GruntGod 2.9.1: “Pagan" — Insult Before Religion
This is drawn from the revision of the Martin chapter in the second edition of God Is a Grunt.
If you've ever used the word "pagan" in a sentence, you've been sloppy. I say this with love, because I was too before I started digging into the cultural backdrop of the early church.
The Latin pagani originally meant "of the countryside." Calling someone a paganus in the Roman Republic was the equivalent of calling someone a redneck or a hillbilly — it was a class insult, not a theological category. Pagans could hold citizenship. They could even Latinize their names, the way Saul became Paul in Gentile contexts. But they would never fully escape the stigma of being idiotae: dumb, indigenous, country people who couldn't be trusted with sophisticated religion or civic responsibility.
Here's where it gets interesting for our purposes. As Rome professionalized its military by creating economic incentives to recruit from the poor (because the wealthy had stopped serving, like in America) an unintended cultural shift happened. Full civic identity had always implied military service. Once the ruling class opted out, Romans who never served got lumped in with the pagani. By the first century, paganus had come to mean “civilian.”
The early church inherited this linguistic landscape. Christians began calling themselves milites Christi, soldiers of Christ, very early in the tradition. And they used paganus for people who didn't serve God, or who served “false” gods. The two meanings (non-soldier and non-believer) collapsed into each other. Even Tertullian, one of the early church's most vocal critics of military service, uses this framing in De Corona Milites. He contrasts the paganus (civilian/non-believer) with the miles (soldier/believer) as if the distinction is obvious… because in his cultural context, it was.
This matters for reading the New Testament, and it matters for reading God is a Grunt. When Paul tells Timothy to "share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus" (2 Tim. 2:3), he's not just reaching for a convenient metaphor. He's invoking a status category. He's saying: don't be a paganus — an outsider, a civilian, someone who doesn't serve. Be a miles — an insider, someone with skin in the game.
Timothy wasn't in the military. He was doing missionary work. But educated Romans hearing those words would catch the contrast immediately. Military service wasn't just a career in the idealized Roman world; it was a marker of full participation in the common life. Psaul is using that cultural grammar to make a point about the cost and commitment of faithful discipleship.
The implication the church has mostly missed: when influential Christians turned against military service, or treated it with suspicion, they were not being countercultural in the way they imagined. They were, functionally, becoming the pagani — the civilians, the outsiders, the people who let others do the hard thing while they stayed home and theorized about it.
I'm not saying military service is required for faithful discipleship. I'm saying the church's long history of distancing itself from its military members — treating them as spiritually suspect, or at best as mission projects — has never been as theologically grounded as it pretends to be. The soldier of Christ is not a metaphor the tradition grafted onto a pacifist original. It's closer to the foundation than most people want to admit.
