Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac
Overview
Traditionalist Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and other cultural developments in the United States wonder why they are being forced to bracket their beliefs in order to participate in public life. This situation is not new, says Steven D. Smith: Christians two thousand years ago faced very similar challenges.
Picking up poet T. S. Eliot’s World War II–era thesis that the future of the West would be determined by a contest between Christianity and “modern paganism,” Smith argues in this book that today’s culture wars can be seen as a reprise of the basic antagonism that pitted pagans against Christians in the Roman Empire. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City looks at that historical conflict and explores how the same competing ideas continue to clash today. All of us, Smith shows, have much to learn by observing how patterns from ancient history are reemerging in today’s most controversial issues.
Key Features
- Examines patterns of Christian cultural conflict beginning with the Roman Empire
- Focuses on conflicting views of sexuality and marriage
- Provides a helpful analysis of current cultural and political trends
Contents
- A Portentous Question, a Quixotic Proposal
- Homo Religiosus
- City of the Gods
- Believing in Paganism
- Looking beyond the World: The Christian Revolution
- The Logic of Pagan Persecution
- The Struggle for the City
- Under a Christian Canopy
- Secularism and Paganism
- Counterrevolution, Part I: Symbols, Sex, and the Constitution
- Counterrevolution, Part II: Religious Freedom
- Coming Home? The Imminent Immanent City
Praise for the Print Edition
The Romans perceived Christianity as a threat—and Christian ideas about sex figured significantly in that perception. They feared that Christianity would, in Smith’s evocative phrase, ‘turn out the lights on that “merry dance” [of paganism.]’ . . . We need a sober, penetrating, deeply insightful diagnosis of our current condition and account of where we are and how we got here. Professor Smith deserves our deep thanks for providing it.
—Robert P. George, Princeton University
A fascinating new take on America’s culture wars, rooted in history that most of us know in only the vaguest way.
—Douglas Laycock, University of Virginia Law School
Pagans and Christians in the City by Steven D. Smith is a wonderfully wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful book. Its lucid style draws the reader into a world of ancient questions and contemporary debates whose often surprising connections Smith helps us to see in a new and suggestive light. Secularists and believers alike have much to learn from his careful, balanced, and generous account.
—Anthony Kronman, Yale Law School
Product Details
- Title: Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac
- Author: Steven D. Smith
- Series: Emory University Studies in Law and Religion
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Publication Date: 2018
- Pages: 408
- Resource Type: Topical
- Topic: Christianity & Culture
Sample Pages from the Print Edition
Reviews
4 ratings
Bobby Terhune
8/23/2019
Bobby Terhune
8/23/2019
glorybound9
7/21/2019
Thank you, Logos, for picking up this book almost immediately after it was published! Richly researched and well thought out, Steven Smith's book holds up a mirror showing us how deeply embedded pagan sensibilities are in modern society and secularism, even invading our Christianity in many ways. He makes a tremendous case that the culture war between pagan Rome and Christian Rome continues today. Along the way, Smith's book provides a survey of history, philosophy, art, and religion of the past two thousand years. Sample quote from the book: belief in a heavenly city—and, more generally, in a transcendent reality or truth against which this world might be judged—gave Christians a critical perspective and standard that pagans whose reality was limited to this world did not have. That transcendent standard could be used to criticize—and, in time, to reform—practices that were taken for granted in the pagan world: infanticide, slavery, inequality, the neglect of the poor and the diseased. It is not by accident that the idea that history and society should be progressing toward some sort of ideal condition comes with the emergence of transcendent religion and, in particular, Christianity.121
