First Things: The Pagan West
By Peter Leithart
September 6, 2007

When it arrived in the world, Christianity announced the end of sacrifice. But in its growth over the long centuries since then, it may have muted its own founding message, a victim of its own success. Does Galatians have much to say to people who have never worried about ritual contagion or the danger of contracting impurity from table companions? Does the Letter to the Hebrews resonate with people who have never seen a sacrifice, much less performed one? Can the New Testament speak to people who have lost all sympathy for primal religion?

In Europe and North America, the Church faces an unprecedented challenge. American Christians don’t deal with paganism—not real paganism anyway. In the West, the Church is surrounded by the spiritual lethargy that accompanies a surfeit of wealth and aimless ease. We face a general accedia. Our neighbors are adherents of a sometimes jaded, sometimes gleeful, post-Christianity. The Church has triumphed over paganism before. But never before has she confronted a sophisticated civilization haunted by Christ.

Here, as on so many other questions, there’s much to be learned from Christians in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a truism among African theologians that the Church has grown most rapidly where traditional African religions are strongest. According to Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako, this is no accident but highlights the “special relationship” that African “primal religions” have with Christianity. Like primal African religion, Christianity displays a strong sense of human finitude and sin, believes in a spiritual world that interacts with the human world, teaches the reality of life after death, and cultivates the sacramental sense that physical objects are carriers of spiritual power. Christianity catches on there because it gives names to the realities they already know and experience. the rest