Rebuilding the Pantheon

     It is now quite obvious that a new age of paganism has dawned upon us.  No longer does Christian culture justly reign in the hearts and minds of the world.  This has been so, I think, for at least a century, but now it is easy enough to look around at the present state of things and deduce that the old pantheon has once again been enthroned on the principles of a false morality.

     Though many of the current generation might not conscientiously subscribe to any definite morality (I doubt if the average college student is even prepared to discuss what morality means), they live by a morality nonetheless.  We do not live in an amoral society.  Wherever there is approbation or affirmation, there is at least a sense of right and wrong and where there is a sense of right and wrong, there is a principle by which to judge something accordingly.

     Any and every different morality, complete or not, has an end; a perceived good to which that morality aspires.  For example, if one deems it right to care for personal hygiene, the good to which that norm aspires is the health of the individual.  Simple enough.  Christian morality has God as its end because God is goodness itself and all good things are good insofar as they come from God.  Furthermore, one can hope for happiness in apprehending good things because they ultimately lead one to happiness in God.  Hygiene, then, is a reasonable enough norm as someone who is clean and therefore healthy is more likely to be happier than someone who is not.

     But I am not writing to discuss hygiene.  What has become obvious to the Christian standing apart from modern culture is that God is no longer recognized as the end of morality.  He is no longer recognized at all.  And with the Source-and-Summit of goodness removed, the whole structure is dismantled.  We now see a scattered, fragmented collection of principles which have only sub-perfect goods as their ends, each set up as something worthy of worship in itself.

     I wish it were that society had only fallen under the demons of pagan Rome, where greedy traders and "honest workers" alike consecrate their lives to Vulcan and Mercury, where Venus bestows her blessing on the unbridled sexual escapades of youth, and where libations are offered to Bacchus in return for the destructive pleasure of drunken revelry.  Gaia has reformed her demands and now asks that you drive a Prius, eat only free-range eggs, and separate your recyclables.  Minerva, while still cherishing a few remaining rationalists, scolds those who are perhaps too "narrow-minded" to concede to the pedantry of her priests.

     These gods have indeed been resurrected, but a far more malicious and (thankfully still) controversial presence in our society is the resurgence of the older and much more sinister cults of Ba'al, to whom one was not a man until he sacrificed his virginity to the temple prostitutes, and of Moloch, to whom women sacrifice their children in the hope of being spared the hardships of a capricious life.

     The principles aforementioned are not (as of yet) personified as they were in pagan Rome and ancient Babylon, but they hold their false place of honor nonetheless.  What turns a veritable good into a vicious god?  It is that these ends of today's morality are set up as the end; that there is nothing more to live up to.  The art of pagan worship is nothing more than the art of fooling oneself into believing that happiness will come when the gods are appeased, despite their quarrelling even among themselves.

     What is a Christian to do in a neo-pagan world?  The answer does not come easily, but it helps to know what it means to be Christian and who one's gods are.