Christianity as Dressed-Up Paganism?

Paul Potts

Speaking of Dressed Up...

(Image from Britain's Got Talent)

A couple of weeks ago, as some will recall, I was invited to dinner with Park Wan-suh and her two translators because I had proofread and reviewed the English translation of her book Who Ate Up All Those Singa?

One of the translators, Yu Young-nan, gave me a book, Lee Dong-ha's Toy City, which Young-nan's daughter Kim Chi-young has translated and which Koryo Press has just published. Like Park's Singa book, Lee's Toy City is an autobiographical novel set in the poverty-stricken period following liberation from Japanese rule when the Americans and Russians defeated the Japanese.

One of the things that interested me is Lee Dong-ha's depiction of Christianity's role in South Korea during the 1950s. For some Koreans of the time, survival was possible only because the Protestant and Catholic churches provided a bit of food. But the fare was thin, as was also, at times, the spiritual nourishment, which could occasionally appear hardly Christian, as in the piety of one character, Reverend Cha, who dispenses some intriguing advice on prayer when the main character's grieving, pregnant mother inquires how to pray to Jesus:

"Reverend, will my boy's father and sister be able to come home if I believe in Jesus?" This was her last wish.

I clearly heard Reverend Cha's easy answer. "Yes. Just pray to Jesus. Then the day will come when the entire family can live together."

Mother asked again, cautiously, "How does one pray, Reverend?"

Reverend Cha replied breezily, "Do it like you would to the Wise Old Goddess of Maternity." (Lee Dong-ha, Toy City, page 136)

A fascinating reply, for it not only assumes that the mother will know exactly what this means but that such a pagan prayer to a goddess can provide an appropriate model for a Christian prayer to Jesus.

Perhaps this is the Shamanism just under the surface of Korean Christianity that many observers have claimed to glimpse.

Yet, in the history of Christianity throughout the world, this is nothing unusual -- even in its European development as Christians evangelized, for instance, the Anglo-Saxon tribes of England. Here's something that I wrote about this in my article "Praeparatio Evangelium: Beowulf as Antetype of Christ" (Journal of The Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Association of Korea, Volume 12, Number 2 (2004)):

In his History of the English Church and People, Book I, chapter 30, Bede cites the instructions that Pope Gregory the Great gave in A.D. 601 to Abbot Melitus for missionary work in England:

[T]he temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let water be consecrated and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed there. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more freely resort to the places to which they have been accustomed. And because they are used to slaughter many oxen in sacrifice to devils, some solemnity must be given them in exchange for this, as that on the day of the dedication, or the nativities of the holy martyrs, whose relics are there deposited, they should build themselves huts of the boughs of trees about those churches which have been turned to that use from being temples, and celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting, and no more offer animals to the Devil, but kill cattle and glorify God in their feast, and return thanks to the Giver of all things for their abundance; to the end that, whilst some outward gratifications are retained, they may the more easily consent to the inward joys. For there is no doubt that it is impossible to cut off every thing at once from their rude natures; because he who endeavours to ascend to the highest place rises by degrees or steps, and not by leaps. Thus the Lord made Himself known to the people of Israel in Egypt; and yet He allowed them the use, in His own worship, of the sacrifices which they were wont to offer to the Devil, commanding them in His sacrifice to kill animals, to the end that, with changed hearts, they might lay aside one part of the sacrifice, whilst they retained another; and although the animals were the same as those which they were wont to offer, they should offer them to the true God, and not to idols; and thus they would no longer be the same sacrifices. This then, dearly beloved, it behoves you to communicate to our aforesaid brother, that he, being placed where he is at present, may consider how he is to order all things. God preserve you in safety, most beloved son (A. M. Sellar, tr., Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England, A Revised Translation (London: George Bell and Sons, 1907), Book 1, Chapter 30).

As in Beowulf, the 'gods' are suppressed and demonized, and new content is added, but the old forms and much of the familiar world remains. Interesting in this context are Bede's remarks elsewhere about the origin of the Anglo-Saxon term for "Easter," linking it to Eostre/Eastre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of the rising sun (Venerable Bede, De Temporum Rationale, 1.5). In this instance, the name has been preserved but applied to Christ's resurrection.

