{"id":10841,"date":"2019-09-10T20:15:15","date_gmt":"2019-09-11T02:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10841"},"modified":"2019-09-11T17:05:48","modified_gmt":"2019-09-11T23:05:48","slug":"when-pagans-return-who-gets-hurt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10841","title":{"rendered":"When “Pagans” Return, Who Gets Hurt?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read an alternative-history novel now and then,((Robert Harris’ Fatherland<\/em><\/a> remains an all-time favorite.)) especially those in which the Pagans triumph. <\/a>\"\"For instance, John M. Ford <\/a>created a 15th-century world, Dragon Waiting: A Masque of History<\/em><\/a>, in which Julian the Philosopher, the last Pagan emperor, did <\/em>put on his armor before that skirmish with the Persians, and, consequently, made possible a Pagan empire centered on Byzantium \u2014 not that they are necessarily the good guys to Western Europeans.((Bonus: fans of Richard III of England<\/a> will like this one a lot. There are also vampires.))<\/p>\n

<\/a>Another book that I have ordered is The Kingdom of the Wicked, Book One: Rules<\/em><\/a> by Helen Dale, an Australian writer who is also a lawyer and one-time Classics scholar. In an review essay titled “Return of the Pagans<\/a>,” she writes,((Law & Liberty <\/em><\/a>describes itself as focused “on the classical liberal tradition of law and political thought and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons.”))<\/p>\n

Kingdom of the Wicked<\/i> is a work of speculative fiction. It takes place in a Roman Empire that\u2019s undergone an industrial revolution. My initial academic training was in classics (I became a lawyer later to pay the bills), so I\u2019m well aware pagan Rome had different cultural values from those now present in the modern, industrialized West.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>She says of herself that she “lacks a religious orientation.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

This serves to explain [my] mystification at adherents of both immanent and transcendent religions. We classical liberals really do spend a lot of time asking, \u201cI just want to say, you know, can we all get along?\u201d In doing so we forget how rare we are in the population. Minding other people\u2019s morality is deeply human. It turns up everywhere, a cosmic homeopathic joke with only memories of being funny.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Her essay discusses Steve D. Smith’s Pagans & Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac,<\/a><\/em> another book I need to read. By “Pagans,” Smith does not mean today’s Wiccans, Druids, etc. but rather those who lack a “transcendent” orientation to god(s) above.<\/p>\n

The first half of Pagans & Christians in the City <\/i><\/a>is given over to comparative religion. Smith outlines the underlying logic of Roman paganism and emergent (Catholic) Christianity and draws out similarities and differences. He discusses how paganism locates the sacred within<\/i> the world \u2014 it\u2019s an immanent<\/i> religiosity whereby the divine emerges from the natural environment. Christianity and Islam, by contrast, are instances of transcendent<\/i> religiosity \u2014 they place what is most sacred outside the world, in part because God made<\/i> the world.<\/p>\n

While classicists and scholars of comparative religion appreciate this distinction, it\u2019s not widely known otherwise. For my sins I once spent a couple of years tutoring Latin, losing track of students\u2019 pleading enquiries about what Romans actually believed<\/i>. That I resorted to suggestions like \u201cread Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses<\/i> while stoned\u201d or \u201cgo to Japan and get a priest or priestess to explain the significance of The Great Ise Shrine\u201d gives a sense of the magnitude of Smith\u2019s achievement. Without once falling back on theologically similar Shinto (which I\u2019ve pillaged as a novelist and teacher of classics), he takes Roman paganism seriously as a religious tradition on its own terms and renders it real and alive.<\/p>\n

In the second half of Pagans & Christians in the City<\/i>, Smith sets out a bold claim. In short, he argues that paganism never went away. The immanent orientation to the sacred it advances is not only in direct competition with Christian transcendence, but competition between the two orientations continues today \u2014 it manifests in the US as \u201cculture wars\u201d \u2014 because a number of progressive values comport readily with pagan conceptions of the sacred. This is particularly so when it comes to sex and sexuality. To take two of Smith\u2019s case studies among many: modern liberal democracies have simply abandoned the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim view of same-sex attraction and abortion and substituted the pagan Roman view wholesale.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Where this leads includes a discussion of what happens when monotheism goes wrong: “bigotry, misogyny, vandalism, and what amounts to a war on human sexuality” contrasted with the other extreme: “If, however, you\u2019re one of those fashionable humanists for whom Roman civil religion and civic nationalism seem sophisticated and high-minded, you will learn how those fine ideals were drenched in blood \u2014 both animal and human \u2014 and the extent to which Roman sexual liberality was founded on terrifying exploitation of slaves and (sometimes) non-citizens.”<\/p>\n

