Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Emory University Stud

Traditionalist Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and other cultural developments in the United States wonder why they are being forced to bracket their beliefs in order to participate in public life. This situation is not new, says Steven D. Smith: Christians two thousand years ago faced very similar challenges. 

Picking up poet T. S. Eliot’s World War II–era thesis that the future of the West would be determined by a contest between Christianity and “modern paganism,” Smith argues in this book that today’s culture wars can be seen as a reprise of the basic antagonism that pitted pagans against Christians in the Roman Empire. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City looks at that historical conflict and explores how the same competing ideas continue to clash today. All of us, Smith shows, have much to learn by observing how patterns from ancient history are reemerging in today’s most controversial issues.

• Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom
• The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity
• Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West
• Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
• Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics
• Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization
• Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan
• From the Depths of Our Hearts: Priesthood, Celibacy and the Crisis of the Catholic Church
• Free to Believe: The Battle Over Religious Liberty in America
• History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology