Uneasy agnosticism on both abortion and infanticide has probably been the norm in Christian societies, even during periods when the church was far more powerful than it is today. Laura Gowing, for instance, writes of the reluctance of witnesses and neighbors to condemn women suspected of infanticide in seventeenth-century England: instead, they would present the accused as “confused and anxious, heartbroken and manipulated by her fear of naming the father.” Although a 1624 statute demanded that women found guilty of infanticide be hanged, courts were unlikely to hand down such a sentence. This reluctance persists still, as Helen Dale writes:
An echo of humanity’s infanticidal past is still found in jury rooms throughout the common law world: the reason we do not refer to infant-killing as “murder” is because in 1922, it was reclassified and re-named with passage of the Infanticide Act. This was done because juries refused to convict—even before 1920, when they were all male and the Crown case was overwhelming—and had been refusing to convict for some time. The only crime for which fewer convictions were recorded was abortion. In Scotland, there hadn’t been a successful abortion prosecution for 50 years. To this day, infanticide convictions are astonishingly rare.
“Juries,” as Helen put it to me, “are pagan.” Increasingly, we all are.
In 1939 T. S. Eliot gave a series of lectures at the University of Cambridge in which he described a fork in the road. Western Civilization might continue along the Christian path, he predicted, or it might adopt “modern paganism.” Eliot, a Christian convert, hoped for the former, but he feared that we were already hell-bent on the latter.
Eliot’s binary is the basis of a 2018 book by the legal historian Steven Smith titled Pagans and Christians in the City. One might reasonably ask why our choices should be limited to these two options, to be pagans or to be Christians. If we fully abandon Christianity, so say the secular reformers, shouldn’t that clear the way for some newer and better guiding philosophy?
No, says Smith, because paganism never really went away, which makes its return all the easier. Forget the account of history offered in, for instance, Gustave Doré’s painting The Triumph of Christianity Over Paganism, in which Christ and his sword-wielding angels descend from the sky and scatter the old gods. Even after the Christian emperors began to persecute pagans in earnest, Smith argues,
Paganism lingered on both in the countryside and in enclaves like Athens for decades, even centuries. . . . paganism endured as a powerful, evocative, shaping force in the historical memory and imagination of the West. It persisted both in a positive form—in wistful memories of (and attempts to recapture) the beauty and freedom that had ostensibly been lost with the suppression of paganism—and in the more negative form of a lingering anger or resentment toward the force that had supposedly defeated and suppressed it—namely, Christianity.
Smith and Eliot do not define paganism narrowly as an interest in entrails or in praying to Jupiter. Rather, they understand it as a fundamentally different outlook on the world, and on the sacred.
