The repaganisation of the West

The return of Greco-Roman values

In the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, a group of seven people – and their dog – hide in a cave to avoid persecution at the hands of the Roman emperor Decius around the year 250 AD, only to awake during the reign of Theodosius II two centuries later.

They had been told to worship the Roman idols and recant their faith, but chose instead to give away all their worldly goods and retire to a mountain cave to pray, where they fell asleep. Decius then had the entrance to the cave sealed up.

They slept for 196 or perhaps 373 years – the sources vary – but at any rate, it was a very long sleep.

According to the story, in the reign of Theodosius, around the year 456, a landowner opened the cave and found the sleepers inside. They imagined that they had been asleep for only a day and sent one of their number off to the town to buy food.

Here they found that their faith, once persecuted and despised, was now the official state religion of the empire and almost everyone was a believer, or at least pretended to be. A huge amount can change in the world when you’re asleep.

The story makes me wonder what a modern-day sleeper who had gone into a cave in 1960 would find on awakening in 2023.

In London, Vienna, Berlin and capital cities across western Europe, he’d see a strange selection of colourful flags displayed on buildings, including government buildings, and even on the embassies of the United States and other countries.

If he visited in June, he’d see far more of these ubiquitous colours, and notice that there was a religious procession throughout major cities bedecked in them, although it wouldn’t look like the Corpus Christi celebrations he remembered, and certainly featured fewer clothes.

He might read about dozens of cases of vandalism and arson against churches in Canada, which followed mass hysteria about the Catholic Church burying the victims of its abuse, a hysteria fuelled by politicians and which turned out to be untrue.

He’d see that country’s prime minister tweeting (never mind having to explain what that meant) stuff like: ‘Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people are valued – and deserve better. As we mark #SistersInSpirit Day, we remember those who have been murdered or are missing, and we stand with their families and their communities.’ In fact, he’d find that country strange in every way.

He would also hear about increasing numbers of churches being burned down in France and demolished in England. He’d read about a 170-year-old Christian house of worship in Oldham, Lancashire, pulled down by the council over fears it would attract vandals and become an ‘eyesore blighting the local area’ – although this rather invites the question who the real vandals are. Indeed, this is the third church in the town to be recently knocked down.

He would notice popular musicians using satanic imagery in a way that doesn’t even shock but just raises a yawn. He might see that Canterbury Cathedral, the seat of the English Church since the days of St Augustine, was hosting ‘school disco’ nights playing the music of the Spice Girls, Britney Spears and S Club 7.

He would note that blasphemy laws are no longer in use, and that artists are even given state funding to produce work which mocks Christ or the Virgin Mary. But he might, after a while, note that they have been replaced by newer, and far stricter, forms of blasphemy law. He might also have heard about the hysteria that followed the death of the man it was now a crime to mock, a convicted criminal put to death in the West’s most powerful empire.

He might read how in Finland two people have essentially been put on trial for their Christian beliefs, accused of ‘hate speech’ and interviewed by the police after questioning the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland’s official partnership with a Helsinki Pride festival. Päivi Räsänen faces up to two years in jail for publicly voicing her opinion on marriage and sexuality in a 2004 pamphlet and for debating the subject in a 2019 radio talk show.

Our traveller would also note that infanticide had become widespread and legal, and in some countries suicide too, paid for by the state even for the young and physically healthy.

What our sleeper would conclude, correctly, is that the West had undergone repaganisation, and that society had returned to the norms that had once been universal but were upended by the Christian revolution.

This was the conclusion of French author Chantal Delsol in La Fin de la Chrétienté (The End of the Christian World), a process which she argued began in the 1960s and which has reached its fruition now.

Just as Christians brought what Delsol called a ‘normative inversion’ to pagan Rome, overturning its old moral order, so the same thing is happening again, in particular in regard to sexual mores. This has been the real story of the post-1960s world, the biggest change to our civilisation since, at least, the Reformation, and perhaps the Christianisation of Rome.

Today, just 46 per cent of Britons identify as Christian, down from 72 per cent two decades ago. In the US, for many years seen as impervious to the godlessness of western Europe, religious belief and attendance has dramatically fallen in the past 20 years. The millennial generation, which includes most adult Americans under 40, is the first one in which Christians are a minority. Even Poland, arguably Europe’s last bastion of Christianity, is now losing its religion.

The scale of the change has been rapid. As Scott Alexander put it: ‘Everything happens faster these days. It took Christianity three hundred years to go from Christ to Constantine. It only took fifty for gay pride to go from the Stonewall riots to rainbow-colored gay bracelets urging you to support your local sheriff department.’

When I say paganism, I don’t mean people sacrificing goats or dressing up as druids at Stonehenge, although self-proclaimed druidism is indeed on the rise, and today, 1.5 million people in the US identify as pagans, a tenfold increase on 2001. Likewise self-identified witches are especially popular on TikTok, the brain-melting social media site popular with adolescents. At the start of the Ukrainian war some prominent American witches even put a hex on President Putin, although it doesn’t seem to have done much good. Halloween has long displaced All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day as the main event of the seasons of remembrance, while the rising popularity of names such as Thor and Odin attests to a certain cultural repaganising.

Most of all, though, what I mean by paganism is the default beliefs and behaviours in most human societies, which Christianity certainly isn’t.

People have a tendency to assume that their cultural upbringing is the norm and that human nature is much the same across the world. In fact, Christianity is really very strange and counter-intuitive. Paganism is normal.

