Pagans and Christians in the City
Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac
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- $47.99
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- $47.99
Publisher Description
Traditionalist Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and other cultural developments in the United States wonder why they are being forced to bracket their beliefs in order to participate in public life. This situation is not new, says Steven D. Smith: Christians two thousand years ago faced very similar challenges.
Picking up poet T. S. Eliot's World War II–era thesis that the future of the West would be determined by a contest between Christianity and "modern paganism," Smith argues in this book that today's culture wars can be seen as a reprise of the basic antagonism that pitted pagans against Christians in the Roman Empire. Smith's Pagans and Christians in the City looks at that historical conflict and explores how the same competing ideas continue to clash today. All of us, Smith shows, have much to learn by observing how patterns from ancient history are reemerging in today's most controversial issues.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith (The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom), professor of law at UC San Diego, has an elegant take on T.S. Eliot's proposition that a contest between Christianity and "modern Paganism" would decide the West's future, arguing that Eliot's thought experiment can illuminate contemporary American culture wars. Defining paganism as a persistent religious worldview that locates the sacred in the world rather than in God's realm is key to Smith's position; progressive lawyers, in his estimation, have successfully turned the "neutrally agnostic" Constitution into a "partisan weapon" that respects the sacred values of modern paganism while denying authority to the views of Christians. He argues that this is most visible in the "public annexation of the marketplace," where Christian workers are required to abide by pagan values, such as acceptance of nontraditional conceptions of sexual orientation and gender identity. The book's early musings on human nature and religion are well-reasoned and draw on a wide range of sources from antiquity to the present. This makes Smith's avoidance of discussing Christian sexual ethics and the vast array of Christian communities that subscribe to many "pagan practices" particularly frustrating. Evangelical readers will enjoy this work, but others will likely remain skeptical of Smith's grand claims.
