Pagans and Christians in the City

by Steven D. Smith

  102. See above, 91.

  103. Dworkin, Religion without God, 2–3.

  104. See especially Benjamin Wiker, Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2013). See also Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, 117 (observing that “the nation in Western civilization in many ways replaces the church”).

  105. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, preface to Either/Or: The Gospel or Neopaganism, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 14, 7.

  106. Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 44.

  107. Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (New York: Free Press, 2012), 215.

  108. T. S. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt/Harvest, 1948), 39.

  109. See Rajeev Bhargava, “Rehabilitating Secularism,” in Calhoun, Rethinking Secularism, 92. Acknowledging these difficulties and complications, even as he advocates its renewal, Rajeev Bhargava observes that “only someone with blinkered vision would deny the crisis of secularism.” See also Jose Casanova, “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms,” in Calhoun, Rethinking Secularism, 54, 63: “For example, American, French, Turkish, Indian, and Chinese secularisms, to name only some paradigmatic and distinctive modes of drawing boundaries between the religious and the secular, represent not only very different patterns of separation of the secular state and religion but also very different models of state regulation and management of religion and of religious pluralism in society.”

  110. This theme runs through many of the essays in Rethinking Secularism. See especially Alfred Stepan, “The Multiple Secularisms of Modern Democratic and Non-Democratic Regimes,” in Calhoun, Rethinking Secularism, 114. See also Michael Warner et al., eds., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

  111. See, e.g., Martin Marty, “Religio-Secular . . . Again,” University of Chicago Divinity School, Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, April 24, 2017, https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/religio-secular-again.

  112. See Bhargava, “Rehabilitating Secularism.”

  113. “Secular,” English Oxford Living Dictionaries, accessed July 13, 2017, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/secular.

  114. Cf. Paul Veyne, When Our World Became Christian: 312–394, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 135 (asserting that “paganism . . . was such a lightweight religion as to constitute a very model of secularity”).

  115. Charles Taylor thus explains that the concept of the secular became important in Christian discourse in describing “profane time, the time of ordinary historical succession which the human race lives through between the Fall and the Parousia [or second coming of Christ].” Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 32. For Taylor’s more detailed explanation of the relation of spiritual and secular time in premodern sensibilities, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 54–59.

  116. Nomi Stolzenberg, “The Profanity of Law,” in Law and the Sacred, ed. Austin Sarat (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 51.

  117. Cf. John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins: Histories of More Than 8,000 English-Language Words (New York: Arcade, 1990), 465: “secular Latin saeculum, a word of uncertain origin, meant ‘generation, age.’ It was used in early Christian texts for the ‘temporal world’ (as opposed to the ‘spiritual world’). . . . The more familiar modern English meaning ‘non-religious’ emerged in the 16th century.”

  118. Stolzenberg, “The Profanity of Law,” 35.

  119. Quoted in Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot, 222.

  120. Quoted in Joseph Vining, The Song Sparrow and the Child: Claims of Science and Humanity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 50.

  121. For a searching exploration of this conflict, see Vining, From Newton’s Sleep.

  122. Ferry, Brief History of Thought, 243.

  123. Ferry, Brief History of Thought, 244, 245.

  124. See Gray, Straw Dogs, 94.

  125. For discussion, see Steven D. Smith, “The Constitution and the Goods of Religion,” in Dimensions of Goodness, ed. Vittorio Hösle (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 328–33.

  126. Gray, Black Mass, 1.

  127. John Copeland Nagle, “Playing Noah,” Minnesota Law Review 82 (1998): 1171, 1208.

  128. G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, [1910] 2016), 15.

  129. See Jacques Dupuis, SJ, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (New York: Orbis, 1997), 143–49.

  130. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” 6–7.

  131. Anthony T. Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

  CHAPTER 10

  Counterrevolution, Part I: Symbols, Sex, and the Constitution

  Rome, we saw in chapter 3, was the city of the gods—a city whose might, opulence, and splendor were sustained and consecrated by the worship of the pagan gods. That religion could embrace numerous and sundry cults and deities—by in effect absorbing or annexing them. But it could not embrace the Jerusalem-based faiths, Judaism and Christianity, which (as we saw in chapter 5) represented a radically new, different, and unassimilable form of religiosity—one devoted to a single transcendent deity rather than to a sprawling pantheon of immanent deities. Thus, as Christianity began to grow in the empire, Roman authorities correctly perceived the new faith as subversive (despite sincere protestations of loyalty by Christians like Tertullian) and as threatening. The authorities responded to that threat by episodically persecuting Christianity and, in the “Great Persecution” at the beginning of the fourth century, attempting to eradicate it.

