Why paganism is better than christianity

Flashing ahead several centuries, consider contemporary progressives and their reactions to Judeo-Christian faith. Overwhelmingly, progressives regard themselves as a tolerant group of people. Also, like ancient pagans, they are enormously concerned about sex. Traditionalists often observe, reasonably enough, that this is a very intolerant -seeming brand of tolerance. Progressives do embrace a kind of cosmopolitan ideal, within certain boundaries.

They can have genuine curiosity about global cultures, cuisines, and customs, and are sometimes very interested in history, high culture, or the arts. That broad-mindedness, though, finds its limit when it encounters its ancient Christian rival.

Orthodox Christianity is seen as authoritarian, inflexible, and joyless. Progressive cosmopolitanism, like its Roman forebear, has its limits. Transcendent religion is deeply in tension with the social vision of our progressive neo-pagans. That is why, in the eyes of many, Christians must be converted, or else marginalized to the point where they can pose no real threat.

Invoking ancient paganism may not seem like a promising way to start an interfaith dialogue. Where some traditionalists have viewed progressive social crusades mainly as a product of irrational moral panic, Smith is more prepared to see the struggle over public symbols as understandable and genuinely consequential.

In the transitional pagan-to-Christian period, ancient Romans engaged in similar debates. They fought about statues and imagery, the proper use of public funds, and appropriate religious requirements for teachers and public servants. In a culture war, these are often the debates on which longer-term outcomes depend.

Orthodox Christians like modern-day Tertullians may feel that they are too down-and-out to represent a real threat to the progressive left, but history suggests that their cultural and spiritual reserves are considerable.

Smith is also more generous than many in allowing that progressive combatants may have some real goods in view.

Paganism, after all, has brought real meaning to the lives of many people across history. It is not obvious that a post-Christian society would have to be brutal and devoid of beauty or joy.

Though Smith is an established partisan of Team Transcendence, he is more willing than many of his contemporaries such as R. Reno, Anthony Esolen, or Patrick Deneen to consider that the rival team may have at least some genuinely attractive ends in view in its quest to establish a new, neo-pagan society. In his final chapter, he doubts whether neo-pagans are truly equipped to vanquish their long-entrenched Judeo-Christian opponents.

Witchcraft — with its intuitive, inexpensive and DIY approach to spirituality — requires no such abnegation. Solitary witchcraft in particular — that is, witchcraft practiced alone, by an individual, as opposed to a coven or circle — is especially liberating, allowing the practitioner to cast spells, celebrate holy days and undertake rituals as and when they please, on their own terms.

For many ex-faith pagans, a fallow period marks their break from the fold. Eileen identified as agnostic for long time after leaving Catholicism, a period that left her feeling isolated and rudderless. For Eileen, Wicca is about free will over blind faith, about following her gut rather than received wisdom.

Just having the option gives me confidence. Praying to God never gave me that. Monitoring the growth of pagan populations in the UK is a tricky business. While tech fatigue might push us back to nature, the web is also a rich source of esoteric know-how for pagans fledgling and established alike. They were Christian militants who accompanied the prefect precisely so that they could violently attack pagan shrines in a fashion that allowed Theodosius to avoid taking direct responsibility for their actions.

They had spent their entire lives learning how to compete and thrive in a geographically and religiously diverse imperial system that rewarded loyalty and buffered the worst effects of radical changes in imperial policy. They were unaccustomed to operating outside of its rules and they struggled to respond to an emperor willing to empower paramilitaries to destroy pagan property and lives that the Roman state was supposed to protect. This is why Libanius addressed his speech to Theodosius in He could think of no better course of action than to appeal to the emperor who sat atop the administrative apparatus through which Libanius had been conditioned to work.

But what, at first glance, looks like a defiant condemnation of an unjust political order, now appears to be the desperate pleading of an old man who finally recognised the true import of the transformational events that had been going on for his entire life.

Despite his powerful call for reform, Libanius probably understood that it was already too late to save the world he treasured. Many temples were still there, though the disinterest of worshippers and the decay of the buildings meant that the number of useable ones dropped steadily. Statues of the gods remained in public places and people still prayed to them in private homes, but fewer did this each year.

Religious processions and public sacrifices continued in cities where local pagan authorities remained strong and in pious towns so remote that they attracted little attention, but more and more places stopped meeting these criteria. The traces of the old gods that dotted Roman cities, towns and villages once seemed reassuring.

Now they seemed like the ghostly echoes of a nearly dead pagan past. The state had turned against paganism and, as the 4th century gave way to the 5th, the restrictions on pagans increased greatly. So too did the pace of temple closures until, by the middle of the 5th century, not enough pagan temples remained in use to bother with efforts to close them.

The Athenian Parthenon, one of the last major temples to operate openly, closed around The goddess Athena then decamped to the house of the philosopher Proclus and, Proclus claimed, they cohabitated until his death in Proclus and others like him were devoted pagans — more devout, in fact, than Libanius and many of his peers ever had been. But there remained no meaningful sense of pagan community to bind them, even after the threat to paganism became clear.

Instead, pagans often condescended to or exploited one another. The rustics living in areas that tacitly permitted the worship of the old gods reciprocated by profiting from gullible urban-pagan spiritual tourists.

How then should one think about this generation that so completely failed to imagine the future? It was already in a terminal decline, helped along by complacent 4th-century pagans who did little to stop the transformation of Roman society. They were the last pagans with the opportunity to perhaps stop the Christianisation of the Roman empire, but they organised no sustained pagan resistance to Christianisation.

We do see isolated incidents in which the pagans of a single city rallied to defend a particular temple, but none of these events sparked wider protests by pagans across the empire. Nor would one expect them to.

Fourth-century pagans were a unified community only in the imaginations of Christians. Things might have turned out differently if Libanius and others like him had spent their life battling Christianisation with the same all-encompassing vigour that the monks alongside Cynegius showed in promoting it. But Christianity was new and, in many ways, more attractive than the old cults.

Christians sought out converts, taught them what the religion promised, and supported them both spiritually and, if necessary, monetarily. Pagan cults were particularly ill-prepared to respond to a monotheistic religion that actively worked to permanently take worshippers away from the old gods.

When they were asked to choose, Romans overwhelmingly chose Christianity. They acquiesced to the rule of Christian emperors pursuing the elimination of paganism in exchange for a few decades of government salaries and fancy titles. These men could have fought against a change they fundamentally disagreed with. They got rich instead. Everyone tempted to believe that future generations will have time to address difficult issues that we selfishly choose to ignore should remember their sour legacy.

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