It would have been hard to fault one of Paul's spectators for believing that no religion would ever again dominate the Roman Empire. Each of the contending religions had good ideas, but they seemed incompatible with each other. Surely none of the contenders was capable of winning out, and they would continue to squabble ineffectively against each other while the Roman world slid further into an amoral secularism.
With hindsight we can see that this opinion was both right and wrong. None of the contending religions did win out, but eventually the Empire would be dominated by Paul's Christianity, a new religion that synthesized features from all the others. It married the mythological monotheism of the Jews to the philosophical monism of Plato, and added an admonition to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. It provided a new savior whose rituals resembled those of Mithras and produced a powerful religious experience called the coming of the Holy Spirit. The Christian holidays came to resemble those of the agricultural religion in both timing and significance: Christmas coincided with the Winter Solstice festival honoring the rebirth of the Sun (and with the December 25th birthday of Mithras), while the spring festival celebrating the resurrection of the Corn God (coincidentally Passover) continued to be celebrated as Easter. Whether by craft, luck, or divine inspiration, young Christianity pulled together the ideas and practices of rival religions in a way that was ideal for its time.
In modern America we also have little reason to be optimistic about religion. Again we are witnessing the increasing secularization of society, a weakening sense of individual responsibility and duty, and a loss of faith in our social institutions. Even observers with no particular attachment to religion are alarmed. The noted socialist Michael Harrington wrote an entire book, The Politics at God's Funeral, to ask the question of how society will hold itself together in the absence of a dominant religion.
Like ancient Rome, we have no shortage of religions or religious ideas. On the contrary, virtually any religion that is practiced anywhere in the world is being practiced in America. But Christianity has lost the power to shape our culture's world view, and no other religion or philosophy seems capable of taking its place. The problems of all the major contenders are well understood, as thinkers from each religious point of view have made devastating and quite accurate critiques of all the others. Just as there are very good reasons for believing that Christianity will not regain its former dominance, there are equally good reasons for believing that none of its current rivals will replace it.
And yet America, like Rome before it, will again someday have a dominant religion. The pieces of that future religion are all around us, sitting inside our current religions, seeming to us to be as incompatible as Dionysus and Jehovah were to the Romans. But they are not incompatible; they only appear to be so because they sit inside of religions that contradict each other. The purpose of this article is to extract these pieces from their current context, dust them off, and place them next to each other. It may still not be possible to see precisely how the next religion will fit them all together, but the broad outlines are becoming clear.