My friend Larry Yudelson recently pointed readers of his terrific Web log, “YudelLine 2.0a,” to an article in Christianity Today on the Yu-gi-oh! phenomenon.
Yu-Gi-Oh! is a Japanese trading card game that has spawned a television cartoon and a movie. Because it features grade school kids who summon up magical spells or monsters to defeat their enemies, the Christian magazine’s movie reviewer offered a discussion guide for children and parents.
It points readers to Ephesians 6:10-18, which describes a struggle against “the powers of this dark world” and “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
I don’t know what kind of forces of evil I was tempting when I sat down to read, in the weeks of reflection preceding the Days of Awe, a new book by Jonathan Kirsch called “God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism” (Viking Compass). But it’s clear from the above that the “war” is still being waged.
Kirsch is a writer of gently iconoclastic religious books. In his latest, he challenges a foundation of Judeo-Christian and Islamic civilization; the claim that monotheism is an ethical advance over paganism.
According to Kirsch, the so-called “gift of the Jews” (actually, he places the birth of monotheism in the court of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton) is a mixed blessing.
Kirsch contends that paganism was hardly the “parade of horribles” described by the biblical prophets and church elders. Lurid accounts of human sacrifice and cults of prostitution often amount to “atrocity propaganda” by the polytheists’ enemies.
And notwithstanding some of the commentaries we read about the binding of Isaac, “monotheism cannot claim a monopoly on the replacement of human beings with animals as acceptable offerings on the altar of sacrifice.”
Impulse to punish
Kirsch does not address directly the weightiest claim usually made for monotheism: that without the belief in one God, all ethics become relative and situational. Instead, he weighs monotheism’s ethical claims against the behaviors of its historical practitioners.
He concludes that one enduring legacy of monotheism is “the impulse to… punish anyone who did not embrace an approved set of beliefs and practices.”
He extends the argument to suggest that the “same rigorism [sic] and zeal that characterized the war of God against the gods can be found in all totalitarianisms, and nowhere more terribly than in such modern and supposedly secular phenomena as Nazism and Communism.”
The leap from the God of Abraham to the Nazi’s death head is huge and unsupported, especially when Kirsch acknowledges the zeal of the pagan Roman and Hellenistic rulers who suppressed the monotheists in their midst.
I also wish he addressed those who argue that Nazism and communism were fatally God-less movements.
Yet Kirsch’s book has come out in 2004, not 1944. He clearly has the attacks of 9/11 in mind when writes that monotheism “turned out to inspire a ferocity and even a fanaticism that is mostly absent from polytheism.”
Kirsch is a literary critic, not a theologian, and is not arguing for or against Western religion. “The dark side of monotheism, of course, is not its only side,” he writes. “The blessings of Judaism, Christianity and Islam far outweigh — and, we must hope, will long outlast — the curse of religious fanaticism that is implicit in the very notion of the Only True God.”
But he does suggest that monotheists could learn from the tolerance and pluralism he sees in ethical polytheism, which honors “freedom to choose among the many gods and goddesses who are believed to exist.”
After all, he writes, “the values that the Western world embraces and celebrates — cultural diversity and religious liberty — are pagan values.”
I prefer to think that what we learned from 9/11 is that we cannot tolerate those who have no tolerance for others. That our enemies hate the capitalist West because it represents and defends freedom of choice over religious and ideological absolutes.
That a radical imam’s worst nightmare is not a Christian or Jewish theocracy, but countries whose citizens decide to go to synagogue or church — or not; whose women choose to pursue degrees and careers — or not; whose children grow up to challenge their elders’ values — or not.
I don’t think that makes me a pagan. I think that makes me an American.
And when I sit in synagogue over the next few weeks, I’ll pray that God will give me the strength to tolerate, understand and even appreciate those who seek their Awe in different ways and different places.
Andrew Silow-Carroll is the editor in chief of the New Jersey Jewish News, where this article originally appeared.
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