From Christianity Back To Paganism

Here is another (rough) chapter from my book project, this time shedding light on my frequent use of the word "pagan" or "neo-pagan" to describe modern Western man. Congratulations if you can make it through the whole thing, and enjoy.

Christianity has served as the defining and unifying feature of Western civilization since the latter days of the Roman Empire. Though Christianity has changed in multiple ways since then, at its core resides the belief that God dwelt among us in the flesh and accepted earthly death in order to achieve and provide everlasting life. No one can understand Western civilization, or America, without also understanding this.

While it is not in vogue to say so, America began as a Christian nation, specifically a Protestant one. Denouncing the Catholic Church as having grown worldly, extravagant, and corrupt, Protestants declared their independence in the sixteenth century and stripped the faith to its essentials. The Bible contained the unvarnished word of God accessible to all, without need for clerical intermediaries. Iconography, pageantry, and even architecture were spurned (and often destroyed) as distracting the mind from the things of God and toward the things of man. So uncompromising and severe was the Protestant spirit that it did not rest on its laurels upon achieving doctrinal independence. Protestants continued to fight against lingering signs of Catholicism around them, notably within the Church of England. Facing persecution, the most devout Protestants soon decided that the only way they could truly practice their faith was to flee a corrupt society and establish a godly one in the New World. Against all odds they did it, crossing an ocean and scratching out an existence in an alien and hostile land. Their grit and drive for independence achieved ultimate victory in their descendants’ revolution against the British Crown, completing the independence of the English-speaking New World from the Old and paving the way for a bold experiment in human affairs: individual freedom nourished by individual responsibility. (Latin America, unfortunately, would come to represent an extension of the Old World rather than a repudiation of it.) The American political system was the natural continuation of the Protestant’s unquenchable thirst for a righteous and self-guided life, made plain by the Declaration of Independence when stating that we are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights, and that no government may dishonor them. While it’s true that the Constitution established a secular form of government, the nation to be governed was thoroughly Protestant and undertook the democratic experiment as an expression of the Protestant character. It is no accident that as Protestant faith and culture have withered, so have the institutions and liberties once sustained by them.

But whatever distinctions might separate Protestantism from Catholicism, these pale in comparison to the seismic rift between Christianity and what preceded it. This was an even greater revolution in human affairs, vital to almost everything we take for granted today but often fail to remember or appreciate. What might seem ancient history is in fact crucial to current events because paganism is re-asserting itself, threatening to burn the very civilization built on its ashes.

Most people imagine ancient paganism as merely the worship of nature and a pantheon of multiple gods. While paganism certainly incorporated these elements, it signified much more, a mindset hostile to the Christian conception of life and our place in the universe.

The pagan existed entirely in a world of flesh and matter. Reality consisted solely of what is seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched, with death representing a bleak end (unless one achieved sufficient exploits to be remembered among the living). Pagan gods, though immortal, were physical and displayed human foibles such as lust, deceit, and avarice, all of which made it rather easy for a Roman emperor such as Caligula to declare himself one. Their strength and beauty made the gods noble despite their pettiness; strength and beauty connoted good, while weakness and ugliness connoted evil. There being nothing beyond what is perceived, questions of truth and justice were just those: questions, not reality. Pontius Pilate’s famous words to Jesus – “What is truth?” – were mockery rather than inquiry. Right and wrong were inherently meaningless to the pagan; there were winners and losers, powerful and weak, gods and humans. The rich and powerful were, by their very status, righteous. Slavery struck the pagan as a natural arrangement whereby the inferior served the superior. The pagan was savage in warfare, mercy being a sign of weakness. Personality (how others perceive you) counted for more than character (what you carry within you). The individual existed only in relation to society, whose governing mechanisms were totalitarian and permeated daily life. Faith consisted of elaborate rituals and open displays of respect for the gods; being perceptive rather than reflective, pagans viewed the early Christians as “atheists” for refusing to genuflect before statues and idols, failing to grasp the transcendental nature of their beliefs.

