Marc Barnes makes a misguided argument about paganism (via Rod):
Think about it: Christianity is still attacked — one would hardly deny the fact — but the Christian today is rarely summoned up to defend the Holy Family. He is instead forever being called to rise to the defense of that Pagan institution, the human family. The fundamentally human idea that a vow is a thing forever kept is an idea weary and battered by divorce. That natural, human understanding that a child is Good is an understanding contracepted from our hearts.
I don’t think I’m being pedantic in pointing out that pre-Christian societies in the Mediterranean world regularly practiced infanticide and abortion, and particularly among some of the “hardest” ancient societies deformed and female children were frequently abandoned and exposed to the elements. Pre-Christian societies in what we might call “the West” valued certain children as the continuation of a family’s lineage, but not all children were valued so highly. Likewise, many ancient Mediterranean societies allowed for divorce. So if one is interested in defending the family and the sanctity of life and of marriage, one would be ill-advised to follow the example of ancient pre-Christians, whose values and practices were sometimes starkly at odds with the teachings of the Church.
daniel_larison 
JonF311 
Barry_D 
It’s very true that Christians and pagans weren’t all pulling the same direction– just ask Julian the Apostate.
It seems to me that Barnes is succumbing to a common error of conservatism at its less reflective– assuming that Back Then, things were Good. So all prominent people were on the side of Good. That reads deeply felt divisions out of history.
Incidentally, that strikes me as a flaw of Ross Douthat’s argument in his new book. He has written that “The old Christian establishment … by the 1950s encompassed Kennedy’s Roman Catholic Church as well as the major Protestant denominations”. But mainline Protestants like Norman Vincent Peale and Christianity Today editor (and father-in-law of Billy Graham) L. Nelson Bell fretted in 1960 that American culture would be threatened if a Catholic were elected president. (Bell argued, “The antagonism of the Roman church to Communism is in part because of similar methods.”).
It’s fun to look back and pick out good guys & bad guys in history, but that often means creating our own, modern, fictionalized version of the past.
(Of course, we run into the danger of anachronism when we generalize about Christians, too– just ask the Nestorians, the Pelagians, the Novatians, the Arians, et al).