Note that in the quotation above, Gregory the Great cites the Old Testament as providing a precedent for grafting Christianity onto pagan practices, a rhetorical move that allows for a bivalent reading of paganism. (Hodges, "Praeparatio," pages 321-323)

I suppose, therefore, that if one is going to see Korean Christianity as pagan Shamanism in disguise, then one could call European Christianity merely Euro-paganism in disguise, which is precisely what the Protestant Reformers claimed about the Roman Catholic Church. The Reformers, of course, fractured European Christianity into broken parts through their quest for spiritual purity and political power, so there's no little irony that in their mission work throughout the world, the various Protestant groups have largely come to see the necessity of grafting Christianity onto the more 'acceptable' pagan practices that they encounter. Even tiny Bible colleges in the U.S. offer courses on the anthropology of missions that teach future missionaries how to present Christianity in ways that are culturally acceptable to the non-Christians whom they are trying to convert.

Now that Europe is 'post-Christian' -- as some claim, anyway -- and Christians turn to thoughts of re-Christianizing that continent, they face a rising Islam there within the neopagan secularism that otherwise pervades European culture. Faced with a daunting task, they aren't giving up, and they might even gather their courage from Philip Jenkins's recent work, as his article in Foreign Policy, "Europe's Christian Comeback" (June 2007), currently makes clear:

In fact, the rapid decline in the continent’s church attendance over the past 40 years may have done Europe a favor. It has freed churches of trying to operate as national entities that attempt to serve all members of society. Today, no church stands a realistic chance of incorporating everyone. Smaller, more focused bodies, however, can be more passionate, enthusiastic, and rigorously committed to personal holiness. To use a scientific analogy, when a star collapses, it becomes a white dwarf -- smaller in size than it once was, but burning much more intensely. Across Europe, white-dwarf faith communities are growing within the remnants of the old mass church.

Perhaps nowhere is this more true than within European Catholicism, where new religious currents have become a potent force. Examples include movements such as the Focolare, the Emmanuel Community, and the Neocatechumenate Way, all of which are committed to a re-evangelization of Europe. These movements use charismatic styles of worship and devotion that would seem more at home in an American Pentecostal church, but at the same time they are thoroughly Catholic. Though most of these movements originated in Spain and Italy, they have subsequently spread throughout Europe and across the Catholic world. Their influence over the younger clergy and lay leaders who will shape the church in the next generation is surprisingly strong.

Similar trends are at work within the Protestant churches of Northern and Western Europe. The most active sections of the Church of England today are the evangelical and charismatic parishes that have, in effect, become megachurches in their own right. These parishes have been incredibly successful at reaching out to a secular society that no longer knows much of anything about the Christian faith. Holy Trinity Brompton, a megaparish in Knightsbridge, London, that is now one of Britain’s largest churches, is home to the amazingly popular "Alpha Course," a means of recruiting potential converts through systems of informal networking aimed chiefly at young adults and professionals. As with the Catholic movements, the course works because it makes no assumptions about any prior knowledge: Everyone is assumed to be a new recruit in need of basic teaching. Nor does the recruitment technique assume that people live or work in traditional settings of family or employment. The Alpha Course is successfully geared for postmodern believers in a postindustrial economy.

Alongside these older Christian communities are hugely energetic immigrant congregations. On a typical Sunday, half of all churchgoers in London are African or Afro-Caribbean. Of Britain’s 10 largest megachurches, four are pastored by Africans. Paris has 250 ethnic Protestant churches, most of them black African. Similar trends are found in Germany. Booming Christian churches in Africa and Asia now focus much of their evangelical attention on Europe. Nigerian and Congolese ministers have been especially successful, but none more so than the Ukraine-based ministry of Nigerian evangelist Sunday Adelaja. He has opened more than 300 churches in 30 countries in the last 12 years and now claims 30,000 (mainly white) followers.

Well, that's certainly interesting, and a different perspective on Europe's religious future than one glimpses from the viewpoints of those many other commentors who see an Islamic future for Europe. Even the secularists are coming around as they come to appreciate Europe's Christian inheritance when faced by the great cultural difference and challenge that Islam presents:

The result has been a rediscovery of the continent’s Christian roots, even among those who have long disregarded it, and a renewed sense of European cultural Christianity. Jürgen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

Prompting Jenkins to remark that if a Marxist like Habermas can praise Christianity, then:

Europe may be confronting the dilemmas of a truly multifaith society, but with Christianity poised for a comeback, it is hardly on the verge of becoming an Islamic colony.

Is Jenkins right? Faced by Islam, a culturally contextual re-Christianization of neo-pagan Europe? That would take a miracle!

Sometimes, however, miracles do happen, as in the case of the fortunate Mr. Paul Potts, a mobile phone salesman from South Wales whose dream was to sing opera.