The Christian Era. The age of Christianity. The light side of the dividing line that followed the New Covenant revealed through Jesus Christ. That's what we grew up in. Or at least we thought we did, not realizing we were witnessing the last breaths of that historical epoch. I suppose if we were raised in church it never dawned on us that the world would move on past the Christian Era in our lifetimes. Much less could we imagine that the world would revert to the pre-Christian era values of paganism and heathen gods. Yet that is what happened.
Rod Dreher called it in his book The Benedict Option. Dreher might not be the messenger we need, but his message was loud and clear for a people who missed the memo: We are entering into something the Church has not encountered since the earliest years of its existence. A pagan world in which paganism once again has the wealth and power and minds and hearts of the masses, and those who follow this first century messiah supposedly born in a stable are the fringe outcasts.
Granted, it's a secular paganism. It mostly accepts a very atheistic view of the universe. That is, reality is matter and that's about it. Perhaps there are parallel universes or such, and energy fields and all. Maybe there is some core energy field behind it all. Call it God, Allah, Buddha, or Bill Pullman for that matter. None of it maters because religions are just fairy stories invited by the ancients in lieu of having science. If there is some divine thing, it is as irrelevant as quantum physics is to most of the human population. If we must personalize it, we do so only to affirm me and otherwise it may stay out of my way. A seductive gospel to be sure.
Which is why it's the one that has swept the West. What the rest of the world will do with this post-Western, post-Christian society remains to be seen. When Russia invaded Ukraine we initially said the whole world would rally against this naked display of barbarism and slaughter. But it hasn't. China, India, the Middle East, S. America - all are just sitting on the fence at best, likely waiting to see what happens. I can't help but think that not a few people in the world would be happy to watch the West eat itself.
Nonetheless, we in the West are so far gone that such a reality check barely registers. That's because we are dead as the civilization we once were. At this point I would support someone who wants to remove 'In God We Trust' from our money since it's a bold face lie. Whatever god our nation trusts in today has little to nothing to do with the God revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophets, Christ and His apostles. The God who was the default understanding of God until I was old enough to remember holds no more place in our social mindset than the tooth fairy.
My son accepts the theory that the two World Wars did it in. First Europe after the First World War, then America after the Second, it was the end of the Christian Era and the beginning of a new, godless, pagan, secular era of self-worship and hubris that would shame the Tower of Babel. However long ago we trace the roots of this decline, it can't be denied that in the years following WWII, the decline happened like a row of tumbling dominos.
It's fitting that by the time I was in high school the academic world was pushing to eliminate the designation BC/AD from our timelines. Of course many Christians instantly complied. By the time my sons were in public school, not only did their textbooks and resources exclusively use the non-Christian 'BCE/CE (that's Before the Common Era and Common Era), but they were taught exactly what they meant and why it was incumbent upon them to adopt the same designation.
I'll say this, at least the are honest. Ever day we see the chipping away, if not the demolition, of values, truths, beliefs, virtues and views established by the biblical revelation of God. Donald McClarey posted a NYT editorial pondering the virtues of cannibalism in light of our modern climate crisis and food shortage. Abortion is increasingly a badge of honor, not something horrible to be hidden. And our medical establishments are beginning to warm to the mutilation of youth based on the mental health industry's insistence that a person who says she is Napoleon must mean there is no such thing as an objective Napoleon. The world of the modern paganism.
Paganism, I'm convinced, is the at-rest position of the world. Even a secular brand of paganism. We invent our gods in our image and proceed afoot. In paganism, there is no sanctify of life. Humans exist as food for other humans born into various strata of power and privilege. Unlike the ancient pagans, however, who could still achieve lofty and honorable accomplishments, we have reduced ourselves to animals in trousers with not much to seek except the latest physical pleasure or self-worshipping proclamation. We are the privileged ones, able to hate with justification and support the extermination of those not-me types since we're sure such practices will never turn on us, simply because we are better than anyone born before us. Nothing honorable, much less sensical, about that.
