justice, diversity, inclusion, and even climate change, boil down to the question of what does it mean to love one’s neighbor. In the ancient world, that question was answered usually with the statement that it was important to do good to one’s friends and evil to one’s enemies.
The Christian way is to love one’s neighbor—that is, everyone—as oneself.
I think it is pretty obvious that Christianity, not paganism, aligns with the justice movement currently important in our society.
So have we come to the end of Christian culture, as Professor Delsol believes? Far from it. We might be coming to the end of Roman Catholic Anglo-European white-supremacist heteronormative patriarchal culture, if we’re lucky. But the ideals of Jesus Christ are enjoying quite the ride at the moment.
I realize I am simplifying things pretty severely. But I’ve been thinking about this for a while. And as we go into 2022 with a pandemic still raging and the seams of our ship of state letting in quite a bit of water, I wanted to express that I am more hopeful and optimistic about this world than I have been in a long time.
As a white man, it used to be easy to ignore my neighbor. No more. It’s much better for me, as a Christian white man, to be uncomfortably moved towards loving my neighbor.
That’s why I’m writing THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY, incidentally. It’s not just a project where I want the satisfaction of having a book published. I am really pointing to the reality that Greek myths began from diverse origins and continued to be popular precisely because of their diversity. I want to affirm that multiculturalism is not a leftist political preference, but a dynamic principle of the thriving of humanity.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. I’ll be happy to hear what you have to say on this subject. And I wish you a healthy and prosperous New Year.