It’s not normal for a society to place such levels of moral shame on its aristocracy to behave itself, especially aristocratic men. It’s much more normal for powerful men to dominate and crush their enemies, and to sexually exploit women. Christianity’s emphasis on forgiveness and internal guilt is weird: indeed WEIRD is the acronym coined by Joseph Henrich to describe the way that Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic people behave compared to others.

Similarly, the Christian taboos about suicide and infanticide are unusual. A recent Canadian survey found that 27 per cent of the public believe that people should have access to euthanasia because of poverty (rising to 41 per cent among 18–34 year olds), and a majority supported it for the disabled. This would have been totally unremarkable in ancient Greece or Rome, but unthinkable a couple of generations ago – and since there is most likely an association between public acceptance of suicide, and suicide rates, this is a worrying development.

Canada, at the forefront of this repaganisation, has adopted the most post-Christian euthanasia programme in the West, which will soon extend to drug addicts; it has even seen assisted suicide turned into a commodity, with a glamorous video featuring a woman talking about her upcoming death.

Then there is infanticide, which was commonplace in the ancient world. Louise Perry recently wrote in First Things about learning how archaeologists recognise the site of a Roman brothel – because they always have the bodies of murdered newborns underneath. She admitted that she found this a painful thought and that ‘to mention abortion and infanticide in the same breath is a provocation … But this distinction has not been made by all peoples at all times.’

Infanticide was the norm in antiquity. Across almost all cultures in the known world newborns might have to wait several days before their fate was decided. Often some form of ceremony would take place where the father would publicly accept the child as his. Or if he didn’t, that was that.

In Sparta, that famously cruel pagan society, newborns might be left to the wolves, but this was an almost universally accepted practice. A surviving letter from an upper-class Roman man to his wife instructs her to kill the child she is carrying if it turns out to be the wrong sex. The only people who did not accept infanticide, the Romans noted, were a couple of small German tribes and, at the other end of the empire, the Jews. Of course, what we call ‘reproductive rights’ is motivated by very different ideas of morality to those held in the ancient world, but the end result is the same. Repaganisation in part explains why anti-abortion campaigns tend to be a vote loser, even in the US; it goes against a widespread human social norm.

Christianity was revolutionary, and in particular it brought a ‘revolution to the erotic’, as Tom Holland wrote in Dominion:

The insistence of scripture that a man and a woman, whenever they took the marital bed, were joined as Christ and his Church were joined, becoming one flesh, gave to both a rare dignity. If the wife was instructed to submit to her husband, then so equally was the husband instructed to be faithful to his wife. Here, by the standards of the age into which Christianity had been born, was an obligation that demanded an almost heroic degree of self-denial.

Divorce was prohibited, and to leave a wife was to ‘render her an adulteress’, as Christ had said. Even more radically, as the religion evolved, couples could no longer be forced into marriage and priests were instructed to join them even without the permission or knowledge of their parents.

The religion placed great restraints on male sexual desires, stigmatising adultery, divorce, prostitution and the sexual use of female slaves. As Delsol wrote of the new moral order of late antiquity: ‘They prized much that the Romans held in contempt and condemned much that the Romans prized, particularly in matters related to sex and family.’

So it is again, and even if the sexual revolution was driven by ideas of freedom and equality, it has often developed in ways that has led one critic to call it ‘the sexual reaction’. In men like Harvey Weinstein, the villain of the #MeToo movement, Tom Holland saw a truly Roman figure, freed from the shackles of Jerusalem.

Modern progressivism is paradoxical in being both pagan and sort of hyper-Christian. It has a strong emphasis on the first being last, and the last first. It makes suffering and victimhood sacred. Social justice politics is about who gets to be on the Cross, as Holland once said, with various identities competing over their perceived persecution.

As progressivism replaces a previous civilisation, so it has retained some of its inheritance. Just as Delsol wrote, this continuity is normal for civilisational transformation – the Christians borrowed much of pagan Greece’s ethics, building a civilisation that was a fusion of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. Likewise, our new civilisation is a fusion of Rome, Harvard and Silicon Valley.

The new religion even claims its own ‘virtuous pagans’, with a recent St Francis of Assisi exhibition calling him ‘an ally … of causes related to social justice, interreligious dialogue, socialism, feminism, the animal-rights movement and ecology’.

Like Christianity, modern progressivism is universal and determined to save every human soul, although expressed in the language of rights. Like the old faith, it has advanced most especially in cosmopolitan cities, especially where identity lacks roots.

But progressivism also contains elements which are deeply pagan. The default religions are ancestor worship and earth worship, both of which have seen a return, although only certain types of ancestors are allowed to be venerated with ‘land declarations’ and other such nods towards sacred races. We are also seeing the decline of forgiveness as a central concept, and the erosion of WEIRD norms.

It also comes with its own form of pagan intolerance. The ancients believed that impiety was even worse than murder, and with hate speech laws we have returned to a Hellenic idea about offending the gods.

Paganism was tolerant in allowing the worship of any deity one chose, but it was firm in its insistence that everyone honour Caesar, the state cult. The authorities are perfectly happy with Christianity today: you can worship all you want, but if you are an ambitious politician you will also recognise the supremacy of ‘diversity and equality’. You will take part in the state ceremony. You will worship Caesar.

Perhaps the biggest indication of repaganisation, and most unremarked upon, was the fact that in 2021 both the leaders of the US and Britain were Roman Catholics, in the case of prime minister Boris Johnson the first such Catholic — and no one cared. Whether our leaders are notionally Protestant and Catholic, what matters is that their ‘faith doesn’t get in the way of politics’, which means they must conform to the state faith on important moral matters – those who don’t, like Tim Farron or the SNP’s Kate Forbes, may as well go and live in a cave.