In summary, the pagan believed that might makes right and that the ends justify the means.

Christianity differs from paganism as day from night. Belief in a single God is an obvious feature shared with Judaism, but Christianity goes further in its rupture from the pagan outlook. Pagans as well as the God of the Old Testament prized earthly victory; in contrast, Jesus Christ and the God of the New Testament bring victory over and above the Earth. The Earth is not the sum total of existence, rather a pale imitation of the ideal world whose spark we all carry within us. Being aware of the ideal, we have a duty to exercise our free will to embrace it and resist our lower, earthly appetites as manifested in sin. Earthly fortunes are completely irrelevant to truth and righteousness. There is one eternal right and one wrong, neither of which depends on earthly status or circumstance. What is within us makes us noble and righteous, not how strong, wealthy, or esteemed we might be. A prince may be wrong while a pauper may be right. By the same measure, an entire empire may be wrong while a destitute carpenter may be right. This is the most liberating concept ever to gain hold in human affairs: the acknowledgment of a universal standard that all are equally accountable to uphold. From the pagan perspective, Jesus was a loser because he meekly surrendered to be tortured and crucified, leaving the Romans in control of earthly affairs. The pagan cannot grasp that Jesus’ victory was spiritual, and thus far greater.

Jesus demonstrated that it is better to sacrifice life in the service of truth, than to sacrifice truth in the service of life. 

By doing this we achieve a higher form of life that is everlasting, as Jesus’ resurrection illustrated. This simple lesson was the key to a new world where might does not make right, but rather where everyone is endowed with a soul and possesses fundamental rights that cannot be disregarded by anyone, high or low.

Other notable aspects of Christianity abound. Mercy and forgiveness show strength, not weakness. To be worldly is degrading; to be in the world, but not of it, is ennobling. Neither displays of piety, strict adherence to rituals, nor good works can make you righteous if, internally, you are vile. The health of your body has no bearing on the health of your soul. The ends do not justify the means. And there are fates far worse than death.

These fundamental notions have informed Western civilization – once known as Christendom – and powered its astonishing success. It is precisely because Western man fixed his gaze beyond the Earth that he proved so capable of mastering it. Rather than squeeze as much personal utility as possible out of a short life, he took the long view and sought to better himself in preparation for the afterlife, practicing virtues such as chastity, fidelity, patience, frugality, mercy, and overall self-restraint. Rather than be trapped in a world of the senses, he unlocked his mind to pursue the unseen and the ideal in all things, revealing invisible secrets of life and the universe. And rather than leave earthly authorities with absolute power to declare what is right and true with every passing season, he undertook a bold mission to understand and uphold what is right and true, demanding that those with authority submit to them. All of these beliefs translate into sound economics, scientific inquiry, limited government, the rule of law, and beauty. The cathedrals, sculptures, songs, paintings, drama, and literature inspired by the Christian mind are exquisite and timeless because they attempt to capture that timeless, ideal world where the Christian yearns to return to. “Why is the heart of a Christian heavy?” queried St. Augustine. “Because he is a pilgrim, and longs for his country.” The pagan smugly basks in the world; the Christian humbly strives to transcend it and, paradoxically, has achieved greater success than any pagan of the ancient world could imagine.

Modern American life has grown increasingly alienated from, and hostile to, Christianity. This is largely the product of scientific and technological wonders that entice us to believe that few mysteries remain and that we can create heaven here on Earth. Though this is often touted as secularism, in truth it signals a return to the worldly and materialistic perspective of pagans, a dynamic that reaches far beyond those particular groups who identify themselves as such.

The revolt against Christianity takes multiple forms, some apparent and others subtle.

On the apparent side, the entire weight of the law and popular culture has been brought to bear against the public expression of Christianity. In a string of decisions beginning in the 1940s, the United States Supreme Court set to building a “wall of separation” between church and state even though nothing in the Constitution requires it. The First Amendment prohibits only Congress from making laws establishing a religion; the States are left free to handle religion however their citizens see fit, and several States went so far as to support official churches for decades after the Constitution’s adoption. As with much of the Bill of Rights, the Court has taken the Fourteenth Amendment – enacted after the Civil War to prohibit States from depriving ex-slaves and their descendants of equal protection or due process of law – and turned it into a weapon for perpetually reviewing and vetoing state laws of which the political class disapproves. Neither the language nor the history of the Fourteenth Amendment calls for such an inversion of the constitutional order, and the framers of that Amendment would become physically sick if they bore witness to how the courts have eviscerated Christianity and American life in their names. It is virtually impossible to say a prayer, wear a cross, display a nativity scene, or even mention Jesus in the public square without inviting a petulant and expensive lawsuit. More and more often the private decisions in regard to hiring, firing, and leasing are coming under attack if founded on religious sentiment. The effects of this scorched-earth campaign are particularly damaging in public schools, where America’s traditions and heritage are bleached of any religious sentiment, thereby alienating new generations from the past and destroying cultural continuity. Piling onto the destruction is “pop” culture, which wages a relentless war against Christians by mocking and insulting them at every turn. Most Americans now come of age almost entirely ignorant of the crucial role that Christianity plays in Western civilization and their own country’s founding; to the extent they are aware of Christianity, such awareness consists of fear and loathing. Anyone who lives his life strictly according to Christianity, and especially anyone who makes value judgments or life choices on that basis, is now a pariah.

Christianity faces another apparent threat no less sinister than its avowed enemies, and perhaps even more so: its practitioners. Having discarded the demanding message to resist this world and strive for the perfection of the next, modern Christians gorge on a saccharine recipe for making themselves at home in the world and deriving maximum benefit from it.

With the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s the Catholic Church signaled an accelerated and unmistakable preoccupation with worldly affairs, reforming the Church to water down its doctrines and make them more palatable to modern, secular tastes. The “cafeteria Catholics” of the United States profess full faith yet dabble in contraception, abortion, fornication, divorce, or any number of other activities that clearly deviate from Church doctrine. Doubling down on these trends, the current Pope has sought and achieved worldly acclaim by denouncing economic freedom, calling for the forcible re-distribution of wealth, and suggesting that the Church takes no position on those who lead a homosexual lifestyle. In so doing, he has rebuked the Ten Commandments and endorsed the sin of avarice to elevate man’s material condition over his spiritual one, and he also has implicitly endorsed a lifestyle that the Church always has viewed as spiritual poison. In a stunning display of capitulation to worldly trends, the University of Notre Dame (a nominally Catholic institution) refused to recognize a student group that identified itself as favoring traditional marriage, i.e., the only kind recognized since the Church’s founding.

As for Protestants – whose refusal to compromise with the world once motivated them to break with the Catholic Church and strike out across oceans and continents – they have grown as cozy with the world as pigs in slop. Points of doctrine have been compromised to maintain popular appeal, again whether it’s fornication, abortion, homosexuality, divorce, or more and more frequently, female pastors. Protestant “mega-churches” draw thousands of members to hear that God loves them no matter what they think or do. Gone are the sternness and simplicity of Protestantism's early days, which once reminded believers of their fallen nature and encouraged them to ignore their surroundings in order to focus on the transcendent. Perhaps the epitome of modern American “worship” is Saddleback Church, a lavish religious theme park that entices the senses with every modern contrivance and guarantees that nobody attending will experience a moment of self-criticism or contemplation. The overt goal is to make people comfortable and happy, not to call them to account or help them understand that pain is an inextricable feature of earthly existence. Rick Warren, who heads the church, shares Pope Francis’s penchant for getting along in the world and fixating on man’s material condition, and he has improved his own quite considerably. This refusal to denounce or even grapple with sin might feed the body, but it leaves the soul starving. And the only people whom modern American Christianity routinely denounces are its founders, namely heterosexual men. Fearful of criticizing women, pastors blame every relationship failure on men, re-inventing Genesis to portray Eve as free of sin or of responsibility for her actions. Divorce now supposedly results from the husband’s sinful refusal to lead his wife, but never from the wife’s sinful refusal to submit to her husband. Men are browbeaten to improve themselves and marry regardless of women's suitability for marriage, while women are never instructed to keep themselves suitable.

