The early Church Fathers strove to understand, and to justify, the stunning resemblances between their religion and that of the pagans that they so despised, such as the ancient Greek myth of a god who dies and rises from the dead.

Clement of Alexandria accused the (ancient!) Greeks of stealing from the Christians, and it took some pretty fancy theological footwork to carry this off. He initiated “The Thesis of Demonic Imitation,” later advanced by Tertullian and Justin, which argued the case most Jesuitically (if I may be anachronistic): That the demons, in order to deceive and mislead the human race, took the offensive and suggested to the Greek poets the plots of the Greek myths, in the hope that this would make the story of Christ appear to be a fable of the same sort, when it came. (“Oh, never mind, it’s just another one of those dying and rising gods again.”)

This Christian comparative apologetic, in a twisted form, was the driving force behind that great nineteenth-century comparatist, Sir James George Frazer, too, in The Golden Bough: what to do about the similarities between Christianity and paganism. The specific OED referent to pagans in this sense may indeed be “now chiefly hist.,” but the general pejorative sense lives on in the derivative meaning: “A person of unorthodox, uncultivated or backward beliefs, tastes, etc.; a person who has not been converted to the current dominant views of a society, group, etc.; an uncivilized or unsocialized person, esp. a child.”

But the positive sense of “pagan” is the modern term for a kind of nature religion and ecological spirituality, a religion that still, like paganism type A, rightly claims to antedate Christianity. Thus: “A follower of a pantheistic or nature-worshipping religion; esp. a neopagan.” This, paganism type B, is the sort of nature mysticism that Kenneth Grahame conjured up in the episode that he called “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” in Wind in the Willows, where a lost baby otter is found and returned—dying and rising, as it were--by a benevolent but awe-inspiring figure of Pan. (The title, if not the spirit, of that chapter lives on in the title of a recording by the rock group Pink Floyd).

A number of people nowadays identify themselves as type B pagans, a wide range that includes the Wicca witches (as in the Wikipedia, the encyclopedia for people who believe in witches and leprechauns) and the Goddess feminists (who believe that [a] originally we all worshipped Goddesses, and [b] the world was a far kinder, gentler place when we did, two equally unsupportable hypotheses).

Since both type A and type B paganism are religions—the Others’ False Religion (to the early Christians) and Our True Religion (to the contemporary pagans)--, and since we ought not to discriminate against any religion, paganism has a claim equal to that of Christianity or Judaism when it comes to bringing spiritual comfort to soldiers in the field.

Here we encounter again an earlier On Faith question, “How do you keep your faith during times of war?”, in response to which several of our team independently quoted the old saw about there being no atheists in foxholes. But since there are, in fact, atheists in foxholes (as the official organization of American Atheists keeps insisting), and since we must honor here, too, our promise not to discriminate against any faith, we also need to have, in addition to a Muslim and a Hindu and a Taoist chaplain, a pagan chaplain.

And, since atheists are often just as doctrinaire in asserting that there is not a god as the other guys are in asserting that there is one, we should also have an atheist chaplain. And, finally, precisely because atheism is just one more faith, to be complete we should also support people who lack even that faith, and have an agnostic chaplain.

As for pagans in public office, there, too, I think, it is time to give up the untenable and hurtful pretense of being one nation under one god. A pagan, and an atheist, and an agnostic, and anyone of any other creed has the right to hold public office—as long as they all restrict their religious views to the privacy of their place of worship, even if that place is simply a clearing in the woods under a full moon.