What the near future holds is anyone's guess. A growing number of believers are simply throwing off the shackles of the Old Time Religion and finding new and creative ways to do in Rome now that Rome is back. If they won't lay a sacrifice at the altar of Caesar, they will certainly find ways to party at the ceremony afterwards (from Russ Moore's statement that he couldn't attend a gay wedding, but he would happily attend a gay wedding reception). No doubt such compromises will suffice for the new paganism - for now. Down the road the line in the sand will be moved again, and more believers will happily leap accordingly.
Whether it's because deep down they haven't really believed the Gospel message or not, I don't know. I have a hunch there is less real faith in our pews than we might believe. Heck, we all know how tough it is to believe when we've lived in a ruthlessly secular state for generations. I imagine some long ago lost that faith, but since there was no cost for indulging in a fine Sunday fellowship, it was no problem.
Now, as the new Caesars of the new paganism consolidate control, free believing and free worshipping aren't going to be as easy as it was. I fear those who cling to that Old Time Historical Gospel will increasingly be the pariahs, the outcasts, the ostracized. And many of the ones charging forward with rocks ready to stone the dissenters will be those we once sat next to in our pews.
I know it's a bit bittersweet (especially if one loves this country - or just hates to see so many people embrace pointless insanity), but there is hope to be found that the faith itself revolves around its very founder being put to death, and rising again three days later.
ReplyDeleteAs I heard one old-fashioned protestant preacher put it: No matter how dark Saturday gets... Sunday's a-coming.
This is true. We always have that to cling to. But like Billy Graham was fond of saying, he looks forward to going to heaven - he just doesn't want to get there in an airplane. That is, there are real things we don't want no matter how bad. Today we focus on global warming, despite the world not being the Kingdom of Heaven, because we're convinced there is still something important about the here and now. We've fallen into the insanity, however, of believing that 1) it's easy as pie to build free, good, democratic and equal societies and 2), the Civilization that brought this one to the world was in fact the only thing to cause troubles int he world and therefore must go. Which is setting up our posterity for one big catastrophe that we won't have to deal with - at least in this world. Though at the rate things are changing, you never know.
DeletePagans are not atheists but polytheists, and thus are not materialists (heathens were distinguished from pagans in First Millennium Christianity because they believed in gods of northern and eastern Europe rather than the traditional pantheons of the Mediterranean world with which Christians were more familiar, and heathen spiritual forces were not necessarily immortally divine like the major deities of Paganism). Christians were accused of atheism by ancient Pagans because Christians rejected the divinity of Pagan deities.
ReplyDeleteModern atheistic materialism is a different thing than the world into which Christianity arrived. And Christianity today has burdens the early Christianity did not: the burden of centuries of failures to abide by the Gospel message.
True. But much of what we sees hearkens to paganism, in that the gods are inventions of their own minds in lieu of revelation. My point is that we actively live in a society that is pretty much atheistic. But we allow for the invention of a rather bland, 'Barney the Dinosaur' style god that exists to make sure I can say I'll see my loved ones when I die, but stays out of my way otherwise. A pure invention of our modern thinking that otherwise accepts a more or less atheistic world view.
DeleteThe problem with your response is that it severely discounts the liminally enchanted worldview of pre-moderns. They were even less materialist in their worldview than mono-theists, who had a strong boundary between Creator vs Created Order. Using "pagan" as a handle to describe modern atheists is more than merely technically inaccurate and anachronistic; it's flat-out wrong on virtually every level. (Ancient pagans and heathens didn't imagine themselves as creators of their pantheons.)
DeleteI'm not saying atheists are pagans. I'm saying we are a pagan nation because the god we speak of has nothing to do with the God of Scripture. It's an invention of our own, in a condensed version of the ancient peoples who made their own gods and spirits in their own images. The atheism part is the practical day to day we live in. We more or less accept an atheistic world view of a physical universe whereby science can explain the whole of everything (when it can't, then we drag out the god stuff, if we do so at all). That's my point. We're sort of 'the worst of both worlds.' Mostly atheistic, but the religious flavoring we add to make ourselves feel better is the stuff or our own minds and desires, not anything revealed.
