The problem with God, some people think, is that there’s only one of Him. Belief in just one God makes the people who claim him as their own impose a one-size-fits-all religion on everyone, whether or not it fits them.

I heard this just recently driving home listening to a history of Hannukah on public radio. The speaker explained that the pagans didn’t fight about religion because every group had its own gods. Then the Israelites came along with their one true God and demanded that their God rule, because they thought their God was real and the others were fakes. And of course they were intolerant and even violent.

Even if he were right, I thought, it’s the Jews’ belief in one God that makes the story of Hanukkah so good. It’s a story of men standing up and even dying for their principles, resisting an oppressive foreign power in a way we now applaud. They did it because they loved their God with a capital G.

Most pagans would have thrown up their hands and started worshiping the conqueror’s gods. Which would have been understandable, but no one would be invited onto NPR over two millennia later to talk about it.

Dan Brown’s Reverence

“We live in a world where people kill each other every day over whose definition of God is correct,” Dan Brown told a reverential interviewer on National Public Radio the week his last book, The Lost Symbol, appeared. The Masons, he said, are “a worldwide organization that, at its core, will bring people together from many, many different religions, and ask only that you believe in a god, and they’ll all stand in the same room and proclaim their reverence for a god.”

This he called “a perfect blueprint for universal spirituality.” He thought it would just be so sweet if believers of every sort could hold hands and declare their belief in a god, and which god doesn’t matter.

That’s the nice version. Scholars offer a more sophisticated one. This is the idea that the ancient pagans didn’t fight over religion because everyone had his own god to worship, and that Christianity brought religious discord into the world by banishing the gods and establishing its own God as the only one allowed.

The Jews had introduced the idea but they had remained a minority in the Roman empire, allowed to have their odd belief in one God because there were too few of them to bother the authorities. Then the Christians came along and eventually took over the empire, and the peaceful days of religious pluralism were gone.

Some years ago, for example, a book called God Against the Gods proposed this idea, and it became a bestseller. The writer claimed that “The core value of paganism was religious tolerance — a man or woman in ancient Rome was at liberty to offer worship to whatever god or goddess seemed most likely to grant a prayerful request.” Reviewers applauded.

In that way of telling the story, the pagan world was like a giant buffet, at which each person could find exactly what he wanted, and everyone was happy and got along with everyone else. Vegans with their tofu chattered merrily to meat-eaters with their ribeyes, the people who ate only free-range eggs traded recipes with the people who ate eggs from factory farms.

When Christianity took over, the world it created was like a school cafeteria run by a fanatical bully who makes everyone eat only what he likes. The vegetarians had to eat hamburgers, the diabetics had to eat ice cream, the lactose intolerant had to drink their milk, and everyone had to eat the inedible mystery meat. And they had to pretend to like it, or else.

The Bitter Pagan World

In this case, who wouldn’t want paganism? But life in the pagan world wasn’t really so tolerant. This sophisticated argument depends on a rosy vision of the good old pagan days, which is even less accurate than grandmother’s memories of the good old days when children always did what they were told.

The world of the pagan gods was a constant and often bitter contest for power and supremacy (scholars call it an agon). The Greeks and Trojans suffered the ten brutal bloody years of the Trojan war because three vain goddesses argued over who was better looking, and forced some poor sap from Troy to decide between them. The two he didn’t choose let his people have it, and dragged in the poor Greeks to do it.

Only the most powerful gods could keep order, and they couldn’t do it very well. In Homer’s IIiad, which tells the story of the Trojan War, Zeus keeps trying to satisfy all the contradictory demands of the different gods (some were pro-Greek, some pro-Trojan). He did, mostly, but only by causing yet more suffering for the Greeks and Trojans.

If this is the way the gods are, people naturally reasoned, this is the way the world is. The world is essentially chaotic and always just inches from breakdown. Only force applied by the strongest — brutally, without mercy — can keep it in order.

So, actually, the pagan world was like a giant buffet . . . in North Korea. You could eat what you want, but the armed guards stationed around the room have been ordered to drag you out and torture you, or just shoot you, if you even look like you might start trouble. You only have a choice because the choice doesn’t matter.

Not Much of a God

In the ancient Roman world, you could follow any god you wanted, as long as that god kept his head down and didn’t pretend to be much of a god. And you had to live under a brutal government that might do almost anything to you if it thought it needed to, because it believed in gods who couldn’t get along.

That world wasn’t really a peaceful world of religious tolerance. As the early Christians found, when they brought to that world the good news of a God who was love, and the state saw how this undermined its claims to control. That’s the reason it — not so tolerantly after all — sent Christians to the lions.