Christianity is therefore under assault from enemies within and without. But the return to paganism is far broader and deeper, an entire sense of life better suited to the days before Christ. This sense wears a thousand faces but is unified in its insistence that the here and now is all that matters.

Modern man believes himself too sophisticated for God, but in fact he is too primitive. A renewed pantheon of physical gods captivates the senses and has replaced the transcendent God who captivated the soul. Now soulless, man embraces tangible gods such as celebrities, politicians, scientists, and superheroes.

Celebrities such as musicians, actors, and professional athletes lead a godlike existence of rapt attention, if not outright worship, from the mundanes who crave to be in their midst. The widespread hunger for their wealth and fame bespeaks a profound fear that there is no hereafter, and that only through earthly exploits and notoriety can one achieve significance or even meaning. This was the same perspective shared by the ancients. In the eyes of God, you are unique and eternal because you have a soul. In the eyes of the renewed pagan, you are unique and eternal if you have admirers or, in Internet parlance, “followers.”

Politicians also have achieved godlike status because of a distorted social compact that now charges government with preserving life at all costs, even at the expense of liberty and justice. This compact manifests most clearly in the ritual plunder by the welfare state, which regards theft as honorable if done to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, or care for the sick. Such crimes are no less offensive if done pursuant to a vote, and likely even more so. Especially offensive is when the perpetrators of these crimes invoke Christ as their guide, for Christ instructed how to live through the exercise of your free will – not how to force others to live through demolishing theirs. Socialism grows all the more attractive to a spiritually-impoverished people who find it praiseworthy that government shreds principles to rescue the flesh, and the supreme irony is that the end result is both spiritual and material poverty. Even short of socialism, the regulations that pervade all aspects of our lives in the vain quest to preserve life accomplish only the destruction of it in any meaningful sense. A life worth living is free and fraught with danger, each of us tasked with taking responsibility for his choices; modern life is slavish and prophylactic, with the politician assuming responsibility for everything under the sun. The obscene power and worship surrounding the modern presidency in particular represents a rebuke to every noble Christian impulse that once animated American life, a life where the president was a distant prefect rather than a ubiquitous Olympian. This phenomenon likely has its roots in the Civil War, which baptized in blood the new religion whereby a president is “great” only insofar as he destroys life, liberty, and property in the name of a lofty objective. Presidents today live beyond the reach of law and increasingly implement their will through unilateral action, with no pretense of constitutional process. But such tyranny gratifies modern pagans, who crave a supreme leader with the ability to take swift and decisive action unhindered by laws or principles. Indeed, most people today prefer to be ruled by gods, than to rule themselves in accordance with God.

And of course there are scientists, the priestly class whose supposed mastery of the physical world makes them the final authority on all issues of importance. But a serious problem with modern science is that it has abandoned the spirit of inquiry, innovation, or the earnest and objective pursuit of facts. Such values are transcendent by their very nature, and modern scientists lack transcendence as much as everyone else, falling into a dogmatism that prizes consensus over inquiry; government funding over market risk; and peer review over original thought. Legitimate questions surrounding anthropogenic global warming, infant vaccination, the theory of evolution, racial and sexual distinctions, DDT, and a host of other subjects are deemed closed to all analysis or discussion. Another serious problem with modern science is its pretension of disproving religious questions or rendering them unimportant. Science can tell us what atoms are made of, not why. Science can tell us what is lethal, not when it is just to kill. Science can tell us how the human fetus grows, not whether or when it is just to abort it. Despite this clear distinction between questions of fact and questions of ultimate truth, scientists increasingly presume to tell us what public policies to adopt and what personal beliefs to espouse. This reflects yet again a pagan view that all things great and small may be reduced to matter, defying the existence of the immaterial soul or of eternal truth. Once again, though, modern man is all too happy to entrust scientists and their cousins, the “experts,” with answering the questions that we have grown too lazy to contemplate for ourselves. Whether it's science, economics, public policy, or even the care of his own children, modern man thus surrenders his duty as a being crafted in God's image to ascertain the truth, now believing himself only a mass of flesh who lacks the ability to grasp truth in the manner claimed by the credentialed gods who speak to him through the television set.

