A4
East Oregonian
Thursday, December 13, 2018
CHRISTOPHER RUSH
Publisher
KATHRYN B. BROWN
Owner
DANIEL WATTENBURGER
Managing Editor
WYATT HAUPT JR.
News Editor
Founded October 16, 1875
OTHER VIEWS
Merkley must choose between Oregon, presidential campaign
The Bend Bulletin
S
en. Jeff Merkley, D-Portland, really,
really wants to be president. He’s
enough of a realist, however, to rec-
ognize that his chances of winning are
slim, and he’d like to hold on to his Sen-
ate seat as well, in case things don’t
work out.
Winning a third term in the Senate
might be nice for Merkley, but in those
circumstances it’s far from nice for Ore-
gon voters. We deserve a senator who
wants the Senate seat as much as Merk-
ley wants to be president.
There have been hints about Merk-
ley’s ambition for over a year now,
and he’s done nothing to squelch them.
Rather, he’s ramped them up in a variety
of ways, from visiting New Hampshire
to creating political action committees.
Among the most important, he’s
talked with Oregon lawmakers to see
if they’re willing to change a state law
barring a candidate from running for
more than one “lucrative” office at a
time. Both the Senate and the presi-
dency are considered lucrative. Unfor-
tunately for Merkley, change is unlikely.
That doesn’t prevent him from run-
ning in presidential primaries in other
states, however, and running for the Sen-
ate in Oregon. It’s an idea he has yet to
dismiss.
Oregonians should expect more from
a U.S. senator. We may be a relatively
small state but surely we deserve a can-
didate whose interest in Oregon and
Oregonians goes beyond our value as a
stepping stone to higher office or as a
safety net if presidential ambitions don’t
pan out.
If Merkley wants to be president, fine.
He should do everything in his power
to get the job. First on his list, how-
ever, must be a public announcement
that he won’t seek re-election to the Sen-
ate. That way Democrats, Republicans
and others can look for candidates who
really want the job.
AP Photo/Don Ryan
Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., speaks during a rally in Portland on Oct. 17, 2018.
OTHER VIEWS
The return of paganism
H
ere are some generally agreed-upon
facts about religious trends in the
United States. Institutional Christian-
ity has weakened drastically since the 1960s.
Lots of people who once would have been
lukewarm Christmas-and-Easter churchgo-
ers now identify as having “no religion” or
being “spiritual but not
religious.” The main-
line-Protestant establish-
ment is an establishment
no more. Religious belief
and practice now polar-
izes our politics in a way
they didn’t a few genera-
tions back.
R oss
What kind of general
D outhat
religious reality should be
COMMENT
discerned from all these
facts, though, is much
more uncertain, and there are various plau-
sible stories about what early-21st century
Americans increasingly believe. The sim-
plest of these is the secularization story — in
which modern societies inevitably put away
religious ideas as they advance in wealth and
science and reason, and the decline of institu-
tional religion is just a predictable feature of
a general late-modern turn away from super-
natural belief.
But the secularization narrative is insuffi-
cient, because even with America’s churches
in decline, the religious impulse has hardly
disappeared. In the early 2000s, over 40
percent of Americans answered with an
emphatic “yes” when Gallup asked them if
“a profound religious experience or awak-
ening” had redirected their lives; that num-
ber had doubled since the 1960s, when insti-
tutional religion was more vigorous. A recent
Pew survey on secularization likewise found
increases in the share of Americans who
have regular feelings of “spiritual peace and
well-being.” And the resilience of religious
impulses and rhetoric in contemporary polit-
ical movements, even (or especially) on the
officially secular left, is an obvious feature of
our politics.
So perhaps instead of secularization it
makes sense to talk about the fragmenta-
tion and personalization of Christianity —
to describe America as a nation of Chris-
tian heretics, if you will, in which traditional
churches have been supplanted by self-help
gurus and spiritual-political entrepreneurs.