DeleteI read the article and comments as I cling to my instrument of terror, the rosary. I remember the good ole days when Baptists and Evangelicals would belittle Catholics for the idolatry of Our Lady, but then would sneak a beer with me if they were alone. We all followed the Decalogue. was that Christendom? But, I digress.
ReplyDeleteChristendom was long over prior to WW I or WW II. GK Chesterton said it ended with Godfrey de Bouillon's death after the First Crusade; yet, that leaves out St. Louis IX. Christendom suffered a severe wound in 1054 with the Great Schism. Nominalism over the Universals led
to poor formation then to 1517. The "Enlightenment" untethered reason from faith as nationalism grew, science of progress justified power. Pockets of Catholic Christendom could survive but, as a whole, it was buried forever with Napoleon.
The epoch in which we live today denies the very order of creation and human identity. Pre Christian Mediterranean basin, or any other parts, lived a paganism that sought the source in an idolized and idealized creator. Each culture had it's gods who toyed with creation, but did not destroy it. The ancient world attributed creation to the wrong power and worshiped it. (Rom 1) Today's "First World" is eating eat itself by self-creating the god of pure subjectivity. There is no seeking the origin of the mystery of life. There is only the willfulness to live in dark subjectivity.
The ancient pantheon of gods may have interacted with humans, but there was no love only the regular joust of trickery. Jesus Christ is the incarnation of God who entered into our darkness and offered the supreme sacrifice of love and obedience to save, which no pagan gods did. The modern era only offers chaos. Those with money and power will try to contain the chaos and escape.
With that understanding, you should just drop any reference to pagans and paganism; the references are irrelevant to the point you're actually making.
ReplyDeleteI like to say it is a paganism, too. It's not just atheism, though atheism has held a massive influence over the framing of our world view for many moons now. But it's also a 'religious' secularism, in that people are free to make up their own version of god as they see fit. We can't just say secular, that's not accurate. It's certainly not atheist. And yet it is those things and more. To merely say non-Christian religious lacks the umph of what we're dealing with. Since it is so much a made up view of God, I don't think it's far from the mark to suggest it is an invented faith, much in the way ancient pagan religions were (assuming, of course, we're holding to the idea that the old pagan religions weren't true).
DeleteI think the issue is not so much that it is pagan or atheist but a mixture of pride and avarice. People are making a god that suits their morality. That is why people still go to Church but only accept God on their own terms. Moral relativism is their new god. What they fail to understand is that moral relativism is, in real terms, the doing away with good & evil, sin and the one true God. I see modern young (and not so young) catholics (small C intended) who champion abortion, gay marriage, female ordination, communion for gays and divorced and none of them want to listen to the reasons why allowing these things leads to the death of their cradle Catholicism. In fact, they don't seem to care. They want a religion that suits them. They want a religion that accepts the morality of this world not the morality of God.
ReplyDeleteGood points all. It is amazing how so many catholics champion those issues that "lead to the death" of the Catholic faith they received. All the sexuality issues directly lead to the denial of the Incarnation. Think of the vast majority of catholic high schools and colleges: majority faculty not Catholic; increasing numbers of non-Catholic enrollment; conversions are not happening. The Church will continue get smaller. The persecution will clean house.
DeleteAbsolutely. Pride. Avarice. Even apathy. That's sort of my point. We are mostly an atheistic society, in that our assumptions are heavily influenced by an atheist's secular appraisal of the universe. But we can't say that because it's not altogether true. We've also allowed ourselves to reinvent God in our image based on our convenience, so that the modern version has almost nothing to do with the revelation of God through the ages. Hence my term pagan. It's as false as those old wooden statues in the ancient world. And that's as common in churches as it is in the marketplace. But the point is, it's also been a very aggressive and zealous paganism and has been converting believers for generations. Now we're begining to see the results of that development.
Deletehttps://www.thecatholicthing.org/2022/08/19/a-new-ghetto-for-american-catholicism/
ReplyDeleteThis article adds some thoughts.
That's certainly what I've been thinking for some time. That's where Rod Dreher shined - pointing out we are about to enter an era virtually any Christian in the West never imagined. And it isn't just going to come from people outside the Church I fear.
Delete