In The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), T. S. Eliot saw a conflict between Christianity and paganism shaping the 20th century. Steven D. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City applies Eliot’s map to today’s culture wars, especially in the United States.
...His book makes the case that today’s culture war shares much in common with the culture war that rocked ancient Rome.
...The paganism of Rome treated the world itself as sacred. But Christianity introduced a radically different perspective. Christians—while affirming the world’s goodness—located the sacred in another world altogether. In other words, paganism was an immanent form of religiosity, while Christianity embraced the transcendent.
...Modern secularism understands itself as an immanent movement that relegates religion to a purely private role. Political secularism attempts the virtually unprecedented experiment of establishing political order without reference to God or, in theory, any form of sacred. Philosophical secularism claims that rational scientific explanations of the world have made religion obsolete. If Max Weber is to be believed, we inhabit a disenchanted world.
But Smith isn’t buying it. Somewhat like Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, he sees pagan forms of religiosity popping up in surprising places. The late legal theorist Ronald Dworkin, for instance, endorsed a pantheistic “religion without God,” and writers like Sam Harris and Barbara Ehrenreich advocate modes of re-enchantment.
...In each area, Smith’s pagan-versus-Christian template proves more illuminating than the secular-versus-religion framing favored in most “culture war” analysis. The Constitution isn’t a battleground between secular and religious interpretations but between transcendent religion (Christianity in particular) and immanent religion. Transcendent religious expressions are excluded, but immanent religiosity is permitted.
...But the most fundamental problem with Smith’s book is his shaky deployment of the terms immanent and transcendent. Christianity, he says, is transcendent, in that it locates human fulfillment in a world beyond “this world,” while paganism is an immanent religiosity that seeks fulfillment in the here-and-now.
The terms are misleading at best. For pagans, the human world is marred by mortality, while the gods are immortals who transcend this vale of tears. Olympus is beyond this world, where the gods feast on ambrosia. On the other hand, “transcendence” is hardly the whole story for Christianity, which affirms that the Creator took frail flesh to live a human life and die a human death. It was the unthinkable immanence of the Christian God that posed a stumbling block for pagans, as well as for early Christian heretics.
Along similar lines, treating Christianity as “transcendent” obscures the inherently socio-political character of Christianity; that is, it fails to do justice to the church. One of Christianity’s prime novelties was the formation of a new kind of social body—similar to Judaism but not ethnically defined, universal as the empire but entirely independent of it, a polis that was not confined to a single location, a this-worldly communion that also encompassed the heavenly assembly.
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Originally Posted by Chris
