The Changing of the Gods in America

or

Five Points of Paganism

Edited transcript from a lecture given at 198 Young Hall, University of California, Davis sponsored by Grace Valley Christian Center Friday evening, May 8, 1998

Only Two Worldviews

In our time, the Christian West has been invaded by a whole new spirituality that is most simply defined as Eastern or pagan spirituality. Now, pagan might sound like a bad word, but there are many people in this world who find that term a perfectly valid adjective to describe themselves. So I am not using the term pagan in any pejorative sense, but attempting to actually put content into it. This evening I would like to address as my theme the five points of paganism.

I happen to believe that the term paganism is indeed a valid one, and that behind modern-day paganism — which appears to us as a very varied and very colorful expression of many different approaches to the religious question — there is an inner, coherent core. I think for those who attempt to think clearly it is useful to have some kind of analysis of this coherent core.

Obviously my intention is not simply to talk about paganism because it’s interesting — and it is interesting — but because of a basic thesis that I am attempting to defend. Perhaps it is a rather courageous or outlandish thesis at first view, but it’s this: There are only two possible worldviews; one is the biblical Christian worldview, and the only other possible worldview is paganism. Now I know your minds are immediately racing and imagining at least 356,000 worldviews that you know.

Abraham Kuyper, the Prime Minister of Holland at the end of the last century, gave The Stone Lectures in Princeton exactly one hundred years ago. What he said a hundred years ago to the amassed elite of orthodox Christianity in the New World was a sort of courageous and bold statement, the truth of which is becoming more and more evident: “Do not forget that the fundamental contrast has always been, is still, and always will be until the end: Christianity and Paganism, the idols or the living God.”

My interest in talking about paganism is simply because it is the very opposite of Christianity. I see these two worldviews as fundamentally opposed on all the major points.

Paganism Defined

What do I mean by paganism? Well, I would suggest to you that one of the best definitions of paganism is to be found in the Bible, in the epistle to the Romans that Paul wrote just after the year 50 A.D. It was addressed to the very capital of ancient syncretistic paganism — Rome. Here is his definition in Romans 1:25, “They exchanged the truth of God for the lie” — it’s interesting that in the Greek here you have the definite article for both the truth and the lie — “and worshiped and served . . . ”

You know, we tend to think of pagans as those people who get the wonderful chance of playing golf on Sunday mornings. I would love to play golf on Sunday mornings, but I happen to be a Christian and I know my place is at church, and so I don’t. But I find myself, in my sinful heart, envying the pagans who get to play on Sunday mornings.

What we generally mean by the term pagans is those people who don’t believe in anything. But I think we couldn’t be farther from the truth. The two verbs that I’ve just read to you, sebomai and latreuō, are very well-used terms in the Greek Old Testament and in ancient Greek literature. Sebomai has to do with pagan worship at the shrines and in the mystery religions, and latreuō has to do with Old Testament levitical worship. In Romans 12:1 Paul speaks about our “reasonable service” using the same word, latreuō.

Paul is saying there are some people who “exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.” In other words, paganism is right in terms of its religious worship, but it’s wrong in the object of that worship. It is worshiping the creature rather than the Creator. I think we make a mistake if we think that pagans are nonreligious. But indeed, more and more we don’t have to make that mistake, because we are seeing to what extent people are adopting forms of paganism with a very religious approach.

Monism Defined

I would like to introduce one other term I’ve found very useful for my own thinking; it’s the term monism. For with paganism one could have the idea that there are many different kinds of pagan worship, and in a sense that’s true. Don’t, by the way, think that pagan worship is simply to be identified with those folks in far away islands who dance around totem poles. Paul is writing this material to very sophisticated Greco-Roman intellectuals.

Paganism can be thought of as a whole series of different approaches, whereas the term monism wants us to focus more specifically on what binds those various approaches together. “Mono” means “one” in Greek. You know many words that contain “mono.” A monopoly is the one city that imposes its rule on all the others; some of you probably still play the game Monopoly when your television is broken. Monogamy means one marriage, and monotony would perhaps be an appropriate term for my talk tonight. But you get the point. Another way of understanding monism would be to eliminate the “m”; it would be just as right to think of the term as “one-ism.”

“All is One”

I like to draw circles to help us understand monism. Here are the five points of paganism, or monism, as I understand them. Number one: the essence of monism is that “all is one and one is all.” In other words, there is one basic principle in the universe that unites everything together, one essential notion or substance that brings everything into union. The universe is a mass of undifferentiated, related energy, and everything in the universe, everything in reality, is all in the same circle.

