Clap for the modern gods
by Frederick Edward, The Critic:
If your favourite hobbies include hacking unarmed monks to pieces and stealing the riches hidden away within their monasteries, it must be a bit of a wrench to eventually convert to Christianity. You’d certainly have enough to keep you going for a lifetime’s worth of confession.
This is what happened to our Viking friends about one thousand years ago, after all. Gatecrashing the peace and tranquillity of Lindisfarne in 793, Northumbrian scholar Alcuin reported that: “Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race … The heathens poured out the blood of saints around the altar, and trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the streets.”
Yet within a few hundred years the ancestors of these very same Vikings were themselves busy building churches, having spent previous centuries burning and looting them with wild abandon.
[…] It’s often said that Christianity triumphed over the various pagan religions of Europe due to their openness and unspecificity. As far as paganism was concerned, the more gods there were, the better. Yet such beliefs were fundamentally incompatible with the word of the Bible. The all-encompassing conception of the Christian God — in the Trinity of God, the Son and the Holy Spirit — has very little room for the minor gods of water, war, wine and work. He is them all made one.
For most of the last millennium the Western world has taken this understanding of religion as a given. But as Europe loses its faith in God and Christianity retreats from the public consciousness, we will no doubt look increasingly to minor modern gods of heathen belief; deities and causes which can be summoned, invented and appealed to when necessary. In what will prove a heady cocktail, aspects of Christian theology will nevertheless linger, as Westerners are unable to throw off over a millennium of Biblical instruction.
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