Friends, our cultural flashpoints have been seen before. They are precedented. Our fathers and mothers in the faith faced a cultural onslaught that makes ours tame by comparison. And they overcame. Yes, often through great suffering and persecution. And we ought to consider their example.
I think I am becoming more and more known for my phrase, “These are precedented times.” It is one of my missions in life to help people avoid cultural anxiety and panic, the roots of which are often the sense that the world has never before seen the challenges we face, and the fruits of which are things like desperately clinging to bad people and bad ideas (e.g., Donald Trump, “Christian” Nationalism).
That said, there is a sense in which our challenges are new. They are relatively new for us. It is jarring to live in a culture saturated for so long in Christian atmosphere suddenly obsessed with things like cross-dressing and genital mutilation. In the context of the Christian west this is a very new development. But in the context of pagan societies, it is as old as fallen time: androgyny, cross-dressing, and bodily mutilation has always gone hand-in-hand with paganism. You can read all about it here.
Our current cultural upheavals are best seen as symptoms of a deeper problem. The last wisps of Christendom’s oxygen are fading and we are experiencing the re-paganization of the Western world. You can read all about that in Steven Smith’s Pagans & Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac. Or, for a more concrete “on the ground” view, Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites: New Religions For a Godless World. The “old gods” never really went away. They went underground, and they are making a strong reemergence right before our eyes.
And what do they care about? Well, what are our cultural flashpoints? Here are my top three. First, racial discord—how can different peoples coexist and settle their grievances? This is manifest in the rise of Critical Theory, and its answers do more to stoke grievances between people groups than settle them. Abortion makes the top three, too, going by the moniker “bodily autonomy.” And, finally, total sexual autonomy; the right to sleep with whomever one wants, to morph and bend one’s sexual behavior and to mutilate one’s body in essence.
Racial identity, disposal of unwanted children, and free sex. Those are the top priorities for a significant segment of western society—perhaps even half of society.
Here is a CNN report just this week: “Under strict abortion law, Texas had nearly 10,000 more births than expected in last nine months of 2022, research suggests.” The article is a fairly straightforward recitation of the facts, but the online world of progressivism put a pretty strong opinion spin on the story: namely, that this is some kind of tragedy. How awful that ten thousand babies were allowed to be born in the oppressive, theocratic state of Texas! Those babies represent, you see, a violation of a woman’s bodily autonomy.
This all brings me to what I really want to share with you this week. The other day I was reading a translation of a very ancient document and was reminded—and just completely astonished—of how … precedented our times are. It was written in the context of the Greco-Roman pagan world. No one knows for certain the identity of its author (although Charles Hill has argued that it’s Polycarp). It simply says, in Greek: “Mathetes.” That could certainly be his name, but “mathetes” in Greek simply means “Disciple.” It could be a term used to preserve anonymity; it is written by a disciple of Jesus.
“Mathetes” wrote a letter to someone named “Diognetus,” and scholars generally date this letter to around A.D. 130—one thousand, nine hundred years ago. Why did he write it? Because this “Diognetus,” apparently a pagan of some sort, was curious about this newfangled group of people called “Christians.” Mathetes writes:
Since I see the, most excellent Diognetus, exceedingly desirous to learn the mode of worshipping God prevalent among the Christians, and inquiring very carefully and earnestly concerning them, what God they trust in, and what form of religion they observe […] I cordially welcome this thy desire, and I implore God, who enables us both to speak and to hear, to grant to me so to speak, that, above all, I may hear you have been edified, and to you so to hear, that I who speak may have no cause of regret for having done so.
Just think of that. We have a document from the very earliest days of the Christian movement, the days when Christians were an extreme minority often suffering brutal persecution. And the document describes who Christians are.