Of course you can see right away that there’s a problem between this kind of religious confession and the Christian confession, which maintains as a matter of fact that there are two realities. The Christian worldview really has two circles and affirms two realities, not one. There is the reality of God the Creator, and there is the reality of the creation. These two are distinct realities; they do not share the same substance. So you can see already that there is a basic divide between all those religions that will agree with the starting point that “all is one,” and Christianity, which will not allow it.

But what happens when the focus of worship is the creation rather than the Creator, is that then, in a very clever move, the reality of the divine is simply superimposed on the reality of the creation, which enables all kinds of people to begin using very spiritual and religious words, and sounding just as religious and spiritual as any Christian. This is because all the notions of the Creator have been superimposed upon the creation. So everything is in the circle, and God is in the circle. Rocks, trees, animals, people — everything is within this divine circle. This of course underlies New Age/Taoist physics, “deep ecology,” the worship of Mother Earth, and the female imagery for God.

One particular theologian (I’m not sure if she’s Christian or Jewish) has written a book called Restoring the Goddess to Judaism and Christianity. In it she says the “mother” is none other than the encircling, bewitching Mother Earth: “She [is] . . . everywhere and encompasses everything . . .  She is everything and everybody and its opposite . . . .  She shows for me that there is no disunity between something and its opposite. A totality includes all aspects. Linear and dualistic divisions do not exist.”

I recently saw, in a New Age bookstore, a book of symbols. One of the symbols was a goddess with her womb shaped in a circle as the earth. Of course the goddess and her circular womb, from which we all proceed, becomes a very powerful image of monism, since the womb is the source of our existence, and we share with the goddess the same substance with that notion of the divine.

Contemporary Monism for Kids

Our children, too, have been well introduced to this kind of thinking. My own Trilogy, Spirit Wars, is obviously a take-off on Star Wars, where Luke Skywalker, in monistic prose worthy of any pagan priest or priestess, ancient or modern, says: “The Force is an energy field created by all living things; it surrounds us, penetrates us, binds the galaxy together . . .  it is all powerful and controls everything.” That’s interesting — something “created” by all living things.

When The Lion King came to town, my thirteen-year-old daughter, who had fallen in love with Lion King and had posters on the wall and mugs and music and so on, said that it was time for the Jones family to go and see Lion King. And of course it was, because it was in the dollar-a-seat theater, and when you have seven children, that’s the moment when you go and watch movies, so we watched Lion King. As we were walking out, my wife, with her great wisdom, whispered to me, “Don’t say anything negative.” So, needless to say, my thirteen-year-old daughter came up to me and said, “What did you think, Dad?” I dug deep, and I said, “Well, it was brilliantly drawn.” And I was honest about that. Then I said, “And that music by Elton John was absolutely fabulous. I could listen to that all night.”

But you know what she said? “Yes, dad, but it was so pagan.” She understood that the message that was coming through was that the circle of life is a self-contained, self-generating system of existence, and there is no reference point outside that circle of life. Of course the one who best understands that is the monkey, who sits cross-legged and meditates.

In other words, our culture has been very well introduced into these abstract notions. This is what our children are understanding; they are getting it, thanks to the brilliance of Hollywood.

“Humanity is One”

The second point of paganism is that humanity is one. If all is one, then clearly all humanity is one. You might want to think about this in terms of Al Gore’s way of getting us to think ecologically — that we are all holograms, all microcosms of the great macrocosm. Each human being is a microcosm of the macrocosm. And of course what that means is that if the universe is divine, then every human being is divine. Remember that phrase from Ram Dass? As he went through that experience of LSD he said, “I became aware of a part of me, an essence, that had nothing to do with life and death.” In other words, he became aware of himself as part of this divine reality, which doesn’t know life or death in the way we talk about it.

Harold Bloom, who is one of the great experts of Shakespeare and teaches English literature at Yale, was brought up a Jew, but in 1965 converted to Gnosticism. He read Hans Jonas’ book, The Gnostic Religion, which had just been published. In his recent book, Omens of Millennium, Bloom makes an appeal to America to convert to Gnosticism. But this is what he writes that he finds so liberating, so fascinating, so important in this Gnosticism, which is one form of paganism: “Gnosticism is a knowing by and of an uncreated self, or self within the self, and this knowledge leads to freedom.”

You follow what he’s saying? The knowledge of the self as uncreated means that there is no Creator. In the biblical sense of the distinction between the Creator and the creature, this understanding of the human being makes the creature of the same substance with the Creator, and of course that substance is to share in the divinity with the so-called “Creator.” What incredible liberation that gives, to know that one is divine, to know that one is eternal and has always existed.

