The conservative David Horowitz-edited FrontPage Magazine features an editorial by economist Mark W. Hendrickson defending the honor of monotheism. While mainly a defense against criticisms of Christianity by atheists, Hendrickson takes special care to bad-mouth polytheism to bolster the inherent superiority of single-god worship.

“Authors who condemn monotheism seem oblivious to how much their own comfortable, free lives owe to the historical impact of monotheism. The pre-monotheistic worldview was pagan. Paganism exalted nature above all, and taught human subjection to nature. Paganism was fatalistic; it inculcated resignation to a static social order. To the pagans, individual lives were unimportant, cheap. The welfare of the collective, which in practice was the welfare of the ruling elite, was supreme. There was no theory of individual rights opposed to this arrangement. If you were born a drone, you lived the life of a drone, and if the rulers decided that your life should be forfeited to the sun god or in some military campaign to obtain booty for the rulers, then your fate was sealed.”

It is fairly obvious why Hendrickson is an economist and not involved in religious studies. Any sensible scholar on pre-Christian religions would have given him a big fat “F” if he turned in that summary of polytheism as a paper. Indeed, his description of Paganism is straight from the conservative Christian party-line, a thoughtless reductionism that undermines his own defense of monotheism. A parrot of slurs that have been discredited for years. The truth is that many of the things that we take for granted, that we often falsely accredit to Christian (or Enlightenment) moral advancement actually originated within pre-Christian thought and politics. Capitalism, democracy, social welfare for the poor, and the foundations of science, medicine, and philosophy all had their genesis in pre-Christian thought and culture. While many pre-Christian cultures had a reverent and respectful approach to the natural world, it is a gross exaggeration to say their were “subjugated” to it.

This straw man argument by Hendrickson shows the intellectual dishonesty so often employed by defenders of monotheism. Only by first creating an utterly decadent and morally bankrupt paganism can they then trumpet the vibrancy and ethical superiority of their own religious preferences. The truth, of course, is far too nuanced and complicated to declare monotheism (or polytheism) the truly superior method of belief. Sadly, nuanced discussions of competing religious world-views don’t make for good “red meat” rants designed to reinforce your audience’s preconceived notions and values.