Today, however, we read books like Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers that celebrate the fact that we live in a mostly secular society. We find Sam Harris insisting that it is quite possible to develop morality independent of the Christian religion or religion in genera1. We read Theodore Schick Jr. in Free Inquiry insisting that philosophers as different as John Stuart Mill and John Rawls “have demonstrated that it is possible to have a universal morality without God.”
There is a profound confusion here. We get a hint of this when we realize that the term “secular” is itself a Christian term. In Catholicism a priest who joins a contemplative community and retreats from the world is considered to have joined a “religious” order, while a priest who lives in a parish among ordinary people is considered a “secular” priest. As we will see, secularism is itself an invention of Christianity. Secular values too are the product of Christianity, even if they have been severed from their original source.
If all this is true, then our cultural prejudice against acknowledging and teaching the role of Christianity is wrong. Believer and nonbeliever alike should respect Christianity as the movement that created our civilization. We should cherish our Christian inheritance not as an heirloom but as a living presence in our society, and we should worry about what will happen to our civilization if Christianity disappears from the West and establishes itself in non-Western cultures.
Rather than attempt a catalogue of Christianity’s achievements, I am going to trace its influence in the West by focusing on three central ideas. The first one is explored in this chapter and the next two in subsequent chapters. First I consider the idea of separating or disentangling the spheres of religion and government. Although this notion has become highly confused and distorted in our time, the original concept is a very good one. We think of separation of religion and government as an American idea or an Enlightenment idea,but long before that it was a Christian idea. Christ seems to be the first one who thought of it. As we read in Matthew 22:21, Christ said, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God that which is God’s.”
To see the radicalism of Christ’s idea, I turn to the ancient Roman writer Celsus, who in the second century AD wrote an influential attack on Christianity. Celsus’s work was lost, but the church father Origen published a refutation, Contra Celsum, that helps us reconstruct his argument. Celsus basically accused the Christians of being atheists.
He was serious. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the gods a man should worship were the gods of the state. Each community had its own deities—it was a polytheistic age—and patriotism demanded that a good Athenian make sacrifices to the Athenian gods and a good Roman pay homage to the gods of Rome. The Christians, Celsus fumed, refused to worship the Roman gods. They did not acknowledge the Roman emperor as a god, even though Caesar had been elevated by the Roman Senate to divine status. Instead the Christians insisted on worshipping an alien god, putting their allegiance to him above their allegiance to the state. What blasphemy! What treason!
I am not suggesting that the ancient Greeks and Romans were especially “religious.” Gibbon reports that philosophers and public officials held very different attitudes toward the gods than did ordinary citizens: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.” Even so, religious identity in the ancient world was indissolubly tied up with your tribe and community. You could not be a good Dinka and not worship the Dinka deities, whether rock or stone or sun. Nor could you be a good Roman and not exalt the Roman deities, whether Apollo, Bacchus, or Jupiter.
