The Pagan West

Over at First Things, Peter Leithart has a fascinating post wondering whether we need to "re-Paganize" the West as part of our evangelization efforts.  Here's an excerpt:

It’s a truism among African theologians that the Church has grown most rapidly where traditional African religions are strongest. According to Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako, this is no accident but highlights the “special relationship” that African “primal religions” have with Christianity. Like primal African religion, Christianity displays a strong sense of human finitude and sin, believes in a spiritual world that interacts with the human world, teaches the reality of life after death, and cultivates the sacramental sense that physical objects are carriers of spiritual power. Christianity catches on there because it gives names to the realities they already know and experience.

This special relationship is not unique to twenty-first-century Africa. Many African theologians invoke the patristic notion of a praeparatio evangelii, the belief that pre-Christian religion was designed to prepare the way for the gospel, to justify their approach to African religions. Athens might have been the birthplace of philosophy, but the Athenian citizens opened civic assemblies with sacrifices and Athenian women celebrated the Thesmophoria in honor of Demeter.

Sophisticated as Roman politics and military were, they cleansed the burned Capitolium in A.D. 69 with a suovetaurilia sacrifice to Mars of a pig, ram, and bull; and Trajan’s column shows the emperor offering the same sacrifice to purify the Roman army. Tacitus records that the Germanic tribes outside the empire sacrificed animals and humans, met their gods in sacred groves, and predicted the future with twigs and bird auguries. The Letter to the Hebrews, with its talk of priests and sacrifice, of blood and miasma and purgation, spoke to Greeks and Germans as much as to Jews.

If Christianity is most successful among traditional religions, perhaps the Church has to reinvent primal religion before the West can be restored to Christ. Of course I don’t mean that churches should send their tithes to Wicca International or initiate pulpit exchanges with the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. Re-paganizing the West means acting on the premise that, for all our pretense of sophistication, the West has never entirely escaped the impulses and habits of primitive culture, or that, by escaping Christianity, we are reverting to it. Re-paganizing the West means working out the implications of the French sociologist Bruno Latour’s assertion: We have never been modern.