Marginalizing Christianity: Then and Now

Mike Aquilina has written a post concerning Julian the Apostate that strikes a chord:

The Emperor Julian (“the Apostate”), in his drive to re-paganize the empire, tried to weaken Christian opposition by dividing it, setting one faction against another. He restored heretical bishops who had been deposed, so that major cities would have two competing bishops. He offered prominent Catholics high positions, so that he could neutralize them while claiming their support. Meanwhile, he made the requirements for schoolteachers so stringently pagan that no Christian could fulfill them. Banished from the public square, Christianity could be minimized as a cultural force. According to a recent biographer, Julian “marginalised Christianity to the point where it could potentially have vanished within a generation or two, and without the need for physical coercion.” Said Julian: “If they want to learn literature, they have Luke and Mark: Let them go back to their churches and expound on them.” Julian wished to remove Christians from public discourse – drive them into a cultural ghetto.

Just replace the name Julian with a sitting President or Prime Minister, and you have a fit description of the United States and Canada and Great Britain and Australia and … 

You get the idea.

Decadent Western Civilization

I was reading a piece earlier this week and was struck by a section of paragraph paraphrased here.

Leaders and rulers who, fearing no reprisal, plunder and pillage bank accounts; who systematically seek the destruction of civil benefactors; who take women, married or not, for their own wanton pleasures—these men you revere and celebrate their birthdays though they deserve your contempt.  They write books assailing the public good, seek to swap wives as matter of course, engage in sexual activity with boys, and berate civil society.  They are rewarded with public adulation, their words are placed on library shelves, and their names and likenesses grace public venues.

I now ask you, dear reader: when and where was this originally written and of whom is it speaking?  Are we speaking of Hollywood elitist, politicians, community organizers, corporate directors, popular musicians?  There is no way to determine without more information.

As the post title indicates, this is from western civilization—the western Roman Empire circa A.D. 300.  The real tragedy is that one could not determine the difference in decadence level between then and now.  Men are no better than those so-called barbaric days 1700 years ago.  In some ways, we are probably worse because we cannot see how far we have fallen.

As for the quote paraphrased above, I give it here as I read it:

 

Tyrants and your kings, who, putting away all fear of the gods, plunder and pillage the treasuries of temples; who by proscription, banishment, and slaughter, strip the state of its nobles? who, with licentious violence, undermine and wrest away the chastity of matrons and maidens,—these men you name indigites and divi; and you worship with couches, altars, temples, and other service, and by celebrating their games and birthdays, those whom it was fitting that you should assail with keenest hatred.  And all those, too, who by writing books assail in many forms with biting reproaches public manners; who censure, brand, and tear in pieces your luxurious habits and lives; who carry down to posterity evil reports of their own times in their enduring writings; who seek to persuade men that the rights of marriage should be held in common; who lie with boys, beautiful, lustful, naked; who declare that you are beasts, runaways, exiles, and mad and frantic slaves of the most worthless character,—all these with wonder and applause you exalt to the stars of heaven, you place in the shrines of your libraries, you present with chariots and statues, and as much as in you lies, gift with a kind of immortality, as it were, by the witness which immortal titles bear to them.

Arnobius of Sicca, The Case Against the Pagans, Book I, cap. 64