Lessons from the Roman world for contemporary Christian discernment
The notion of civic religion, as observed in the Roman world in which Christianity first emerged, offers an unexpectedly fertile key for understanding the cultural moment through which many Western societies are now passing. Yet the analogy becomes illuminating only if it is carefully inverted. In the ancient world, Christianity confronted a pagan civic religion that demanded public gestures of loyalty without requiring inner conviction. In the contemporary world, Christianity increasingly finds itself less before a weakened Christian civic religion and more before a civic religion that has moved beyond Christianity, even while continuing to appropriate elements of its symbolic inheritance.
For centuries, particularly in Europe and in societies shaped by its cultural influence, Christianity functioned as a civic religion. Not in the full sense of a living faith, but as a shared symbolic framework. One could lack deep belief in God and yet still rely on Christian categories to speak about the good, human dignity, moral duty, compassion, guilt, and forgiveness. Christianity operated as a tacit moral background, even as personal faith weakened and religious practice became irregular.
That stage, however, is now clearly coming to an end. What is emerging is not simply a society that is “less Christian”, but a new regime of public sacrality: a post-Christian civic religion. This new form does not present itself as religion, yet it fulfils analogous functions. It defines what is beyond question, establishes rituals of belonging, determines which forms of speech are legitimate and which deserve social sanction, and generates its own forms of orthodoxy and exclusion. The decisive difference is that it no longer needs to rely explicitly on Christian categories in order to exercise its symbolic authority.
Unlike Roman civic religion, which was overtly ritual and polytheistic, post-Christian civic religion tends to present itself as ethical, humanitarian, or even scientific. It does not demand explicit worship, but it does require public assent; it does not call for cultic sacrifices, but it does require visible gestures of discursive and moral alignment. What matters is not what one believes in private, but one’s willingness publicly to affirm what the community regards as morally unquestionable.
Here a significant inversion in relation to the ancient world becomes apparent. In Rome, Christians were accused of impiety for refusing to participate in common rites. Today, in many contexts, Christians are accused of immorality or of posing a social danger not because they deny God, but because they fail to relativise their faith sufficiently, that is, because they do not accept without reservation the implicit dogmas of a new civic religion that excludes God. The conflict no longer centres on the gods of the pantheon, but on ultimate definitions of human identity, the good, freedom, and the meaning of life, which function as genuine cultural absolutes.
What we can learn from early Christianity is not a strategy of cultural confrontation, but a pattern of discernment. Christians of the first and second centuries did not reject all civil authority, nor did they withdraw from social life. Nor did they attempt to reform Roman civic religion from within or symbolically to “baptise” it. They acknowledged what legitimately belonged to the civil order, while clearly identifying the point at which they were required to render a loyalty incompatible with the confession of Jesus Christ as Lord.
This discernment led them into an uncomfortable yet fruitful position: obedience without idolatry, participation without worship, respect without absolutisation. This stance was not chosen for convenience, nor designed as a political programme, but emerged inevitably from a daily fidelity lived under pressure. They did not seek martyrdom, yet neither did they avoid it at the cost of denying the faith.
Applied to the present, this means recognising that post-Christian civic religion cannot be effectively confronted by appealing to a return to a form of cultural Christendom that no longer exists, nor by retreating into a sectarian withdrawal that abandons the public sphere. Both responses confuse nostalgia or fear with theological discernment. The Christian task, rather, is to learn to distinguish where legitimate social coexistence ends and where a demand for ultimate allegiance begins, taking the form of a concealed act of worship.
In this sense, the greatest danger is not open hostility, but confusion. When Christianity functioned as a civic religion, many confused cultural belonging with living faith. Today, the inverse risk is to confuse cultural resistance with Christian fidelity, or to equate mere opposition to the dominant civic religion with obedience to the Gospel. The lesson of the Roman world is more demanding: the Church does not flourish when it symbolically dominates the public order, but when, even lacking such dominance, it maintains a clear, sober, and non-negotiable confession of its Lord.
Civic religion is mutating, yet the fundamental question remains. Where is ultimate loyalty placed? What are we required to affirm as unquestionable? What gestures are demanded as conditions of belonging? To answer these questions is not an exercise in neutral cultural analysis, but a profoundly theological act. To the extent that they are addressed with sobriety, historical memory, and confessional faithfulness, the contemporary Church may once again learn from that small and vulnerable community which, in a world saturated with gods, dared to confess that there is only one Lord.
Soli Deo gloria