Again we have the argument that environmentalism functions as a substitute immanent religion<\/strong>, a theme familiar both to some religion scholars<\/a> and to some Christian preachers.<\/p>\n

So “the Pagans” here are not contemporary religious Pagans, be they Heathens or Hellenic reconstructionists. But they are a broadly drawn collection of people whose values might well match with those of many or most Wiccans, etc. etc. And these values are in sometimes violent conflict with the “transcendental” values, even when the conflict is cast in secular terms.<\/p>\n

Read it, just to stretch your brain.<\/a><\/p>\n

And if you are commuting, listen to the related podcast interview with Steven Smith.<\/a> Downloadable mp3 audio at the link.<\/p>\n

You may not want the culture war, but the culture war wants you.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read an alternative-history novel now and then,((Robert Harris’ Fatherland remains an all-time favorite.)) especially those in which the Pagans triumph. For instance, John M. Ford created a 15th-century world, Dragon Waiting: A Masque of History, in which Julian the Philosopher, the last Pagan emperor, did put on his armor before that skirmish with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[24,26,216,5,56],"class_list":["post-10841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christianity","tag-culture","tag-literature","tag-paganism","tag-rome"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-2OR","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11101,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11101","url_meta":{"origin":10841,"position":0},"title":"“Pagans,” a Short Documentary Film","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 25, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"? Oooh, scary Pagans! We spend a lot of time with the curtains drawn, gazing at candles, right. We wear black robes . . .\u00a0 Seriously, there is some good stuff here: Pagans, a short documentary. To tell the story of the dramatic rise of neo-paganism in America, though, you\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10197,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10197","url_meta":{"origin":10841,"position":1},"title":"“Solitary Pagans,” a New Academic Study","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 4, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Back in the mid-1990s, Nancy Mostad, then the acquisitions editor at Llewellyn, told me that they estimated that 70 percent of purchasers of books on Paganism were solitaries.Hence the immense success -- by their standards -- of Scott Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner. Meanwhile, sociologist of religion\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8262,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8262","url_meta":{"origin":10841,"position":2},"title":"Call for Papers: Family, Home, and Ways of Life: Living Paganisms in a Globalized World","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 19, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Information on the upcoming Family, Home, and Ways of Life: Living Paganisms in a Globalized World conference in Krakow, Poland, 24-25 March 2017, may be found at this link. Presentations may address various issues within the following (suggested) topics: Everyday life of contemporary Pagans Understanding human relationships: from till death\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10799,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10799","url_meta":{"origin":10841,"position":3},"title":"A New Study of Solitary Pagans","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 19, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Solitary Pagans: Contemporary Witches, Wiccans, and Others Who Practice Alone is a new study from Helen A. Berger, a sociologist of religion who has been studying contemporary Paganism for decades. Her body of work is large enough now that future scholars will be returning to it again and again for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/solitary-pagans.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":13099,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13099","url_meta":{"origin":10841,"position":4},"title":"UK Pagans “More Established”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 29, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"The Guardian newspaper (UK) cherry-picks a few things from the 2021 England and Wales census, including a rise in the number of self-identified Pagans. 2) Pagans and wiccans are becoming more established More established [than self-identified shamans] are pagans [sic] , who number 74,000 people (up from 57,000 in 2011)\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"census\"","block_context":{"text":"census","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=census"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/stonehenge-2018-1024x614.webp?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/stonehenge-2018-1024x614.webp?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/stonehenge-2018-1024x614.webp?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2062,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2062","url_meta":{"origin":10841,"position":5},"title":"Cocktails for Pagans","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 1, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Who says that today's Pagans are not influencing the larger culture? The New York Times' Style section offers the \"right drink\" for every winter holiday party, including the Bohemian Spritz for \"dilettante Pagans\" celebrating the solstice. (If that link is problematic, try this one.) For those slightly weary of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"culture\"","block_context":{"text":"culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=culture"},"img":{"alt_text":"Bohemian Spritz","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/graphics8.nytimes.com\/images\/2010\/12\/01\/dining\/01parties-chameleon\/01parties-chameleon-custom16.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10841"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10863,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10841\/revisions\/10863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}