Pagans and Christians in the City

by Steven D. Smith

  She was debarred from looking to conventional religion for answers. “I was born to atheism and raised in it, by people who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms, whether vested in bosses or priests, gods or demons. This is what defined my people, my tribe: We did not believe” (3).

  While dutifully maintaining this atheistic heritage throughout her life, Ehrenreich recalls having had brief quasi-mystical experiences as a teenager (47–53) in which it seemed as if “another universe, intimately superimposed on our own, normally invisible, but every so often, where the dividing membrane had worn thin, [was] shining through into our own” (52). These culminated in a shattering and transforming experience, or “epiphany” (127), when Ehrenreich was walking in the early dawn in Lone Pine, California. While cautioning that the experience was ineffable, beyond “the jurisdiction of language,” she nonetheless struggles to convey the sense of it: “The world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with ‘the All,’ as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it” (116).

  A quest to discern the meaning of this “epiphany” has occupied much of the rest of Ehrenreich’s life. Shortly after the experience she remarked to a friend, “I saw God”—but then hastened to recant, explaining that “I was only kidding, that I was as firm in my atheism as ever” (116). In subsequent decades, immersed in graduate study, in writing, in political activism, and in raising two children, Ehrenreich sometimes lost sight of the why question, but the quest revived at a later stage, reinforced by later mystical experiences. Her last chapter speculates on various ways of conceiving of what she can only describe as “the Presence” or “the Other” (216, 221), and reflects on ways in which science itself seems to be overcoming “the collective solipsism our species has embraced for the last few centuries in the name of modernity and rationality, a worldview in which there exists no consciousness or agency other than our own” (234).

  The Ranks of the Immanently Religious

  Of these three cases, Ehrenreich’s is the most dramatic—and probably the least typical (though she observes that “almost half of Americans report having had a ‘mystical experience’ ”).77 Dworkin, for example, though he talked of sublimity and the sacred, reported no experience similar to Ehrenreich’s Lone Pine epiphany.

  He did suggest, however, very plausibly, that his sort of less spectacular “religion without God” is widely shared. Not by everyone; perhaps unfairly,78 Dworkin classified Richard Dawkins, the prominent scientist-writer who crusades against religion and for evolution, as a nonreligious naturalist. Dawkins comes in for repeated criticism in Dworkin’s book.79 But Dawkins is the exception.

  Many millions of people who count themselves as atheists have convictions and experiences similar to and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a “personal” god, they nevertheless believe in a “force” in the universe “greater than we are.” They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted. They find the Grand Canyon not just arresting but breathtakingly and eerily beautiful. They are not simply interested in the latest discoveries about vast space but enthralled by them. These are not, for them, just a matter of immediate sensuous and otherwise inexplicable response. They express a conviction that the force and wonder they sense are real, just as real as planets and pain, that moral truth and natural wonder do not simply evoke awe but call for it.80

  These are judgments, emotions, and convictions, Dworkins suggested, that cannot be fully accounted for and credited—as opposed to being “explained away”—by the “just the facts, ma’am” naturalism espoused by thinkers like Dawkins. Insofar as many or most people have such judgments, emotions, and convictions and do not attempt to dismiss them or explain them away, Dworkin suggested, these people are harboring and acting on a view that is “religious.”

  So, how large might this congregation of the immanently religious be? As noted, Dworkin himself claimed for his fellowship “many millions of people who count themselves as atheists.” Perhaps he was exaggerating. And yet there is reason to suspect just the opposite. Recent research by the Pew Foundation suggests that between 2007 and 2014, the percentage of self-described atheists who reported feeling a sense of awe or wonder about the universe increased, from 37 to 54 percent; for self-identifying agnostics the increase went from 48 to 55 percent.81 Beyond the group of atheists and agnostics, Dworkin’s description might fit the growing fold of people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”82 It might fit as well the proportionally small but swelling portion of Americans who are classified as “nones.”83 Some of these people may be reductionist naturalists after the manner of Dworkin’s Dawkins. But it seems that many, while skeptical about God and suspicious of “religion” in its more conventional sense, would share the kinds of judgments about beauty and the moral seriousness described by Dworkin.84

  By expanding “religion” beyond conventional theism,85 Dworkin delineated a category that might well encompass such people—even if (like Harris) they still recoil from the term “religion.” Indeed, even many who describe themselves as belonging to more traditional religions—to Christianity, in particular—might more accurately belong in the camp of the immanently religious. This contingent might well include the vast ranks of the religiously tepid—people who for reasons of habit or family tradition may self-identify as “Catholic” or “Methodist” or whatever, and who have experiences of beauty and value as Dworkin described, but who exhibit no live commitment to a transcendent deity. And even active churchgoers may recite the ancient Christian creeds and yet maintain a faith in something more immanent than transcendent. Martin Gardner observes that “today, you will have a difficult time discovering what any prominent Christian actually believes.”86 And he adds, with evident irritation: “Millions of Catholics and Protestants around the world now attend liberal churches where they listen to music and Laodicean sermons, and (if Protestant) sing tuneless Laodicean hymns. They may even stand and recite the Apostles’ Creed out of force of habit and not believe a word of it. If a pastor or priest dared to preach a sermon on, say, whether Jesus’ corpse was actually revivified, the congregation would quickly find a way to get rid of him.”87

  So in the end, there is no way to count. Still, it seems most likely that the church of the immanently religious is, to borrow from the eminent poetic pagan Walt Whitman, “large; [it] contain[s] multitudes.”88

  Paganism Triumphant?

