Michael Novak on Obama's first week:
The Obama presidency is only one week old, but it has already limned its main moral outlines:
On January 20, President Obama called for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act. He also declared his intention to give multiple rights and privileges to homosexual couples.
[snip]From these announcements we learn that President Obama recognizes no difference between the Jewish-Christian covenant between a woman and a man (a covenant that they will have and nurture children, if they are so blessed), and a civil contract between two persons of any sex, in order to set up a household of affection and sexual favors.
This is a relapse into paganism. The point of monogamous family networks is to treat male and female with complementary and mutually cooperative dignity and to tie the power of sexuality (male, especially) to self-sacrificing communities of love.
Perhaps Novak means "hedonism" rather than "paganism," although bringing homosexual relations under the regime of rights and responsibilities that the estate of marriage entails doesn't sound awfully hedonistic to me. And civil marriage is not by necessity a "community of self-sacrificing love." That would be the Church, in which case the proper concern would be that gays got married in a Church surrounded by Christians who will support them and hold them accountable, rather than tying the knot at the magistrate's office.
More to the point, Paganism in many of its Indo-European manifestations, is a religion whose chief end is to propitiate god/the gods in order to maximize this-worldly success: health, economic well-being, security, and so forth.
To the extent that American government, technology and economic theory are attuned to economic growth, longevity, and maintaining a balance of power among competing interest groups, our society's ethos is pagan, although we don't look to transcendent power, either good or malign, to account for health and wealth and security. Studying proximate causes, rather than ultimate causes, is enough. Novak himself, to the extent that he's a cheerleader for the American way, is more thoroughly paganized than he surely realizes.
The question is, what do you do about this? A-ha! Time for a lesson from history!
A lot changed as Roman power declined in the West. Christianity went from being a persecuted sect to a state religion. The practice of religion began to focus on shrines that held the relics of saints. Christians learned to bless the rough and tumble techniques of statecraft, so long as the sword was deployed against non-Christians (Jews, Arians, pagans, etc.)
Russell's book, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, argues that Christianity is essentially a world-denying religion focused on sin, forgiveness and eschatological judgment, but it had to give a bit when it came up against a world-affirming and robust paganism in the Germanic tribes rampaging through the Western Roman Empire. What was a temporary concession to the pagan worldview became a syncretistic religion. Old pagan shrines are re-dedicated to the Christian deity. Old pagan remedies for illness are replaced by the healing power of saints' relics. And Christian morality gets boiled down to Germanic notions of honor. So you get the Crusades. Medieval Christianity, Russell argues, ain't much different than Voodoo.
Now one might ask how world-denying a religion is whose founder raised the dead, healed the sick, fed the poor, feasted with sinners, and so forth. Russell's book is not without its critics in the scholarly community, and here is a review that seems to reflect both the praise and blame that scholars have afforded it.
More to the point, to what extent does the Church acknowledge this worldly concerns as legitimate, while reorienting people to other-worldly concerns, the meaning of one's life in light of the certainty of death, the dependence on a new creation in light of the failure of all man-made utopias and the scientific judgment that one day this whole universe is just going to fizzle out?
Recent Comments