Wright on the right (and the left)

There's a fascinating interview with N T Wright in the latest Christianity Today.  Worth reading as a whole but  I was particularly struck by the following comment:

`[Like the second century,] we have neo-paganisms of the Right and the Left.  On the Right you've got war and money, Mars and Mammon, calling the shots.  If you oppose the necessity of going to war, you're not quite sane.  And if you say you've just been offered a job at double the salary but you're going to stay with what you are doing, people will look at you as though you are mad, because the money imperative is just assumed to be all important.  It's not just that they disagree or think you're stupid, they just cannot understand what you're talking about.

And the same paganism is on the Left.  Obviously, sex, the goddess Aphrodite, makes demands.  To resist those demands for whatever reason is just assumed to be completely incomprehensible.  Somebody falls in love with the wrong person, and it's just a shoulder-shrugging thing.  Of course you've got to do that because this is the imperative, this is what our culture is all about.'