Essay
Belief
Creed
Paganism
10 min read

Are we Secular, Christian or Pagan?

After the Paris Olympics, Graham Tomlin wonders whether a full-on secularism could veer back towards a modern paganism.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Paris' Pantheon temple displays a flag and banners.
Temple of a nation: The Pantheon, Paris.
Fred Romero, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Nicola Olyslagers is an Australian high jumper who recently won silver at the Paris Olympics. Gearing herself up for one of her final jumps, she lifted her hands and eyes to the heavens at which point the BBC commentator said: ‘and so, she looks to the gods for help as she prepares to jump’.  

All very dramatic. Except that is exactly what she was not doing.  

Olyslagers is a devout Christian. She found her faith aged 16, and regularly speaks of it in public. Her pre-jump routine was not a prayer to the gods of the pagan pantheon, an appeal for a slice of luck or good fortune, but a prayer to the God of Jesus – a commentator who had done their homework might have been expected to know that.  

In such a public display of devotion, she is far from alone. A feature of this Olympics is the number of athletes who have worn their faith on their sleeves, from Adam Peaty to Gabriel Medina, in the most famous surfing photograph of the games. Every night you see someone thanking God, crossing themselves, advertising their faith – not mainly as a plea for victory, but as Ashley Null points out elsewhere on Seen & Unseen as a way of handling the ups and downs of elite sport. 

When you place these public professions of Christian faith next to the row over the opening ceremony, it raises an interesting question. During that ceremony, Christians around the world were upset at what looked like a parody of the Last Supper. Olympics organisers then claimed that the offending scene was not intended to mock the heart of Christian worship but was a reference to Dionysius and the feast of the pagan gods, connecting the modern Olympics with its roots in the pagan world of the classical period. 

If it was a reference to Dionysian pagan feasting, the opening ceremony was perhaps a more telling sign of the direction of our culture than we might think, and one that might cause Christians even more concern than a second-rate mockery of the Last Supper. Because it clarifies a choice that our culture might face as our era proceeds. 

****

Gabriel Medina celebrates his surfing gold medal.

A surfer stands in the air, above a wave, with his board beside him.

In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, T.S. Eliot gave a series of lectures in the refined setting of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, which were eventually published as The Idea of a Christian Society. In it, he laid out a stark prognosis:

“The choice before us is between the formation of a new Christian culture, and the acceptance of a pagan one."

Eliot thought that his society was neither fully Christian, nor fully pagan, but ‘neutral’. Yet he feared that could not last long. Such ‘political liberalism’ was in danger of fostering its own demise by an indiscriminate refusal to make moral value judgments and decide between versions of the good. As he watched the rise of fascism in Europe, which stood on the verge of the most destructive war in its history so far, he made a significant claim: that the only alternative to what he saw as a pagan totalitarianism was a Christian society. 

Closer to our times, a similar thought has occurred to other influential figures. The feminist writer Louise Perry recently mused over the idea that our society is re-paganising, citing the moral conundrum over modern abortion. Despite not being a practising Christian, she sees abortion bearing uncomfortable similarities to pagan infanticide, a sign that we are heading back to a moral scheme with a strong likeness to pagan valuations of human life. The Jewish feminist writer Naomi Wolf has done the same, in an extraordinary essay. Despite a tendency to veer into conspiracy theories too easily, she makes a compelling case that as the Jewish-Christian ethos that underpinned western society has receded, what has emerged is not a benign neutrality, but dark powers that used to lurk in the background of Old Testament religion:  

“the sheer amoral power of Baal, the destructive force of Moloch, the unrestrained seductiveness and sexual licentiousness of Astarte or Ashera — those are the primal forces that do indeed seem to me to have returned… or at least the energies that they represent — moral power-over; death-worship; antagonism to the sexual orderliness of the intact family and faithful relationships — seem to have ‘returned,’ without restraint.” 

The Nazism to which Eliot referred, as we now know, was a dead end - literally. We console ourselves today with the thought that we have left such extremes behind, that the idolatries of fascism and communism were defeated in 1945 and 1989 respectively, and that we now inherit a secular liberal democratic space which is happily neutral and keeps the peace between different claims to truth – an advance on either paganism or Christianity. 

That may be true, but as Rowan Williams pointed out, there is a difference between ‘procedural secularism’ – a non-dogmatic role for the state in helping keep equilibrium in a society where there is no common agreement on truth, and ‘programmatic secularism’, which imposes a distinct set of values on society which tend to inhibit religious expression and denies anyone the right to claim their religious perspective is ultimately true. 