Even the modern fascination with superheroes betrays a pagan outlook. Here we have a godlike figure – or Messiah, if you will – who does not meekly surrender the flesh to preserve the soul, but rather brazenly wields supernatural powers to crush his enemies and keep everyone safe from physical harm. It makes no difference what sort of existence the protected lead, so long as the superhero is there to ensure that they can continue living unmolested. As such, the superhero does not challenge people or motivate them to resist the evil lurking within; quite the opposite, as the superhero vindicates people's natural prejudice to believe that evil lurks only without, particularly in the form of monsters or supervillains who threaten to disrupt their tranquil and unexamined lives. The popular superhero Thor drops all pretense and struts about as an actual pagan god who overcomes adversity with his invincible hammer, thus satisfying the test of godhood demanded by Caiaphas at the crucifixion. Most likely, the modern deification of the military – even to the point of honoring the flag and the uniform within the sacred confines of the church – has its roots in the worship of the superhero, who protects the body rather than the soul.

Popular culture’s similar fascination with vampires and their superhuman strength, beauty, and immortality reveals yet another elevation of pagan virtues over Christian ones. The love story presented in the Twilight series of books and movies is better described as a lust story, relegating the deep spiritual bond between husband and wife to a superficial physical bond of animals in perpetual heat – the vampire “loves” the woman because she smells good, while the woman “loves” the vampire because he is strong and beautiful.

We also have a new morality that, once again, regards the physical as the measure of all things. A Christian understands that a healthy body is no substitute for an unhealthy soul, and that the words coming out of a man's mouth are far more important than the food or drink going into it. Today we have regressed to the pagan notion that physical health equates to purity and goodness. This makes sense because it’s much easier. The adulteress who never touches a cigarette is considered superior to the faithful wife who smokes. The man who hops from one woman’s bed to another is considered moral so long as he scrupulously wears a condom and gets routine checks for STDs. The vulgar vegetarian is considered superior to the gentleman carnivore. Thus modern man displays a sort of Puritanic barbarism, i.e., the insistence that we are animals and must be healthy and vigorous ones at that. Questions of honor likewise take a back seat to physical safety; whereas dueling once typified a manly culture where honor must be paid with life if necessary, now even a boxing match can’t take place without government approval and extensive safety precautions.

The fixation on the physical again manifests itself in the exploding popularity of tattoos and piercings, whose history in the West was once limited to various seedy subcultures. Now that actual culture has been wiped out by the steady onslaught of artificial sounds and images from the Great Stereopticon, people venture to obtain ever more bizarre tattoos and piercings in a desperate attempt to find meaning and announce to the world that they are unique. There being no invisible or eternal God, there is no invisible or eternal self, only what the transitory denizens of the world can see.

Environmentalism is yet another facet of this obsession with the physical world, a refusal to come to grips with our and the planet's mortality. There being no eternity for the pagan, Earth represents the only possible heaven, so he demands that it be kept pristine as if the Garden of Eden. Once again, this demand flattens all competing concerns of human liberty or dignity, which have no meaning for the pagan, and whose only measuring stick is flesh. Since we are all "animals," we have no greater claim to exist than do snail darters or spotted owls, and the full force of governments worldwide may be harnessed to prevent man from exercising his free will. Ignored is that the random violence of nature and the cosmos inflicts far more damage than man could ever match, and that Earth will burn to a crisp as the Sun continually swells. Such truths, however, are distant and abstract; in the pagan’s mind they cannot compete with the flocks of birds, pods of whales, or herds of buffalo in his immediate line of sight. Epitomizing this myopic outlook is the 2014 film Noah starring Russell Crowe, which re-interprets man's sinfulness as disrespect for the planet rather than disobedience to God.