  Insofar as this sort of religiosity, held by “many millions of people” (as Dworkin asserted), is a belief in an immanent sacred, it could aptly be described as a kind of “modern paganism,” as T. S. Eliot claimed.

  To recall the distinctions presented in chapter 4, this would of course not be “mythical paganism.” There are, to be sure, people who actually call themselves “pagans” and who purport to worship nature deities.89 And the shelves of bookstores are stocked with books about the occult or the paranormal; movies on such subjects—and about superheroes who resemble and are occasionally named for pagan deities—likewise proliferate. But these are not the socially salient and politically and culturally influential movements we are considering here. No one today (or almost no one) is claiming that Zeus, Athena, Apollo, and company are still hanging out on Mount Olympus and from time to time officiously intruding themselves into the affairs of mortals.

  In that respect, thoug
h, modern paganism is not so very different from the ancient paganism of the educated classes, who likewise regarded the myths as “lying fables” and often viewed the gods as symbols of a spiritual reality.90 Primarily, “modern paganism” would be a modern variation on the kind of immanent religiosity or “philosophical paganism” expounded by the character Balbus in Cicero’s dialogue on the gods (and by Cicero himself, at least according to his own profession).91

  Barbara Ehrenreich provides explicit if perhaps idiosyncratic evidence for this interpretation. Though a professing atheist from childhood to the present, Ehrenreich “realized that the theism I rejected was actually only monotheism, or the particular version of it represented by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, in which the ‘one God’ or ‘one true God’ is not only singular but perfect.” Conversely, “amoral gods, polytheistic gods, animal gods—these were all fine with me, if only because they seemed to make no promises and demand no belief.”92 But she does not positively assert the existence of these sorts of deities either. The meaning of her Lone Pine and later epiphanies, as she has come to interpret them, points not to traditional religion but rather to “a world that glowed and pulsed with life through all its countless manifestations, where God or gods or at least a living Presence flamed out from every object.”93 To a modern paganism, once again, that is not so different from the ancient philosophical paganism of the educated classes.

  For Dworkin, in short, and for Ehrenreich, and for the millions of “nones,” and for the millions more who consider themselves “spiritual,” and for the additional millions who report an identification with some traditional denomination but without exhibiting any active belief in a transcendent deity, “religion” (a term they may embrace or may eschew) denotes a world reenchanted with intrinsic meaning and beauty, in the way the world was enchanted before the coming of Christianity. Not a world under the stern judgment of the biblical God. Could there be a more apt, succinct description of this position, or this spiritual orientation, than “modern paganism”?

  So understood, paganism is hardly a marginal or exotic phenomenon; on the contrary, it arguably surrounds us. At least as a cultural matter, we might say that in it we live and move and have our being.94

  In this vein, in a book called Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us, Ferdinand Mount argues that “often without our being aware of it, the ways in which we live our rich and varied lives correspond, almost eerily so, to the ways in which the Greeks and Romans lived theirs.”95 It is not just that we owe much to the Greeks and Romans; rather, “in so many ways, large and small, trivial and profound, we are them, and they are us.”96 Mount acknowledges that his claim runs contrary to “the ideology of modernity . . . that we are moving forward and that we are going somewhere new.”97 Nonetheless, he argues, in a series of comparative chapters, that modern society is closer in its assumptions, values, and practices to classical culture than to the intervening Christian culture in a whole variety of areas: science, art, politics, sexuality (where he discerns a “Neo Pagan yearning for a return to the easy, down-to-earth sexual life of the ancient world”),98 culinary arts, hygiene, and appreciation of the physical body.

  And religion. Modern Western societies, Mount contends, closely resemble second-century Rome in its religious propensities—in the smorgasbord of religious options99 covering over an underlying and immanent spirituality that he labels the “new pantheism.” In what might be taken as a one-sentence preview of Dworkin’s Einstein Lectures, Mount describes this prevalent faith as one that “sheds an equal radiance over the whole earth and every creature on it, the sort of reverence and admiration for the structure of the universe as revealed by science which have become especially associated with the godlike figure of Albert Einstein.”100

