Traditionalist Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and other cultural developments in the United States wonder why they are being forced to bracket their beliefs in order to participate in public life. This situation is not new, says the author: Christians two thousand years ago faced very similar challenges. Picking up poet T. S. Eliot's World War II-era thesis that the future of the West would be determined by a contest between Christianity and modern paganism,
he argues in this book that today's culture wars can be seen as a reprise of the basic antagonism that pitted pagans against Christians in the Roman Empire. This book looks at that historical conflict and explores how the same competing ideas continue to clash today. All of us, the author shows, have much to learn by observing how patterns from ancient history are reemerging in today's most controversial issues.