Of course, we see that today in a host of ways. We no longer believe in absolute truth, but we’re all absolutely convinced that we have our own personal truth. And it is politically incorrect to question anybody’s truth, because — why would you question a god? How can divine beings really ever ultimately be wrong? Of course you can translate that on Madison Avenue into sales. Convince people that they are invincible and you make a very powerful sales force. Children too must express what is deep inside them. Their values are simply clarified, but those values come from within, they are not imposed from without.

“All Religions are One”

The third element of paganism is that all religions are one. This could be represented in the following way. Think of a pizza pie. Each one of those pieces of the pie represents a religious approach. Notice how they all start seemingly far away, but as you get to the center they all reach the same point. You can see how syncretism, which believes that there is a bringing together of all the religions, is based upon this particular notion of religion. Notice how religious tolerance is quite acceptable, feasible, and indeed necessary with this paradigm. But notice how that paradigm eliminates the other worldview that does not accept that there is only one reality, but holds there are two. Religious tolerance works within the circle, but it doesn’t work for those who hold that there are two circles.

Indeed, this notion of all the religions being one has a sort of eschatology inasmuch as there is the belief that more and more the religions will become one. I recently was at the Parliament of the World’s Religions. It was not really a parliament as far as I know, having read British history as a student. In parliaments you punch one another, or at least you come to serious disagreements. This so-called parliament was orchestrated from the beginning, and there were experts in conflict resolution from MIT that led the six thousand delegates in exercises to overcome conflict.

One exercise was that a lady had us all sing a note, all six thousand people. It was horrendous. Then she said, “Listen to the note of the person next to you.” And slowly that cacophony started to make a little bit of sense. That was to show us that we could all ultimately be together. In another exercise she said, “Hold the sides of your chair with all your force, and think about the notion that is the most important to you in your religion. Now let it go.” Then she said, “That didn’t feel too bad, did it?” Then she said, “OK, take it back again.” So we went through these exercises to really show us that all the religions are one.

At the World Council of Churches these days the basic approach is that there was a time when the religions were separate; that was the period of monologue. From there we moved to the period of dialogue, where religions at least spoke to one another. But now the argument is that we need to move to the period of communion. There is a call for theologians to pass over into other religions.

Not only do you have that movement, but you also have this movement of religions communing with one another. Indeed in Chicago in 1993 those religions did commune with one another. This paradigm is based upon the fundamental notion that beyond all the differences and beyond all the various doctrines, at the deepest point, all the religions express the same thing.

Essentially that unity is beyond rationality. Theologians today speak about the unio mystica, which is the experience of getting beyond the dualities, getting beyond the various doctrines, to an experience of oneself as divine. This is deification. You can see how all those edges of the pie crust of the pizza will ultimately be eliminated if all the religions are going towards this same experience. Well, that’s the situation today in religion, and I believe it’s part of a pagan understanding, although it doesn’t always come over that way. But as you can see, pagan understanding is focused upon this world; it does not take into account the Creator.

“The Problem of Distinctions”

Well, there is one problem. All is one and one is all, humanity is one, religions are one, and there is one problem. You probably don’t know what the one problem is, because you’re all asleep. The one problem is: you’re all asleep. You’re suffering from metaphysical amnesia, a serious illness. You have forgotten who you really are. You have forgotten that you are divine. You’ve forgotten that you are a hologram, a microcosm of the macrocosm. And because you’ve forgotten that, all of us then proceed, in our sleepy state, in our state of ignorance, to make distinctions. You see, distinction-making ultimately is against this notion of union within the circle. If the goal is fullness of a circle, with all things unified and brought together within this circle, then distinctions are a big problem. Distinctions are stopping this coming together of all peoples and all religions and of the self. We are ourselves divided, and we need that sense of our own universalization, our sense of belonging to the whole.

What are the distinctions that are the major problem in a pagan worldview, that must therefore be erased if we are to realize this circular utopia? I’ll just give you a few examples. Obviously, the creature/Creator distinction is the major distinction that must be eliminated. In other words, this must go. You see how Christianity, with its two circles, with its distinction between the creature and the Creator, is a fundamental problem for a pagan understanding of the world? That distinction therefore must go.

Of course, a second distinction close to it is the distinction between God and man, since we’ve already seen that all human beings are indeed divine. Various other distinctions continue, and they bring us all kinds of problems — the distinction between animal and human, between life and death. There is no life or death, really. There is cosmic spiritual existence, a changing of form perhaps, but no sense of death. So the distinction between life and death must go.

The distinction between truth and falsehood must also go, because truth and falsehood are merely different positions on the circle, and it depends where you are standing. There is no ultimate distinction, really, between truth and falsehood. In our post-modern world, there is just relativization of the notions of truth. We see that every day on the television. There is no ultimate distinction between right and wrong, between Christ and Satan. Remember Charles Manson? He was called by his followers both Christ and Satan. Those notions too are only relative distinctions.

