Pagan

PAGAN: n. one who is not a Christian, Muslim, or Jew; one who professes no religious belief

Some 700 years ago, pagan meant “a person of non-Christian or non-Jewish” faith. That definition is only a bit narrower than its present definition which includes the three so-called Abrahamic religions. Before that time, its antecedents underwent an interesting transformation. The Latin pagus meant “country people, provincials, rural dwellers.” In the nineteenth century, philologists speculated that the religious sense arose from the fact that rural dwellers persisted in the worship of the Greco-Roman pantheon while city-dwellers adopted Christianity more rapidly. However, more recent scholars favor the suggestion that it derives from military jargon in which paganus referred to a civilian. Christians regarded themselves as Christ’s soldiers, or milites. By that reasoning, the unconverted were mere civilians, or – considering the earlier philology – mere country bumpkins.

Indeed, both Augustine and Tertullian used paganus in this manner. By 1568, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was used to mean “not belonging to a nation or community that acknowledges the true God,” as illustrated by Matthew Arnold in an essay written in 1865 where he refers to “The ideal, cheerful, sensuous, pagan life.” The current dictionary definition first appeared in 1908 when it was applied to modern pantheists and nature-worshippers.

But today, John Daniel Davidson has another take on the word. In his Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, he says, “The term ‘pagan’ . . . refers rather to an entire system of belief, which holds that truth is relative and that we are therefore free to ascribe sacred or divine status to the here and now, to things or activities, even to human beings if they’re powerful enough.”

For example, pro-abortion advocates claim that the right of a child to be born does not exist, that only the mother may decide based on her own morality and desires. Again, throughout the West, governments are beginning to champion the “right to die,” encouraging not only those who are terminally ill to end their lives with medical assistance but also those who are depressed, lonely, or simply tired of living – no matter their age. In other words, the right to life is a relative issue, something Davidson sees in the new paganism.

Davidson contends that the teachings of Christianity actually led to the tenets of classical liberalism. Our classically liberal founders – even Thomas Jefferson – believed that the survival of the new republic depended on the influence of religion and the morality it promotes. The demands of the new paganism eschew the influence of Christianity, insisting that religion must remain a private matter. A central pillar of this emerging immorality is that “since nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

Through acts of love and compassion, Christianity supplanted not only the declining worship of the Olympian pantheon but also the concept that might makes right, the sexual exploitation of both adults and children, and ultimately the enslavement of human beings. Though rulers and individuals might defy Christian morality, its power shaped the intellectual and spiritual life of those who embraced it, giving rise to our concept of human rights. It influenced the cultural sense of the good and the true, and created beauty expressed in all the arts.

The word that started as a dismissive label and evolved into a categorization of beliefs may now best describe the fast-growing worldview that amalgamates scientism (not science), a new human sacrifice, transgenderism, pedophilia, and – Davidson argues – transhumanism and AI. The Enlightenment sought to hold to the temporal gifts of Christianity while rejecting the spiritual source of those gifts. Three hundred years later, that philosophy’s failure is manifest. Only Christianity can stand against the new paganism as it once stood against the old. The new pagans would say “resistance is futile.” The Christian will reply with Christ’s words, even “the gates of hell shall not prevail.”