The makers of the Olympic opening ceremony, without a trace of irony, justified their creation by saying that it was celebrating French Republican ideas of inclusion, freedom, human rights and so on – the liberty, fraternity and equality of the French Revolution, which was in turn, born out of the French Enlightenment. This was full-on programmatic secularism on display. It was a classically libertarian view of freedom, the absolute freedom to choose what we do with our lives, of individual self-expression, with no overarching, universal idea of the Good, which of course is one particular understanding of what freedom means. It is distinct, for example, from an older view of freedom as gradual liberation from (and therefore the disciplining of) some of our conflicted inner impulses that are deemed destructive of the soul or of society. Secular liberalism that parades itself as self-evident, the opinion of all right-thinking people, is so often incapable of seeing how for others - Muslims and Christians for example - it is anything but self-evident. There are many across the globe who are not content with an overarching moral scheme which insists on telling them that their belief is a private matter rather than a distinct transcendent truth. 

So, what if the opening ceremony was a paean to French values, rooted in the French Enlightenment? And what does that have to do with paganism?  

The first volume of Peter Gay’s monumental two-volume work on the Enlightenment was subtitled: “The Rise of Modern Paganism.” He pointed out how the philosophes of that same Enlightenment - Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, for example - loved Cicero, Lucretius and the rest. Every educated person at the time studied Greek and Latin, yet these men went deeper to revive pagan ideas, culture and sensuality. They wanted an undogmatic religion, with lots of options, just like paganism – and definitely not the dogma of Christianity. Behind its apparent rationalism or tolerance, the Enlightenment was, for Peter Gay, “a political demand for the right to question everything, rather than the assertion that all could be known or mastered by rationality." It was a rejection of a single creed, in favour of multiple ways of life and belief. The era harked back to the classical past, seeing itself as a completion of the Renaissance, finally leaving behind the vestiges of religion that the Renaissance still retained. The Enlightenment was, Gay argued, not so much the birth of a new rational age, but effectively a renewal of an ancient pagan sensual pluralism.  

****

The argument that paganism is returning has a weak and a strong form. The weaker form is that we have returned to a kind of pluralism where there are many objects of worship under an overarching scheme that denies any of them ultimate truth or value.  

Paganism was essentially pluralistic. Pagans believed there were many gods who inhabited the universe and who demanded allegiance. Pagan worship was a kind of bargain, whereby if you paid your dues to the gods by offering sacrifices to them, especially the local ones of your city, they would look after you and ensure that things went well. Yet the language of ‘gods’ is confusing. What pagans meant by ‘gods’ was not what Jews or Christians meant (or mean) by ‘God’. Pagan gods belong to nature. They do not transcend it. Pagan gods were objects within the world, rather than the transcendent source of all things, existing precisely beyond physical reality. As St Augustine pointed out, paganism took the good gifts of God and turned them into gods – objects of devotion that they were never meant to be.  

If paganism was pluralistic, with numerous objects of worship, none of whom could claim absolute allegiance and who ruled over the lives of their devotees, then modern pluralism bears some distinct similarities. A pluralist public space where each of us is entitled to hold our own sense of what is sacred to us, what is of ultimate value, and where no one perspective is favoured as the one, large distinct truth, gets pretty close to a modern kind of paganism.  

Of course there aren’t too many temples to Bacchus, Aphrodite, Tyche or Plutus on street corners in Paris, New York or London. Yet these were the gods of wine, love, chance and wealth. It is hard to deny that the draw of addictive substances, the lure of sex, the hope of a lottery win, or the desire to be rich do not dominate lives in our world.  

There is an old saying that you can tell what someone worships by asking what they would sacrifice most for – or, to put it differently, what they think will make them happy. Worship and sacrifice always went together, whether in the Jerusalem Temple in the Old Testament, in classical paganism, or even in Christianity where St Paul urged the followers of Christ to ‘offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.’ Equally, you can tell what a culture worships by the buildings it puts up. If the classical period put up temples to the gods, the Middle Ages put up cathedrals for the worship of the Christian God, our city skylines testify that we put up countless temples to Mammon.  

****

Canary Wharf skyscrapers, London.

Skyscrapers loom under a dark sky and are reflected in a river in the foreground

**** 

The stronger form of paganism, identified by Naomi Wolf suggests that darker, older forces are coming back to haunt us. There is an argument that paganism never really went away. It continued to lurk in the corners of European societies as books such as Anton Wessels’ ‘Europe: Was it ever really Christian?’ showed.  

Leslie Newbigin, perhaps the greatest Christian missiologist of recent times, spent most of his life as a missionary in India before returning to the Enlightenment-shaped west in the 1980s. As he did so, he looked back on the idea of a secular society in which there were no commonly acknowledged norms., “We now know”, he argued, “that the only possible product of that ideal is a Pagan society. Human nature abhors a vacuum. The shrine does not remain empty. If the one true image, Jesus Christ, is not there, an idol will take its place.” 

