Bishop's Book Review
GOD AGAINST THE GODS
The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism
By Jonathan Kirsch
(Viking Compass: 2004 336 pages)
This book should be subtitled “Give Me That Old, Old Time Religion.” Jonathan Kirsch, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is typical of historians and journalists who are plagued by the present. Would to God it was only possible to write about the past without showing the bias of the present! This author’s modern 21st century bias shows clearly in this book. Kirsch spends the entire text denouncing modern monotheism (mainly Judaism and Christianity) and longs for the ancient past when polytheism ruled. How one writes about history tells us more about the writer than about the historical subject. We are told in God Against the Gods that polytheists in the ancient world were tolerant and diverse, gentle and gracious in their relationship to adherents of other faiths. Values of polytheism included democracy, power sharing and even feminism! These multiple God worshippers of long gone millennium were also nearly post-modern in their understanding that truth is relative. By contrast, monotheists were (and are) jealous, vindictive, fundamentalist, and fanatic. Kirsch pines for the past and the values he sees within the ancient faiths. Famous vices of polytheism such as sexual excess and human sacrifice are, according to Kirsch, inventions of Jewish-Christian piety. Polytheism, he says, was simply misunderstood!
Jonathan Kirsch sees the rise of Christianity as a disaster for civilization. The rise of the faith within the Roman Empire allowed radical monotheism to acquire the sword of the state and to suppress all other polytheistic religions. Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, we are told was a ruthless aristocrat who invented Totalitarianism. He domesticated the Christian faith and killed his polytheistic opponents. Kirsch praises “Julian the Apostate” who repudiated the Christian faith, and who was the “gentlest of persecutors.” Kirsch speculates that the world would have been much better off if Julian’s “reforms” would have taken root. Perhaps, he says, the events of September 11, 2001, would not have occurred had the fundamentalists of Christianity, Judaism and Islam not prevailed in history.
It is valuable, on occasion, to read a book like the one written by Jonathan Kirsch. One can learn much, and even grow, from an author who challenges and is even hostile to your religion. This work represents an intellectual assault on the Christian faith touched with a nostalgia for a time long ago. In some ways, his thesis of the golden age of polytheism is itself a myth.
Thomas A. Skrenes
Bishop