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This chaotic, intoxicating sense of new space is what marked the 1970s, and it extended right into the heart of the evangelical world. The "biblical" warrant that had once helped sustain Jim Crow, for instance, suddenly became an embarrassment. Perhaps even more telling was the 1976 publication of The Act of Marriage, fundamentalist pastor Timothy LaHaye and his wife Beverly's surprisingly graphic answer to the considerably more graphic The Joy of Sex, published in 1972. The times certainly were 'a changing,' and with them old time religion itself.

Forty years on, it's possible to appreciate more fully what has—shall we say—been goin' on. The moral direction and tension the Law had long foisted on Western civilization has by our day nearly vanished. With the sweeping away over the past century of innumerable small-L laws came the overarching dismissal of Law itself. A recognizably Christian culture has given way to a new paganism. What is this?

It is the embrace of nature without Nature. It is the reverence of bios, physical life, in tandem with a dimming awareness of zoe, spiritual life. It is, in fact, the mistaking of physical life for spiritual life, with all the historically ingrained religious sensibilities rushing toward bios with a very familiar zeal.

So now, for us twenty-first century pagans, being 25 is all—the most alive we'll ever be. Men and women on both sides of that envied age try with holy fervency to attain it, whatever the cost in dollars or dignity. The hair must be cut just so (and then cut again and again—just so). The body must be kept trim, ever prepared for a 25-year-old's feats. Old age never looked so bad. What red-blooded American male today would ever want to wake up and find himself married to a grandmother? What American woman wants to look like one?

It all adds up to a great calamity, no? But if so, why do even the most holy among us don tie-dye now and then?

Clearly, for all their standard bemoaning of the fate of America after the '60s, evangelicals have in evident ways embraced the profound changes in sensibility, style, and thought the era brought—and often with good reason. Even paganism, it turns out, has redemptive worth.

In a recent essay on the Christian poet W. H. Auden, Alan Jacobs helps us to see this possibility more clearly. Jacobs notes that in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Auden came to reject the assumption, pervasive in Protestantism, that "our life in nature is at best an embarrassment," that God saves us to help us transcend the earth. On the contrary, Auden sensed, an embrace of our essential materiality seemed paradoxically to be what spiritual health required: a basic, primordial acknowledgement that we are not gods but creatures of God, living as biological beings under his reign.

Auden understood, in short, that the necessary response to our finitude is not the rejection of the material order but rather the reverent celebration of it. And it is this affirmation that Christians have been, over the centuries, prone to neglect or reject, right down to our times. To put it sharply: If there is a new paganism pervading America, we American Protestants have had a hand in preparing the way for it. In cultivating a spirituality that neglected the human, the earthy, the sensual, we fostered—in diabolical irony—a conceit that taught us to see ourselves as superior to our bodies, as well as the earth, regarding them as at best a species of a finitude that will, gratefully, some day pass.

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September (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53