In the UK, we seem about to head down the road towards ‘assisted dying’. The story of Canada should give us pause. Ever since it legalised euthanasia in 2016, stories continue to emerge of people asking for death over such problems as hearing loss or a lack of housing, or feeling they are a burden on their families or the state, and where not just old people are candidates for death – there are now calls for unwanted babies to be killed – we are back with infanticide. In Quebec and in the Netherlands, one in 20 deaths now are self-chosen. In Belgium, such deaths have doubled in the last 10 years.  

If Louise Perry and Naomi Wolf were among those to spot a re-paganisation of culture, it is no accident that both were women. Paganism was bad for women. Tom Holland’s book Dominion was born out of the insight that our world is very different from the classical pagan one. A world where entertainment meant watching wild animals tear the flesh off slaves, where unwanted babies were routinely abandoned, where masters could have sex with whoever they wanted, and could effectively rape young female slaves was a very different world from ours, where such behaviour is criminalised. And for him, the difference was Christianity.  

The problem was, as the early Christians pointed out, that the gods enslave. If you give yourself over entirely to drugs, sex, money or Dionysian pleasure, ultimately, they will rule your life, enslave, and destroy you, as many an addict has discovered. We were never meant to give ourselves to such temporal things – only God, they said – the transcendent source of all goodness - can satisfy and liberate from destructive desire. 

Maybe Eliot was right. It takes a long time to put down religious roots. Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism are only recent imports to Europe and so have shallow roots here. Both Christianity and paganism have gone deep into our soil. Secular pluralism, especially the ‘programmatic kind, always veers backwards towards another version of paganism. And so, European culture only really has two options – the paganism that lasted for centuries before the arrival of Christianity, and the Christianity that replaced it.  

The Olympics offered us two paths. The one offered by the creators of the opening ceremony, the other by the athletes who see a higher goal than a gold medal or earthly fame. The creators of the opening ceremony may not have intended an attack on Christianity. Yet they were happily acclaiming something which Europeans left behind long ago. And we should pause before we celebrate that. 

Review
Culture
Film & TV
7 min read

Perpetually present in Palm Springs

A movie's time loop explores the meaning in the mundane.

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here

A young couple lounge on floating rings in a swimming pool.
Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg ponder time.
Hulu.

I first watched Palm Springs on the evening of my wedding day. It was the very beginning of what would be a peaceful and relaxing honeymoon, sandwiched in-between planning a pandemic wedding and finishing graduate degrees, and planning a move across the Atlantic to Canada, where my husband had just got a job – which was quickly followed by getting pregnant for the first time. Those two weeks were the only restful time we got in the whole of 2021 -- and arguably to date! It felt like time stood still for a while. We walked on Cornish beaches, talked about our future, ate ice-cream. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to a deep sense of peace.  

It’s quite fitting that, at such a quiet moment in our lives, we watched a film about getting stuck in a time loop at a wedding. Palm Springs’ time loop premise is familiar from cult classics like Groundhog Day. Tala and Abe are getting married on 9th November. An earthquake opens up a strange cave that traps any unwary visitors into a time loop. Nyles, one of the wedding guests and the boyfriend of Tala’s friend Misty (yes, these are their actual names), enters the time loop by accident. Every day, Nyles wakes up in Palm Springs, and every day is 9th November, again, and they’re celebrating Tala and Abe’s wedding, again. He can leave Palm Springs and travel anywhere he likes. But if he falls asleep or dies, the time is reset to the morning of the wedding.  

An undetermined amount of time passes, until two more guests get stuck in time: Abe’s cousin Roy, a middle-aged, disillusioned family man, and later Sarah, Tala’s sister. Roy takes revenge on Nyles by torturing and killing him every few ‘days’; he was lured into the cave by a Nyles high on drugs and is furious that he’ll never get to see his kids grow up. In one iteration of the wedding day, Roy finds Nyles and shoots him with a crossbow. As Nyles re-enters the cave to make the day reset and escape another gruesome death at Roy’s hands, Sarah follows him in, not heeding his warning to stay away. She gets stuck in time, too. 

And here is where the story actually begins. All of this we find out as a shocked Sarah, having woken up on her sister’s wedding day for the second time, goes to Nyles for answers. For the rest of the film, the sci-fi premise is fairly incidental. Palm Springs is really about Nyles and Sarah coming to terms with their brokenness and their longing for permanence as they get stuck in time – and stuck in love. At first, Nyles acts very cynically. He’s been in the time loop for quite a while and fails to see the purpose of his existence. ‘Today, tomorrow, yesterday, it’s all the same’, he says. His advice to newly stuck-in-time Sarah is to simply ‘embrace the fact that nothing matters’. Sarah accepts the invitation, beginning to act erratically. She and Nyles drive around Palm Springs aimlessly, spend their time choreographing an 80s dance, and she even throws him a ‘millionth’ birthday party. In a darker moment, she intentionally gets run over by a truck, hoping – to no avail – to finally escape. They see their lives just like the lost souls in Dante’s Inferno, condemned by sin to relive the same punishment over and over and over again, for all time.  