  So it seems that immanent religiosity—modern paganism—is all around us. And where exactly is the sacred located for “modern paganism”? Here there can be no single or uniform answer. Just as classical paganism sponsored countless diverse cults, all fitting comfortably under the broad canopy of immanent religion or “paganism,” so also modern paganism takes various forms.101 For someone like Barbara Ehrenreich, the Other or the Presence glows through the world in “all its countless manifestations.” This would appear to be a modern variation on Balbus’s declaration that “the universe is god.”102 Others—environmentalists, for example—locate the sacred in “nature,” or in parts of nature: Dworkin gives as an example the Grand Canyon.103 Some observers perceive in modern progressivism a tendency to exalt or sacralize the state.104 Still others attach a sacred quality to the individual person. Thus, in discerning “a reemergence of the pagan elements of Western civilization,” the distinguished Protestant theologians Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson identify this “neopaganism” with “modern variations of the ancient belief of pre-Christian mystery religions that a divine spark or seed is innate in the individual human soul.”105

  More generally, Terry Eagleton observes that “the history of the modern age is among other things the search for a viceroy for God. Reason, Nature, Geist, culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, Being, Society, the Other, desire, the life force and personal relations: all of these have acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity.” Eagleton adds that “suitably degutted of its dogma, [religiosity] is then easily wedded with secular modes of thought, and as such can fill ideological gaps and offer spiritual solutions more persuasive than orthodox religion can.”106

  Ross Douthat argues that in America, Christian orthodoxy has increasingly given ground to new movements that Douthat regards as Christian heresies but that might be classified with what I am here calling “modern paganism.” Perhaps the most pervasive and influential of Douthat’s heresies, especially among cultural elites, is what he calls the “God Within” philosophy, which holds that “somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity universal and divine.” And a person’s highest duty is to “honor the divinity that resides within me.”107 This view seems almost identical to the “neopaganism” discerned by Braaten and Jenson.

  The Orthodox and The Pagan

  Douthat, however, writes in defense of Christian orthodoxy, as do others. That is an important fact, not to be overlooked. Within the last few pages, it may appear that paganism has gone from being something long since extinct, to an exotic and marginal phenomenon, to the triumphant and almost universal condition of our time. But that conclusion overcorrects. Although immanent religion or “modern paganism” seems to be increasing and growing more conspicuous in the modern world, it has surely not wholly displaced transcendent religion, such as traditional Christianity. There are presumably still many and perhaps millions of believers in transcendent religion—orthodox Christians, devout Jews and Muslims.

  For reasons already discussed, there is no way to take an accurate census of pagans and Christians (and devout Jews, etc.). In this context, self-identifications—even sincere ones—are far from reliable. As when Eliot lectured, it is still true that “the great majority of people are neither one thing nor the other, but are living in a no man’s land.”108 And a person may be partly Christian and partly pagan, more Christian one day, more pagan the next.

  And yet the provocations of the “culture wars” make it harder than it once was to remain neutral or undecided. The old opposition—between Christians and pagans or, more broadly, between transcendent and immanent religious orientations—is once again alive and well and, after many centuries, increasingly out in the open; and more and more people are forced to take a side. We will return to the point in the next chapters.

  First, though, we need to conclude by revisiting this chapter’s initial theme, from which we may seem to have wandered—namely, secularism.

  Trisecting the Secular

  As we saw earlier, most of the major thinkers over the past couple of centuries had predicted that the modern world would become secular, in
the sense of “not religious.” Those prophecies seem not to have been fulfilled. On the contrary, as we have seen, traditional religion remains vigorous, and a new and more immanent religiosity—a “religion without God,” as Ronald Dworkin puts it—seems to be emerging even in quite unlikely cultural neighborhoods. So, is the upshot that secularization is a myth—that it has not happened and is not going to happen?

  Not exactly. But as theorists increasingly recognize, the concept of “the secular” turns out to be more complicated than is sometimes supposed; any simple equation of “secular” with “not religious” is dubious.109 Some scholars maintain that instead of referring to “secularism,” we need to start talking of “secularisms,” in the plural.110 The eminent historian of American religion Martin Marty has begun using the term “religio-secular.”111 For some, the need to rethink the meaning of “secular” is underscored by a case like India’s, where the constitution (unlike that of the United States) explicitly provides that government must be “secular” but both culture and politics are pervasively religious.112

  At least for some purposes, it seems, if we are not going to simply renounce the idea of secularization, then we need “secular” to mean something other than “not religious.” But can “secular” be severed from “not religious” without becoming mere double-talk, or gobbledygook?

  Perhaps surprisingly, consideration of the term’s history suggests that the severance is not only possible but easier than one might suppose; it is more a recovery than a renunciation of the term’s core meaning. The term “secular” traces back to the Latin word saeculum, meaning “generation” or “age”; the general original sense of the term is something like “of this age” or “of this world.”113 Pagan religion and pagan deities, as we have seen, were of this world. So, as we saw in chapters 3, 4, and 5, paganism might accurately be described as a thoroughly and intrinsically secular species of religiosity114—even though in paganism the adjective “secular” might seem otiose (like “wet rain” or “cold ice”).