Christianity introduced not only a new religion but a new conception of religion. So successful was this cultural revolution in the West that today the ancient paganism lives only in the names of planets and for those who follow astrology charts. Atheists do not bother to disbelieve in Baal or Zeus and invoke them only to make all religion sound silly. The atheists’ real target is the God of monotheism, usually the Christian God.
Christianity was not the first monotheistic religion. There are hints of monotheism in the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. The Persians were henotheists: they seemed to have believed in many gods but with one supreme god who was more powerful than the others. The Jews were the first monotheists, embracing the concept of one God who embodies all the virtues and who is the sole deity deserving of human worship and obedience: “thou shall have no other gods before me.” In the Old Testament we can witness the battle raging between Jewish monotheism and the still powerful temptation to polytheism, represented in the episodes of the Israelites who worshipped Baal, Moloch, and the golden calf.
Christianity adopted Jewish monotheism and gave it both a universal and an individualistic interpretation. There was no individualism in the Judaism of ancient Israel; the Jews worshipped Yahweh as a tribe and as a community. Individual Jews were not given a choice in this matter. When Moses came down from the mountain and saw the Israelites worshipping the golden calf, he did not think they were simply choosing to follow a different faith. “Freedom of religion” was not an issue here. Moses’s approach was a bit more severe: either embrace Yahweh, the monotheistic God of the Jews, or be killed. Some people imprudently chose to stick with calf worship, and Moses ordered them massacred.
The God of the Old Testament is a universal deity, yet at the same time He seems to be atribal God. He relates mainly to His chosen people, and the enemies of Israel become His enemies. Egyptians and Romans are not expected to follow Him, even though the Jews regarded Him as superior to the Egyptian and Roman deities. No wonder Jewish monotheism was generally unthreatening to Roman paganism. Indeed, the Romans simply integrated the Jews’ god into their pantheon. Judaism was a legal religion in the Roman empire; Christianity was not, at least not until the conversion of the emperor Constantine. The reason for the prohibition and persecution of Christianity was that Christians claimed one God not only for themselves but for the whole world.
Implicit in Christian monotheism was a critique of pagan polytheism. According to the Christians, the Greek and Roman gods were human inventions. Look at the gods of Homer. Each of them seems to embody a human quality: Aphrodite is the goddess of sexual desire, Ares is the god of conflict, and so on. The gods have the same petty vanities and jealousies as their human counterparts. Their virtues are human virtues writ large. As classical scholar Mary Lefkowitz puts it, “The life of the gods is a highly idealized form of what human life would be if mortals were deathless, ageless, and strong.” Ironically, this criticism of invented deities, which seemed valid when it was launched against ancient polytheism, is today leveled against Christianity. As Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins would have it, the Christians too have invented their God. But the Christian God is not like human beings at all. He is outside space and time. He does not have a body. He is a purely spiritual being. He can be comprehended only dimly by humans, who resort to anthropomorphic images and analogies.
Monotheism was a hugely important idea, but as we can see from how Islam is interpreted today, it is an idea that can be used to justify theocracy. By theocracy I don’t mean rule by priests. I simply mean that God’s law extends to every sphere of society and human life. This was the case with ancient Israel, and this has indeed been the Islamic tradition. The prophet Muhammad was in his own day both a prophet and a Caesar who integrated the domains of church and state. Following his example, the rulers of the various Islamic empires, from the Umayyad to the Ottoman, saw themselves as Allah’s vicegerents on earth, charged with establishing Islamic rule worldwide and bringing all the lands they could under the authority of Islamic holy law. Historian Bernard Lewis writes that “in classical Arabic and in the other classical languages of Islam, there are no pairs of terms corresponding to ‘lay’ and ‘ecclesiastical; ‘spiritual’ and ‘temporal; ‘secular’ and ‘religious: because these pairs of words express a Christian dichotomy that has no equivalent in the world of Islam.” Even today in strict Islamic states like Saudi Arabia we see that Islamic law (or sharia) extends beyond religious law to commercial law, civil law, and family law.