Love reenchants the aimless and the mundane for them. They’re no longer stuck in hellish infinity. 

But something happens in the process. Because they know they can’t leave, Nyles and Sarah lower their defences. Their relationship essentially works as a marriage: they are stuck in it for the long term, and so they become honest. They get to know each other more deeply than they have ever known anyone, and they come to love each other deeply, too. Suddenly, they are no longer waking up dreading more of the same, but excited to see each other again, and spend another day together.  

Nyles’ disenchantment slowly disappears. When he first met Roy, drinking at the wedding bar, he cynically quoted from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end, which is always present’. But Eliot’s poem is not actually about the dull, hellish, infinite repetition of time. Rather, it’s about our desire to reach out to God’s eternity in heaven. It reminds us that, when we receive God’s grace, we stop experiencing our lives in a linear way, always looking ahead to new experiences and greater achievements, and instead start finding joy in the mundane. Nyles is finally learning this. He now enjoys Eliot’s perpetual ‘present’, because loving Sarah has allowed him to regain a childlike wonder at the world. As G. K. Chesterton argues in his wonderful book Orthodoxy, ‘Because children have abounding vitality’ they do not tire of repetition, but rather ‘want things repeated and unchanged’: 

They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.  

Roy has learnt this, too. He stops trying to torture Nyles, and rather starts appreciating being able to spend every day – albeit the same day – with his wife and children. When Nyles visits him at his family home, it’s clear that Roy no longer sees repetition as a punishment, and that he’s found a sense of peace.  

Finally, Nyles and Sarah realise that the time loop has instead given them the chance to mend their wounds, and come to terms with their mistakes. In a moment of despair, Sarah runs Roy over, causing him several injuries. ‘Nothing matters’, she tells Nyles as an excuse. But Nyles no longer agrees. ‘No. Pain matters!’, he tells her. ‘What we do to other people matters…It doesn’t matter that everything resets and people don’t remember. We remember. We have to deal with the things that we do.’  

That’s exactly what Sarah spends the rest of the film doing. She deals with the consequences of her actions and attempts to repair her relationship with her sister Tala, whom – without giving away exactly what happens – she had deeply hurt and betrayed.  

I won’t spoil for you whether Nyles and Sarah ever manage to escape the time loop and return to ‘real’ life, but that’s almost besides the point. But I will tell you that they stay together through it all (this is a rom-com as well as a sci-fi film after all…).  

Love reenchants the aimless and the mundane for them. They’re no longer stuck in hellish infinity, but are rather looking ahead to the kind of eternal peace we hope to find in heaven, just like I did on my honeymoon.  

I recently rewatched Palm Springs, a newborn baby girl in my arms, and it reminded me of when my other child, my son, was first born back in 2022. I remember walking down the street in downtown Toronto, where I was then living, and telling my mother that I felt like I was experiencing a taste of eternity. She was understandably confused by my sleep-deprivation-induced philosophical musings, but there was a reason I said that. Just as time had expanded on my honeymoon, each day feeling like everything stood still, and yet each day so full of variety, so the newborn days of my first experience of motherhood were both very busy and very quiet. But while my honeymoon had decidedly felt like a foretaste of heavenly peace, motherhood has been more complex than that. Sometimes it’s so repetitive that it can seem aimless – ‘how is his nappy full again?’ I often ask myself – and in this it can appear as static as Dante’s hell. As adults, it is very difficult to recapture the kind of joy and delight in repetition that Chesterton writes about. It can really feel like you’re stuck in a loop, every day bringing more of the same, more nappies, more bath time, and more baby food thrown at the wall. But motherhood is also full of the endlessly new little joys. When my son says a new word for the first time, or when my newborn daughter looks at me and smiles, I think that I’d be happy to relive this day forever, just like Roy.  

Although I’m not actually stuck in a time loop like Sarah and Nyles in Palm Springs, it can sometimes feel that way. But perhaps it’s good thing. Perhaps that’s what reminds me that being a good parent means getting tired of your kids by the end of the day, then waking up the next morning, and loving them all over again. That’s what being a parent means, and that’s what marriage means, too. As Nyles says to Sarah right before they enter the cave for the last time, unsure if they’ll see each other, and whether their relationship can survive the mundane reality of domestic life, ‘We’re already sick of each other. It’s the best.’