Collective guilt as a precept of paganism

An excellent essay. From America in the Aftermath of George Floyd: Between Paganism and Christianity by Joshua Mitchell.

Most of human history is pagan. The advent of Christianity is a relatively recent affair. Some say Christianity is now receding. Some say Christianity has not yet fully taken hold. Is secularism taking hold? Is paganism reemerging? Do we live in a strange time characterized by a return to paganism, though with Christian characteristics? Whichever account is correct has implications for America in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.

The pagan world was the world of many gods, each associated with a people who made payments and sacrifices to their gods. Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract that when pagan nations battled other pagan nations, soldiers did not battle soldiers; rather, gods battled gods. Hence, the cathartic rage of pagan wars.

Christianity toppled the pagan world. The cathartic rage of war, Christians argued, in which one nation purged another, could not solve the problem of man’s stain, which was original, a term we no longer really understand. Original sin means that sin is always already there, prior to a person being born into membership of this nation or that nation. What this means is that blood rage cannot expiate stain; the sins of my people can no longer be purged by cathartic rage toward your people, and vice versa. That is why Rousseau concluded that Christianity had ruined politics, and had produced a civilization of pacifists, whose rage toward other nations could not be enkindled for the purpose of war. If you doubt this, ponder the fact that Christianity developed a “doctrine of just war,” according to which cathartic rage could not be reason enough to go to war.

Against the backdrop of pagan history, Christianity is revolutionary, not evolutionary. The evolution of paganism, had it occurred, would have brought about novel forms of cathartic rage toward other peoples. Christianity declared that no matter what evolutionary “advance” paganism might bring, it could never adequately address the problem of man’s stain. Christianity was revolutionary because it declared that we must look elsewhere than toward others, with cathartic rage, to expiate our stains. That “elsewhere” is divine, not mortal. Only through Christ, the divine scapegoat, who “takes upon himself the sins of the world” (John 1:29), can man be cleansed.

If Christianity is receding, then we will likely see the return to the pagan understanding that peoples are the proper objects of cathartic rage. That is a sobering truth, which defenders of secularism deny. The real alternatives might not be Christianity or secularism, but rather revelation or paganism. Should we return to paganism, one people will seek to cleanse themselves of stain by venting their cathartic rage on another people. The war between the gods of the nations would resume in full. The “blood and soil” nationalism that is straining to emerge on the Alt-Right is a witness to the reemergence of this pagan view, which is contemptuous of Christianity’s counter-claim, and always will be. What counts in the pagan world of blood is not me, the “person,” but the people of which I am but a representative. What counts in Christianity is the Adam, whose stain I present; and Christ’s sacrifice, through which I am represented to God as righteous. The distance between these two understandings is infinite and unbridgeable.

If by some divine good fortune, Christianity someday fully takes hold, it will be inconceivable for us to think of ourselves in terms of members of blood nations, or to think of justice in terms of blood retribution. We will all be “adopted sons and daughters of God” (Rom. 8:15, 9:26; Galatians 3:26), whose merely genetic markers of peoplehood—exhumed these days by 23andMe and by Ancestry.com—tell us nothing, really, about who we are. In such a world, there will be no nations and peoples, only persons, who know that their transgression, their stain, runs so deep that only Christ can cure it. In such a world, “racism”—the belief that one group, one people, can achieve purity by venting cathartic rage upon another—would be unthinkable.

One of the evils of the BLM protests is not the nominal issue of justice for individuals but the insistence of an expatiation of guilt as a collective. If one sides insists on acceptance of its own predicate belief system before it agrees to engage in discussion, then no discussion can occur.

And regrettably that is the form that discussions take. Accept that you are accountable for a collective guilt. Once you have admitted that, we can discuss how much we will take from you. Because it always comes back to material demands.

If, as a believer in human universalism, individualism, rule of law, equality before the law, consent of the governed, due process, natural rights etc., you are unwilling to let go of those precepts, you cannot accede to accepting the predicate demands to believe in collective identity and collective guilt.

The full essay by Mitchell is worth a read, tying together the fact that it is not just an ideological struggle but also a religious struggle. The pagans wish to insist on conversion to paganism and yet to do so is inherently a rejection of the age of enlightenment precepts, rooted also in Christianity, which has brought us so far.