These figures cobble together pieces of the
old orthodoxies, take out the inconvenient
bits and pitch them to mass audiences that
want part of the old-time religion but nothing
too unsettling or challenging or ascetic. The
result is a nation where Protestant awaken-
ings have given way to post-Protestant woke-
ness, where Reinhold Niebuhr and Fulton
Sheen have ceded pulpits to Joel Osteen and
Oprah Winfrey, where the prosperity gospel
and Christian nationalism rule the right and a
social gospel denuded of theological content
rules the left.
I wrote a whole book on this theme, but
in the years since it came out I’ve wondered
if it, too, was incomplete. There has to come
a point at which a heresy becomes simply
post-Christian, a moment when you should
just believe people who claim they have left
the biblical world-picture behind, a context
where the new spiritualities add up to a new
religion.
Which is why lately I’ve become inter-
ested in books and arguments that suggest
that there actually is, or might be, a genuinely
post-Christian future for America — and that
the term “paganism” might be reasonably
revived to describe the new American reli-
gion, currently struggling to be born.
A fascinating version of this argument is
put forward by Steven D. Smith, a law pro-
fessor at the University of San Diego, in his
new book, “Pagans and Christians in the
City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the
Potomac.” Smith argues that much of what
we understand as the march of secularism
is something of an illusion, and that behind
the scenes what’s actually happening in the
modern culture war is the return of a pagan
religious conception, which was half-bur-
ied (though never fully so) by the rise of
Christianity.
What is that conception? Simply this: that
divinity is fundamentally inside the world
rather than outside it, that God or the gods
or Being are ultimately part of nature rather
than an external creator, and that meaning
and morality and metaphysical experience are
to be sought in a fuller communion with the
immanent world rather than a leap toward the
transcendent.
This paganism is not materialist or atheis-
tic; it allows for belief in spiritual and super-
natural realities. It even accepts the possibility
of an afterlife. But it is deliberately agnos-
tic about final things, what awaits beyond the
shores of this world, and it is skeptical of the
idea that there exists some ascetic, world-de-
nying moral standard to which we should
aspire. Instead, it sees the purpose of religion
and spirituality as more therapeutic, a means
of seeking harmony with nature and happi-
ness in the everyday — while unlike athe-
ism, it insists that this everyday is divinely
endowed and shaped, meaningful and not
random, a place where we can truly hope to
be at home.
In popular religious practice there isn’t
always a clean line between this “imma-
nent” religion and the transcendent alterna-
tive offered by Christianity and Judaism. But
clearly religious cultures can tend toward one
option or the other, and you can build a plau-
sible case for a “pagan” (by Smith’s defini-
tion) tradition in Western and American reli-
gion, which in his account takes two major
forms.
First, there is a tradition of intellectual and
aesthetic pantheism that includes figures like
Spinoza, Nietzsche, Emerson and Whitman,
and that’s manifest in certain highbrow spir-
itual-but-not-religious writers today. Smith
recruits Sam Harris, Barbara Ehrenreich and
even Ronald Dworkin to this club; he notes
that we even have an explicit framing of this
tradition as paganism, in former Yale Law
School dean Anthony Kronman’s rich 2016
work “Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.”
Second, there is a civic religion that
like the civic paganism of old makes reli-
gious and political duties identical, and treats
the city of man as the city of God (or the
gods), the place where we make heaven our-
selves instead of waiting for the next life or
the apocalypse. This immanent civic reli-
gion, Smith argues, is gradually replacing
the more biblical form of civil religion that
stamped American history down to the Prot-
estant-Catholic-Jew 1950s. Whether in the
social-justice theology of contemporary pro-
gressive politics or the transhumanist projects
of Silicon Valley, we are watching attempts to
revive a religion of this-world, a new-model
paganism, to “reclaim the city that Christian-
ity wrested away from it centuries ago.”
These descriptions are debatable, but sup-
pose Smith is right. Is the combination of
intellectual pantheism and a this-world-fo-
cused civil religion enough to declare the
rebirth of paganism as a faith unto itself,
rather than just a cultural tendency within a
still-Christian order?
It seems to me that the answer is not quite,
because this new religion would lack a clear
cultic aspect, a set of popular devotions, a
practice of ritual and prayer of the kind that
the paganism of antiquity offered in abun-
dance. And that absence points to the essen-
tial weakness of a purely intellectualized pan-
theism: It invites its adherents to commune
with a universe that offers suffering and mis-
ery in abundance, which means that it has a
strong appeal to the privileged but a much
weaker appeal to people who need not only
sense of wonder from their spiritual lives but
also, well, help.
