The actual title of the post you are looking for is "This Time Will Not Be the Same."

You can read part 1 here.

You can read part 2 here.

This is Part 2 -- Click Here for Part 1

Because the Gospel was new to him, the pagan needed to learn it from the beginning. The neo-pagan is in a very different position; he needs to unlearn things he has learned about the Gospel which happen to be untrue. We see a trivial symptom of the problem in the great number of people who think a little drummer boy was supposed to have accompanied the shepherds, a notion which makes the Christmas narrative seem most implausible to anyone more than ten years of age.

But non-existent drummer boys are the least of the problems. The neo-pagan is likely to have entirely mistaken views of what Christians believe about creation, fall, and redemption—about God, man, and the relation between God and man.

One thing may seem to be unchanged: Now as then, the non-believer hails Caesar, not Christ, as Lord. But whereas the pagan reproached Christians for doubting distinctively ancient illusions, for example the eternal destiny of the Empire of Rome, the neo-pagan is more likely to reproach them for doubting distinctively modern illusions, for example the idea that by technology and social engineering, we can devise a world in which nobody needs to be good.

In one way the pagan was less deluded, for he could hardly fail to know that he was an idolater. His idols were visible and touchable. They were carved from physical substances like wood and stone. The neo-pagan is much less likely to know that he is an idolater; if faith concerns things not seen, then in a sense he is more faithful, for his idols are invisible and untouchable. They are woven of sensations, wishes, and ideas, like pleasure, success, and the future. Even his magazines have names like Self. Perhaps visible idols were always masks for invisible idols, but in our day the masks have come off.

The pagan world was unfamiliar with Christian ideas. By contrast, the neo-pagan world is brimming with them.  The makers of that world have even appropriated some of them—but have emptied them of Christian meaning.

For example, the neo-pagan may have a high view of what he calls faith, hope, and love, virtues undreamt among the pagans—yet he is likely to use the term “faith” for clinging to the illusions of a barren life, “hope” for sheer worldly optimism, and “love” for desire or sentiment without sacrifice or commitment of the will. Another example of such emptying is the way some neo-pagans accept the Christian view that history has meaning and direction, but purge God from the story so that it becomes a bland tale of “progress” toward whatever they want the world to have more of. Pagans didn’t believe in progress, but in endlessly repeated recurrence.

Nor must we overlook another profound difference. If the pagan was at all inclined to admit that his nation had ever done wrong, he had no one else to blame. But the neo-pagan can blame his culture’s sins on Christianity. The trial of Galileo, the plunder of the American indigenes, the Spanish Inquisition—they were all the Christians’ fault.

Surely these things were gravely evil, though if neo-pagans were consistent, they would set the thousands killed by Christian inquisitions against the millions killed by atheistic inquisitions. Yet it is easy to see why they don’t. Christian offences are easier to invoke, because the Church admits them, and they are also more scandalous, just because of the Gospel of love.

In spite of the sins of Christians, one might expect the memory of the influence of the Gospel to favor its re-proclamation. After all, the pagan world had never experienced the revivifying effect of grace, but the neo-pagan world has. Consider just the Gospel’s high views of conscience and of the dignity of the human person, and how these have transformed Western culture. Surely all this cannot be overlooked!

No, but the neo-pagan takes for granted all the good that his culture has inherited from Christendom. In his view, certain things simply got better: That is just how history goes, or at least how it went. If he assigns anything the credit, he assigns it not to grace, but to such things as science, capitalism, and “enlightenment.”

He expects the stream to keep on flowing without the spring. When it does begin to dry up, he may be vaguely uneasy, but he does not fully grasp what he is seeing.  Why doesn’t he?  Because his ideas of dry and wet are changing too.  It isn’t just that the neo-pagan world around him is losing respect for the sacredness of the conscience and the dignity of the human person; he is a part of that world, and he is losing respect for them too.  They seem so unimportant.  Why do Christians obsess over them?

Finally, the pagan knew he was not a Christian. By contrast, a certain kind of neo-pagan may think that he is one. This oddity is perhaps the most challenging difference between evangelization and re-evangelization. In the ancient world, the people who needed to be evangelized were outside the walls of the Church; today they include thousands who are inside, but who think just like those who are outside.  When the Gospel is proclaimed, they complain.

A pew is a difficult mission field. It is hard for the shepherds to bring home the sheep if they think they are already in the fold.  But that is a story for another day.

This is Part 1 -- Click Here for Part 2

God willing, the new evangelization will happen, but let us not imagine that this time will be like the first time. The old evangelization proclaimed the Good News among pagan, pre-Christian peoples to whom it came as something new. Nothing like that had been done before. But nothing like our task has been done before either.

Re-evangelizing is not evangelizing as though for the first time again; the very fact of past proclamation makes re-proclamation different. For we proclaim the Gospel to a neo-pagan, post-Christian people to whom it does not come as new. The old world had not yet felt the caress of grace; our world, once brushed, now flinches from its touch.

Is re-evangelization completely and radically different from evangelization? No. The same Christ knocks at the door of the same human heart, though a heart with a different history. Is it more difficult? In some ways. Easier? In some ways. But different.

Here is one great difference: The pagan made excuses for transgressing the moral law. By contrast, the neo-pagan pretends, when it suits him, that there is no morality, or perhaps that each of us has a morality of his own. Since they had the Law and the Prophets, it comes as no surprise that the Jews took morality for granted. But to a great degree, and despite their sordid transgressions, so did the pagans.

Not that skepticism was unknown among them: “What is truth?” Pilate asked, not waiting for the answer. Yet consider all the pagan errors to which St. Paul alludes in his epistles: Was relativism one of them? No. He could omit it then; he could not have omitted it today.

Related to that first great difference is another. The pagan wanted to be forgiven, but he did not know how to find absolution. To him the Gospel came as a message of release. But the neo-pagan does not want to hear that he needs to be forgiven, and so to him the Gospel comes as a message of guilt.

This inversion seems incredible, because the neo-pagan certainly feels the weight of his sins. But he thinks the way to have peace is not to have the weight lifted, but to learn not to take it seriously. Hearing Christ’s promise of forgiveness, he thinks “All those guilty Christians!” Having chosen to view the freest people as the most burdened, he naturally views the most burdened as the freest. “Everyone has done things he regrets. Everyone lies. Get over it!”

The pagan was raised differently. He was brought up in the ways and the atmosphere of paganism, and in order to be converted, he had to be removed from both. By contrast, though the neo-pagan has probably also been taught pagan ways, he may have been brought up in an atmosphere of Christian sentiment. Consequently he regards the Gospel not as the story of true God become man, but as a sentimental fable for children. Even Christian sentiments are difficult to take seriously apart from the actual life of grace.

Then too, the pagan was likely to be exposed to the Gospel either all at once or not at all. The neo-pagan has been exposed to just enough spores to develop an allergic reaction. Perhaps he was baptized as a child, but never seriously taught the faith. Perhaps his parents became angry with the Church and stopped taking him.

The pagan suffered the burden of a pagan childhood, but he was spared the burden of an interrupted Christian childhood. Whereas he had never been immersed in the waters of faith, all too often the neo-pagan has been dipped in them, but then pulled out.

Not only was the pagan devoid of nostalgia for a Christian past, he was also unencumbered by the anger of guilt for rejecting it. The neo-pagan is susceptible to both the nostalgia and the anger, and he may even feel both at once.

I once met an atheist with a chip on his shoulder who boasted of the “fun” he had “ruining all the Catholic kids” at the Catholic college where he had taught. Yet after a few glasses of wine he said that he was “very religious,” and that he had recently joined a church choir from sheer love for the great old hymns. At turns, he was nostalgic for something good he had left behind, and belligerent because he had no good reason for having left it.

If neutralism is impossible, then bias is inevitable.  So what am I saying?  Should laws and rules and policies embrace bias?  Is bias good? 

Bias is in the nature of a rule, but some biases are appropriate and others are not.  The rules of baseball are biased toward skill, and that is appropriate because skillful competition is what baseball is about; the rules of education are biased toward knowledge, and that is appropriate because the extension of knowledge is what education is about.

Mind you, rules can and should be fair.  For example, we shouldn’t discriminate against a skillful player because of the color of his skin.  But that is not the same as having no bias; the rules give the advantage to the exercise of skill.

What about the kinds of rules called laws?  Surely they should have no bias, shouldn't they?  Certainly not.  They should be biased toward the common good, along with its corollaries, justice and the greatest possible protection of conscience.  Lady Justice wears a blindfold not because she has no criterion of judgment, but because she is blind toward all other criteria.  She doesn’t use her eyes because she is using her scales.

If we admit that rules cannot be neutral, then aren't we authorizing the tyranny of some religion, or coalition of religions, over others?  We are certainly conceding the inevitability of religious influence, even of unequal religious influence, on public policy.  But shall we protest this inequality?  Why?  What sane person would suppose that, say, Satanism, Voodoo, or Thuggee should have the same influence, say, as the classical theist religions, such as Christianity or Judaism?

But whether the influence of a religion will be irenic or tyrannical depends on the nature of that religion -- on just what supreme and unconditional commitment it proposes, and how it understands it.  Take the early Christian writers, who gave distinctively Christian reasons for respecting non-Christian conscience.

"God does not want unwilling worship, nor does He require a forced repentance," says St. Hilary of Poitiers; "human salvation is procured not by force but by persuasion and gentleness," says Isidore; "no one is detained by us against his will," says Lactantius, "for he is unserviceable to God who is destitute of faith and devotedness .... nothing is so much a matter of free-will as [the virtue of true] religion, in which, if the mind of the worshipper is disinclined to it, [the virtue of true] religion is at once taken away, and ceases to exist."

This is what I call the classical theory of toleration.  It grounds toleration – in this case, religious toleration, but the same is true in every sphere of toleration – not on an incoherency, but on a paradox.  Unlike liberalism, which tries to ground toleration on an impossible suspension of judgment about the good and the true, it grounds it precisely in making judgments about the good and the true.

For example, God really does desire only willing worship.  Faith really cannot be coerced.  True religion really is destroyed by compulsion.  For just these reasons, some bad and false things must be tolerated.  We may pass laws against some things that people do because of their beliefs – that is another sphere in which one must decide what to tolerate and what not to -- but we will not pass laws against the holding of certain beliefs.

For those of us who have been brought up to believe in the liberal rather than in the classical theory of toleration, in the incoherency rather than in the paradox, this is terrifying.  We thought toleration was something that got us off the hook of making judgments.  Now it seems that it hangs us on it.

But I think that is simply how it is.  We have to get over our unreasonable fear of sound judgment.  One must know something, at least, about the good and true in order to know whether to tolerate any bad and false things at all.  Does God really desire only willing worship?  Is faith really impossible to coerce?  Is true religion really destroyed by compulsion?

One must know still more about the good and the true in order to know which bad and false things to tolerate, and which not to.  The more detailed the decisions become, the more one must know.

Toleration turns out to depend not on suspension of judgment, but on judgment.  The ancients were right after all.  We must become wise.

Toleration is a virtue.  But it is a puzzling one, because the whole point of it lies in putting up with some things that are immoral, offensive, erroneous, in poor taste, or in some other sense bad.

In the end the various rationales for toleration boil down to just two.  The classical rationale grounds toleration on a paradox.  The liberal rationale grounds it on an incoherency.  One can live with paradoxes; they merely take some getting used to.  But incoherency is intolerable.  Let’s start there.

We owe the liberal theory, the incoherent one, to early modern thinkers who were wearied by wars of religion and ready to grasp at straws, and to contemporary thinkers who think it is unnecessary to choose among competing views of how to live.  On their view, the reason we put up with some bad and false things is that we suspend judgment about what is good and true.  We don’t have to know what is good to make good laws.

And there is the incoherency.  Liberalism tries to get something from nothing.  If we really suspended judgment about the good, then it would be hard to see what is good about toleration itself.  In fact, we wouldn’t even grasp it means to practice toleration, because we couldn’t locate the mean.  We would have no basis for drawing the line between bad things we should tolerate and bad things we shouldn’t. 

Along with the incoherence comes something even worse.  If neutrality is impossible, then no matter how it preens itself on the illusion, liberalism will never really be neutral.  It will enforce its own biases, sparing itself the necessity of having to defend them by pretending that they aren’t biases at all.

Some of the results are almost comical.  In matters of religious liberty, for example, liberalism follows rules concerning religions which admit that they are religions, which it does not follow concerning religions which deny that they are religions.  Does this claim seem implausible?  Then consider contemporary Establishment Clause jurisprudence. 

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, governmental action must be thoroughly neutral, not only among different religions, but even between religion and irreligion (which isn’t what the Clause really says, but never mind).  In order to promote this so-called neutrality, the Court imposes a three-pronged test.  (1) The law must have a "secular" legislative purpose.  (2) It must not have the principal or primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting "religion."  (3)  It must not foster an excessive government entanglement with "religion."

Yet because the Court denies that so-called secular systems of life and belief are religions, the way the three-pronged test actually plays out is like this:  (1) A statute may not be motivated by concerns originating in the Jewish or Christian systems of life and belief, but it may be motivated by concerns arising in, say, the Queer Nation system of life and belief.  (2) It must not have the principal or primary effect of advancing things that Jews and Christians believe, but it may have the principal and primary effect of advancing things that, say, Marxists believe.  (3) It must not foster an excessive involvement with the institutions of Church or Synagogue, but it may foster any degree of involvement whatsoever with the institutions of, say, Planned Parenthood.

To put the problem another way, liberalism discriminates against transparency and honesty.  My second grade public school teacher, who probably read the Bible, led us at lunch in giving thanks for our food.  My fifth grade public school teacher, who probably read Jeremy Bentham, taught us in civics class to believe in the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number, which at that age, God forgive me, sounded plausible.  These two pieties, biblical and utilitarian, were equally reflective of supreme commitments; they merely reflected different ones, and each one excluded the other.

To mention but a single point of difference, utilitarian morality denies that there is such a thing as an intrinsically evil act, holding that the end justifies the means; but biblical morality insists that there is such a thing as an intrinsically evil act, proclaiming that we must not do evil so that good will result.   Yet what do liberals say?  That the second grade teacher's piety is "religious" and has no place in the classroom, while the fifth grade teacher's piety is "non-religious" or "secular" and may stay. 

If neutrality is impossible, then bias is inevitable.  So what am I saying?  Should laws and rules and policies embrace bias?  Is bias good?  Stay tuned; all will be answered next time.