As I go through this list, you notice that the distinctions which are the problem in this worldview are, according to the biblical account of God’s creation, the very way God creates. God creates by making distinctions. He divides between the night and the day, the land and the sea. But in this pagan worldview those distinctions are part of the problem. The distinctions we make, then, between Scripture and other revelations, between orthodoxy and heresy, between the Christian religion and non-Christian religions — these all must go. Distinctions between a husband and a wife, child and parents, traditional family and alternate family styles, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual — all these must go.

The Reason for Distinctions

According to the Christian worldview, these distinctions are planted in the creation for what purpose? Why are they here? They are here to remind us of that absolute, ultimate distinction between the Creator and the creature. That is, I believe, why there are distinctions written into the creation — to remind us of that Great Distinction. You can see how this pagan worldview ultimately effaces everything about the Christian religion. These are two totally different worldviews, and they are in radical conflict, one with the other, in spite of all that we hear about tolerance and openness and so on. When I was at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the only group that was not welcomed was orthodox Christianity. That voice was never heard. And indeed, in the discussions that was the one big problem in religion that had to be solved.

“The Spiritual Solution”

Well, there is one means of escape. Since we have “all is one and one is all,” “humanity is one,” “religions are one,” and since there is one problem, there is also one solution. It’s all very well to have an intellectual worldview like this, built in a very coherent way, but it needs more than that to get people on board. A worldview must also have spirituality. So the solution to the problem of divisions is an experience of union, an experience of belonging to the whole, because all is one and one is all. This experience comes through a non-rational, mystical experience of seeing oneself at the very center of the universe, seeing oneself as divine. This can be gained either through drugs — that’s the fast track — or through a certain amount of discipline, via Hindu meditation in particular.

I read a book by a Roman Catholic, charismatic, kundalini Hindu. His goal was to experience this unio mystica, this sense of his own divinity. What was getting in the way of his doing that was prayer, so he eliminated prayer. It reminds me of Phil Jackson of the Bulls, who wrote his book, Sacred Hoops. Phil Jackson was raised in a Christian home. He has now become a Buddhist. He complains that in his spiritual exercises the one problem he has is that just when he’s about to experience this oneness, a Bible verse from his youth jumps into his mind.

Well, this is a pretty significant worldview, and the more you think about this, the more you apply it to movements that you know around you, the more I think it makes sense. I don’t believe that what I am speaking about is nostalgia for an America that’s gone. I don’t believe we’re talking about a preference for miniskirts or maxiskirts or wide ties or narrow ties. I believe that presently we are faced with a choice of worldviews, and it is a choice between only two worldviews.

In our time we have experienced what’s called deconstruction, which is the destruction of all previous worldviews and a relativization of everything. But you can’t live with that kind of destruction for too long. Last year at the Davis Whole Earth Festival the theme was “Kiss Chaos.” This year it’s “Harvesting the Harmony,” the new harmony. In other words, you can only live so long with the destruction, and then you have to rebuild.

Absolutism

This rebuilding is really giving expression to a new absolutism based upon the pagan worldview. The absolutism comes from the experience at the center of this worldview. Remember Ram Dass’ experience with LSD, when he said, “And something else – that “I” Knew – it really Knew . . .  I felt like I had come home.” Shirley MacLaine, in her book, Going Within, says, “I’ve had too many experiences over the past fifteen years to remain stuck in the old definitions of truth.” New Age philosopher Goldstein speaks about the new absolutism. He talks about a double helix consisting of relative truth on the one hand, absolute truth on the other, and they keep winding around one another. Harold Bloom, speaking about his experience of Gnosticism, says that it gives to him a direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic truths of existence, accessible to human beings.

I spoke with a Hindu guru at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, and he was speaking about how Christianity cannot give us any sense of assurance. I asked him, “But how do you have assurance?” He replied, “I simply know.” His knowledge, of course, comes from that mystical experience. Hamid Ali, a Sufi mystic that is a mystical Mohammedan, believes that Sufism has the clearest and most precise understanding. He speaks about “direct knowing.”

It seems to me that we are in the presence of a movement that benefited from the deconstruction of the old worldviews, and claimed that there were indeed no meta-narratives with which we could put the world together again, that all great stories were only social constructions. Now we are faced with a new absolutism that will claim, more and more, through irrational experience, to be able to tell you the truth about the universe.

Writing in 1973 about the counter-culture revolution of the sixties, Os Guinness remarked: “The swing to the East has come at a time when Christianity is weak at just those points where it would need to be strong to withstand the East. Without this strength, the Eastern religions will be to Christianity a new and dangerous Gnosticism.”