However, there are forms of modern
paganism that do promise this help, that
do offer ritual and observance, augury and
prayer, that do promise that in some form
gods or spirits really might exist and might
offer succor or help if appropriately invoked.
I have in mind the countless New Age prac-
tices that promise health and well-being and
good fortune, the psychics and mediums who
promise communication with the spirit world,
and also the world of explicit neo-pagan-
ism, Wiccan and otherwise. Its adherents may
not all be equally convinced of the realities
that they’re trying to appeal to and manipu-
late (I don’t know how many of the witches
who publicly hexed Brett Kavanaugh really
expected it to work), but their numbers are
growing rapidly; there may soon be more
witches in the United States than members of
the United Church of Christ.
What ancient paganism did successfully
was to unite this kind of popular supernatu-
ralism with its own forms of highbrow pan-
theism and civil-religiosity. Thus the elites of
ancient Rome might reject the myths about
their pantheon of deities as just crude sto-
ries, but they would join enthusiastically in
public rituals that assumed that gods or spir-
its could be appealed to, propitiated, honored,
worshipped.
To get a fully revived paganism in con-
temporary America, that’s what would have
to happen again — the philosophers of pan-
theism and civil religion would need to build
a religious bridge to the New Agers and
neo-pagans, and together they would need to
create a more fully realized cult of the imma-
nent divine, an actual way to worship, not
just to appreciate, the pantheistic order they
discern.
It seems like we’re some distance from
that happening — from the intellectuals
whom Smith describes as pagan actually don-
ning druidic robes, or from Jeff Bezos play-
ing pontifex maximus for a post-Christian
civic cult. The 1970s, when a D.C. establish-
ment figure like Sally Quinn was hexing her
enemies, were a high-water mark for those
kinds of experiments among elites. Now,
occasional experiments in woke witchcraft
and astrology notwithstanding, there’s a more
elite embarrassment about the popular side of
post-Christian spirituality.
That embarrassment may not last for-
ever; perhaps a prophet of a new harmonized
paganism is waiting in the wings. Until then,
those of us who still believe in a divine that
made the universe rather than just pervad-
ing it — and who have a certain fear of what
more immanent spirits have to offer us —
should be able to recognize the outlines of a
possible successor to our world-picture, while
taking comfort that it is not yet fully formed.
YOUR VIEWS
Amsberry showed
respect for inmate
families
I wanted to share my experience
knowing Ms. Amsberry while I was at
EOCI from 2011 until 2015.
I remember having a family lunch in
which inmates’ families come to visit
and are able to have a lunch together. I
remember Ms. Amsberry passing through
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of
the East Oregonian editorial board. Other
columns, letters and cartoons on this page
express the opinions of the authors and not
necessarily that of the East Oregonian.
the visitation and requested, “Mr. Castro,
is it all right if I sit in on a visit with you
and your family?” I was very happy she
would do that so we had our visit and she
gathered her info on how visits can be
more welcoming to our families.
She showed her respect always and
made sure things went well with inmates,
even when we would have like a Val-
entine’s Day card making for fam-
ily and loved ones, also Mother’s Day!
In my 18 years I’ve been incarcerated
I’ve never come across such a caring
superintendent.
Most recently, just last year, she was
superintendent here at TRCI and she
did her walk-around through each unit.
When she entered Unit 4 AHU (admin-
istrative housing unit), I approached Ms.
Amsberry. She smiled, and I smiled,
because of course we knew each other
when I was at EOCI. I quickly men-
tioned to her about us not having
enough jobs for the unit, and Ms. Ams-
berry quickly told me, “I’ll look into it,
I promise.” A week later, Ms. Amsberry
got us jobs in our unit folding sheets for
the institution.
She is compassionate — a small
woman with a huge heart! She always
resolved any issue anyone had. She was
a true blessing, and a gift beyond doubt.
She will be truly missed when she retires
at the end of December.
Jose Castro
Umatilla (TRCI)
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