  The attempt failed, and so the fourth century witnessed an epic, back-and-forth cultural and political and sometimes military struggle between Christianity and paganism for mastery within the city. (We can see this in hindsight, although contemporaries often could not perceive the nature of that struggle.) By century’s end, Christianity had prevailed—in the political struggle, that is. Christianity’s political dominance persisted in the ensuing centuries; observers like T. S. Eliot could accordingly describe the nations that arose after the decline of Rome as “Christian societies,” even though the practical substance of those societies sometimes, or rather always, fell dismally short of Christian ideals.

  And yet paganism was hardly eliminated; rather, it continued to exist just beneath the surface, and often hidden in plain sight, in the variety of ways we considered in chapter 8. One mode of continued existence was in the Western historical imagination. A persistent and recurring regret for the loss of the “merry dance of paganism,” together with resentment of the oppressive force that had ostensibly turned out the lights on that “merry dance”—namely, Christianity—inspired countless theories, books, tracts, poems, works of art, secular sermons, and fulminations of all sorts. And in recent times, immanent religiosity or “modern paganism” in a variety of forms—we have taken Ronald Dworkin’s “religion without god” as a cogent manifestation—has begun to reassert itself openly and unashamedly.

  In these circumstances, it should hardly be surprising—it might well be inevitable—that paganism would at some point challenge the increasingly tattered and threadbare canopy of Christianity. It would be unsurprising, in other words, if paganism might attempt to reclaim the city that Christianity wrested away from it centuries ago.

  And in fact, that is what has happened. The latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first have witnessed a renewal of the fourth-century struggle between Christianity and paganism—a struggle seeking to reverse the “revolution” that Christianity achieved in late antiquity. As with the ancient struggle, the modern one may become cl
earer as the years pass and give us a more detached perspective. But even now the struggle is discernible, if we are willing to see it.

  This at least is one way—and, I will suggest in this chapter, a perspicuous way—of understanding the salient cultural, legal, and political conflicts of our times. This interpretation, like all interpretations, is to some extent an artificial imposition upon a complex and messy reality. Modern pagans, like ancient ones, typically do not label themselves or conceive of themselves as “pagans.” (Although sometimes they do—Anthony Kronman, for example.)1 More generally, as we saw in the last chapter, self-identification—whether by pagans or by putative Christians, putative atheists, putative “nones,” or people who deem themselves “spiritual but not religious”—is in this context profoundly unilluminating and unreliable. And people often slide unawares between one category and another, and back again, and again. Ours is a situation in which, as Matthew Arnold put it, “ignorant armies clash by night”2—on a whole variety of levels and issues. The interpretation of our period as one in which the fourth-century struggle between Christianity and paganism is being reenacted will nonetheless be useful just to the extent that it provides illumination into our profoundly confused and confusing times.

  One caveat: although a parallel struggle is arguably occurring through much of the Western world (and perhaps beyond), the precise political and legal developments will be different from place to place. For reasons both of scope and limited competence, the following discussion will focus on developments in the United States. Readers with more intimate knowledge of other regions and countries will judge to what extent similar developments are discernible in other places.

  How We Got Here: From Civic Religion to Culture Wars

  In 1892, in a case aptly or perhaps portentously entitled Holy Trinity Church v. United States, the Supreme Court declared that “this is a Christian nation.”3 A century later, the Court’s declaration would be seen by many as an embarrassment,4 comparable in its offensiveness to the Court’s approval four years later of the “separate but equal” doctrine that effectively put an official imprimatur on the segregationist “Jim Crow” position.5 At the time it was uttered, however, the Court’s statement in Holy Trinity Church would likely have seemed to most Americans little more than an obvious truism. The nation was not officially Christian, of course, in the way that, say, England was officially Anglican, but it was pervasively if sometimes amorphously Christian in its culture and substance.6

  Thus, the Court supported its “Christian nation” interpretation with a lengthy recitation of an array of laws and “organic utterances” going all the way back to Columbus.7 And indeed, more recent studies by scholar after scholar have vindicated the Court’s interpretation, showing how pervasive Christian or biblical assumptions were in public and political discourse during the colonizing and founding periods and continuing through the nineteenth century.8 Sometimes the scholars report this situation critically, even bitterly;9 nonetheless, the basic fact is well attested.

  In this vein, the sociologist Robert Bellah’s influential scholarship described a prevalent public philosophy or national self-understanding that he called “civil religion.” “By civil religion,” he explained, “I refer to that religious dimension, found I think in the life of every people, through which it interprets its historical experience in the light of transcendent reality.”10 Citing the appeals to deity in the Declaration of Independence, Bellah argued that “it is significant that the reference to a suprapolitical sovereignty, to a God who stands above the nation and whose ends are standards by which to judge the nation and indeed only in terms of which the nation’s existence is justified, becomes a permanent feature of American political life ever after.”11

