Op-Ed: America’s Pagan roots

As the last days of the political campaign wind down and the election draws near perhaps this is a fit time to reflect on how this process came about and the historical roots that have made our nation what it is today.

The state of History education in this country is so dismal that very few of our citizens have any clear understanding of who we are or where we came from. Because of this gap in our collective knowledge, charlatans as well as earnest and well meaning believers, have felt free to invent their own mythical history for our nation, and people it with heroes tailored to their heart’s desire. For fundamentalist Christians this has led to the earnest belief that the Founders were people very like them, steeped in the same religion and social beliefs that they hold dear. But such was not the case. Education played a major role in early America. As John Adams noted:

“A native of America who cannot read or write, is as rare an appearance…as a comet or an earthquake.”

But American education of the day did not stop with the “three R’s. The overwhelming majority of it was centered around a study of the Pagan classics of antiquity. Anyone who had a formal education, and 30 of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention were college graduates, were expected to speak several languages, among which Greek and Latin were required. Indeed, one could not even be admitted to Harvard, a divinity school at the time, unless they were able to:

“…read Tully [Cicero] or such like classical Latin author ex tempore and make and speak true Latin in verse and prose suo (ut aiunt) Marte [by his own power, as they say], and decline perfectly the paradigms of nouns and verbs in the Greek tongue, then may he be admitted into the college, nor shall any claim admission before such qualification.”

Once in college students were seldom even allowed to speak English:

“The scholars shall never use their mother tongue, except that in public exercises of oratory or such like they be called to make them in English.”

During the heady days of intellectual ferment that culminated in the Revolution, pamphleteers wrote stirring essays on the rights of man and the ideal form of government for a free nation, hiding their true identities from the authorities behind such classical noms de plume as Cato, Brutus, Caesar, Aristeides, Helvidius, Catullus, Junius Americanus, and many more, confident that a classically educated public would recognize the heroes whose persona they had assumed and the ideological meaning of each and every name. George Washington as a Roman hero Revolutionary America was steeped in the intellectual effervescence of the great European “Enlightenment” of the 18th century, which was a secular humanists reaction to the horrors of the Protestant reformation and the Catholic counter-reformation. For Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and America’s own Thomas Paine, Reason rather than religious dogma was “the primary source and basis of authority.” Religion had been in decline throughout the colonies for almost a century before the Revolution despite desperate attempts by Evangelicals in the 1730’s and 40’s to rekindle it and “bring the Colonies to God.” This was the movement known as the “First Great Awakening.” It failed and so great was the Revolutionary antipathy towards religion that in 1775 tax rolls show that there were only 1,800 Christian ministers in all the colonies combined, giving a ratio of only one minister for every fifteen hundred adults. To the sons and daughters of the Enlightenment, churches were seen as reactionary, oppressive and superstitious. When the newly formed US government performed its first census it discovered that barely 17% of the population belonged to a church of any sort. A poll of the graduating class of Yale, conducted in 1796 found that only one member of the entire class professed a belief in God. This is very significant since Yale of that time was a divinity school. So where did the generation of the Revolution draw its morals and ideals if not from the Bible? From the classics of Greece and Rome. Even the name of their form of government reveals its roots. Democracy is from the Greek dimokratia (δημοκρατία) for government by the people or demos. But it was to Republican Rome that the Founders looked for the actual structure of their new state, naming the upper house of their new government the Senate after the body that had ruled Rome before the emperors. The Jefferson Memorial This classical foundation to American history is easily seen in the art and architecture of the time. Christian symbols on American revolutionary art, illustration or architecture are rare but Pagan symbols are everywhere. When the new Americans wished to show Liberty or Justice or any other virtue it was a Greek Goddess and not the Christian God they chose and justice, the cornerstone of the democratic ideal, lived in a pagan temple, not a church. U.S. Supreme Court Today the nation that these classically minded heroes founded is in the midst of great turmoil and radical social change. Soon people from non European cultures will equal and eventually surpass those from Europe bringing with them their own ideas of religion, culture and government. Now, more than ever before, the right of the individual to worship as they choose, must be carefully guarded and fostered. The Goddess of Justice Soon no one religion will dominate and we must therefore avoid at all costs politicizing faith or basing our laws on the faith of one group to the exclusion of others since that way leads to sectarian strife, perhaps even violence. To guard our own faiths we must also guard those of other people as well as the right of some people to have none at all. Otherwise our laws will whipsaw back and forth, changing as the political stock of one sect gains or loses in relation to the others. If America wishes to maintain the ideals that made it what it is then Americans need to know the real roots of who we are and where we came from so that we can decide for ourselves where we want to go. Ours is, and must always be, a secular nation, one that guards the right to faith but demands that the laws that govern us all be rooted in a shared, secular, heritage.