In 1853, the Scottish Presbyterian theologian Alexander Hislop published a pamphlet entitled The Two Babylons: Romanism and its Origins that was expanded into a book released after his death in 1903. Most of Hislop’s arguments relied on supposed parallels showing that Catholicism was just an ancient Babylonian religion dressed up with Christian language. Fundamentalist authors in the late twentieth century took these arguments and put them into popular evangelism tracts.

The most popular of these, published by Jack Chick (known commonly as “Chick tracts”), contained stylized drawings depicting hapless Catholics appearing before God on judgment day, discovering they are damned because they belonged to a “pagan religion.” Chick went on to publish tens of millions of tracts containing dubious assertions about the origins of Catholic practices. 

Protestants who are sympathetic to Hislop’s basic argument should be careful, since Hislop also criticizes practices that most Protestants consider innocuous. For example, he condemns the celebration of Easter as a carryover from paganism, claiming that the name of the holiday “bears its Chaldean origin on its very forehead. Easter is nothing else than Astarte, one of the titles of Beltis, the queen of heaven.”

In fact, modern atheists make similar arguments when they claim that Easter is a celebration of the pagan god Ishtar. And when we look at how Protestants respond to these atheistic “pagan parallel” arguments, we see those responses just as easily answer fundamentalist “pagan parallel” arguments against Catholicism.

Atheists who believe that Jesus never existed (called mythicists) claim there are damning parallels between the story of Jesus and stories of other “dying and rising” gods. But instead of reading about this in a pamphlet like Hislop’s, you’re more likely to come across mythicist arguments through online videos such as Zeitgeist, which claims:

• The Egyptian god Horus “was born on December 25 of the virgin Isis-Meri . . . at the age of thirty he was baptized by a figure known as Anup and thus began his ministry. Horus had twelve disciples he traveled about with, performing miracles such as healing the sick and walking on water . . . Horus was crucified, buried for three days, and thus, resurrected.”
• The Greek god Dionysus was “born of a virgin on December 25, was a traveling teacher who performed miracles such as turning water into wine.” Zeitgeist also claims that the Roman god Mithra was born of a virgin on December 25.
• Ancient pagan cults also worshipped the “Sun” by mourning when it died in the winter and celebrating when it “rises” in the spring to bring forth new crops.

Although similarity between beliefs can be evidence that one culture was the source for another culture’s belief, in many other instances it can lead to a bad case of “parallelomania.” Biblical scholar Samuel Sandmel says this happens when a person falsely believes cultural borrowing has taken place and tries to prove it with highly implausible parallels. Straining to make connections, the “parallelomaniac” ignores more plausible explanations for why two different religions might have similar beliefs, stories, traditions, or customs. 

For instance, in some cases, the imagined parallel simply doesn’t exist at all. In others, the alleged parallels are so trivial that they don’t really serve as evidence for culture-borrowing. Or it might, on closer inspection, turn out that the borrowing happened the other way around (e.g., paganism borrowing from Christianity). Or the borrowing might be real but related only to non-essential areas of belief. 

When we apply these alternative explanations, we see that neither Catholicism can be explained as mere offshoots of older pagan practices.