  American civil religion, Bellah showed, was a species of Christianity, or at least a biblically based form of public religion.12 “[Americans] saw themselves as being a ‘people’ in the classical and biblical sense of the word.”13 Like other faiths, American civil religion had its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution), its prophets (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln), its martyrs (Lincoln, later Martin Luther King Jr.), its theologians (Lincoln again),14 its holy days (Independence Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day), its rituals (presidential inaugurations, State of the Union addresses, Fourth of July parades and fireworks). This situation continued into the 1960s, when Bellah began writing on the subject. “Biblical imagery provided the basic framework for imaginative thought in America up until quite recent times and unconsciously, its control is still formidable.”15

  To be sure, in the first half of the twentieth century, the religious landscape had become more complicated. The hegemony of the “nonsectarian” ecumenical Protestantism of the nineteenth century was broken.16 Even so, by the 1950s, public religiosity remained strong, and conspicuous. This was the era of “piety on the Potomac,” joined in by all branches of government. President Eisenhower repeatedly endorsed the importance of religion to the American way of life.17 Borrowing from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and ratified the national motto (already announced many decades earlier in the national anthem): In God We Trust.18 And the Supreme Court declared, not that we are a “Christian nation,” as it had said in 1892, but rather and more ecumenically that “we are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”19

  Moreover, the public religiosity was still discernibly biblical in nature. Will Herberg wrote his classic Protestant-Catholic-Jew, elaborating on “the conception of the three ‘communions’—Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism—as three diverse, but equally legitimate, equally American, expressions of an over-all American religion.”20 Significantly, all three supporting “communions” were grounded in the Bible. Or, in other words, in a transcendent religiosity.

  From the beginning, the ongoing existence of a general rough consensus about an increasingly inclusive civil religion emphatically did not mean that American culture and politics were happily harmonious; any such suggestion would of course be preposterous. To name just the most obvious and horrific counterexample, there was the enormity of slavery, leading to the unfathomable agonies of the Civil War. And yet, paradoxical or shameful as the fact may be, even that catastrophic conflict was fought out, explained, and rationalized, on both sides, largely under the encompassing canopy of the biblical civil religion.21 As Lincoln recalled in his Second Inaugural Address, surely the most profound public reflection ever offered by an American political leader, Americans had fought over slavery, but they had “read the same Bible and prayed to the same God.” Their common commitment to the same Bible and the same God was the premise on which Lincoln could interpret the war for the nation as a working out of divine justice, and on which he could issue his celebrated call for reconciliation: “With malice toward none, with charity for all . . .”

  Bellah believed that although the American civil religion had endured and developed through most of the nation’s history, it was in the process of disintegrating by the late 1960s and early 1970s. The civil religion had become “an empty and broken shell.”22 “We have lost our sense of direction.”23

  So then, what would follow the dissolution of this guiding narrative? The answer was in effect announced by another prominent sociologist, James Davison Hunter, in a 1991 book called Culture Wars. Hunter found that across a surprising variety of issues ranging from education to family to media to law and politics, Americans were increasingly coalescing into two broad and contending camps, which he labeled “orthodox” and “progressive.”24 The former maintained continuity with the old, biblically oriented civil religion, while the latter challenged it.25

  Consequently, the earlier situation in which Americans might disagree fiercely and even violently over issues like slavery but still be united under a common commitment to “the same Bible” and “the same God” emphatically no longer obtained; on the contrary, the authority of the Bible and the relev
ance of God were major points of disagreement. Though living side by side as Americans, orthodox and progressive citizens held to moral conceptions so different that each effectively inhabited “a separate and competing moral galaxy.”26

  Critics objected that Hunter had exaggerated the cultural divisions and that the polar positions he described were occupied mostly by activists, not ordinary Americans. To be fair, Hunter himself had explained that the major disagreements were mostly among “elites.”27 Even so, the critics may have had a point. The early 1990s seem at least in retrospect and by comparison to the present a relatively placid time in which Congress and president could join in near unanimity in passing a law giving strong protection to religious freedom—more on that in the next chapter—and in which the inflammatory issue of same-sex marriage was barely visible on the political horizon. But if Hunter overstated his case then, it seems that his assessment is cogent now: in the two and a half decades since his book was published,28 political and cultural polarization has increased dramatically.29 Thus, Hunter’s diagnosis seems even more apt today than when it was first offered.

  Three features emphasized by Hunter are especially pertinent to our inquiry. First, Hunter explained that the different cultural orientations represented more than differences of opinion on private matters. Rather, the competing sides in the culture wars pressed conflicting visions of “how we are to live our life together.”30 Each side was struggling to “define America,” as Hunter’s subtitle put it. So the culture war was and is a struggle for “domination”31—for control of the cultural and political community and the self-conception by which the community constitutes and governs itself.32

  A second feature of the conflict follows directly from the first. Thus, Hunter explained that in the struggle to define America, symbols and discourse are crucial.33 Consequently, each side “struggles to monopolize the symbols of legitimacy.”34