Then there is the obsession with youth. What is young, fresh, or hip matters more than anything old or out of style. The elderly now pathetically mimic the dress, habits, and slang of the young in order to remain relevant to modern minds. Wisdom gained through age is discounted as an obstacle or inconvenience to the demands of here and now, with the young declaring themselves independent from the past and immune to the lessons of history. While the young always have felt this way, it is a recent phenomenon that society indulges this hubris and allows it to flourish, so much so that it has now assumed the status of public policy. The 1960s saw the most privileged and pampered generation in history curse its ancestors and seize the power of the state to eradicate all lingering unfairness from life, in the process bringing us to ruin. The abject failure of the Baby Boomers hasn't slowed them one bit; to the contrary, they gnaw at the remaining sinews of law, tradition, and decorum on the belief that they are all that separate us from Nirvana, unleashing a feral leftism that seeks out heretics more fervidly and efficiently than the Spanish Inquisition. The personal is political, mirroring the ancients' incapacity for imagining a private life apart from the public sphere.

The new pagan religion of leftism holds that earthly health and happiness are of supreme importance, and that any means are justified to preserve them. The worst fate imaginable is now death. “If it saves just one life” is the mantra uttered to demolish all concerns of liberty, dignity, justice, or the rule of law, life being paramount no matter how diminished or degraded. Adherence to universal, unbending principles that might stand in the way of earthly joy are now universally denounced as "bigoted," "intolerant," "reactionary," or any number of other epithets. Voicing the platitudes and striking the poses of leftism serve to provide automatic moral superiority over anyone daring to question them; failure to bow before modern pagan gods, or to follow pagan rituals, is condemned now just as it was in ancient Rome. At least the early Christians could seek refuge in catacombs; today there is no safe haven for the communal expression of Christian sentiment, except perhaps once a week in church, yet even there the world has barged in and demanded that the faithful conform to the world. Any Christian who expresses a sincere belief that men and women are fundamentally different and have different callings in life; or that homosexual conduct is sinful; or that sex should not occur outside of marriage; or that man was created rather than randomly evolved; or that Earth belongs to man; or that government cannot encroach upon our rights and duties under God, now does so at his own peril.

Other examples of the pagan mindset fill our modern landscape. We have lavish weddings, but fleeting and impoverished marriages. We treat sex as the highest, and perhaps the only, expression of love. Paradoxically, we regard sex as a mere recreational activity that any consenting persons can and should indulge in at any time. We have divorced the pursuit of wealth from the long-term mission to provide for families or to advance civilization, worshipping instead the thrill of conspicuous consumption, flaunting status and the trappings of wealth while discarding the personal refinement that once accompanied them. We live in the present, dismissing the past and ignoring the future. We regard what is beautiful as good and true, what is ugly as evil and false. We defy the very existence of goodness and truth, embracing a nihilistic postmodernism that declares that might indeed makes right. We show no mercy in war, destroying national sovereignty and attacking civilians in a quest to re-make the world in our image. We thump our chests and loudly demand that others respect us, forgetting that true respect is quietly commanded.

Looking into a modern man’s eyes reveals no nobility, no sense of higher purpose, no connection with fundamental truths and ideals, no shame . . . no soul. What we find instead is an animal devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and material gain, and on whom the great achievements of two thousand years of Christendom are entirely lost. The civilization this animal inhabits remains intact through sheer inertia, but the absence of a Christian sense of life guarantees its ongoing decay and eventual collapse. Perhaps only then, when the technological wonders and false gods of today crumble before his eyes, will he rediscover something more permanent and fundamental.