How Christianity Ruled: A Jewish Cult Becomes the Roman Church
Piety. One factor was the broad trend in late antiquity toward monotheism--or at least toward a single chief God of the Good. We find this in the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD), who asserts a pagan orthodoxy of "gods" (2:11) but names only one god in the Meditations. This is the imperial Zeus, who is said to have ordered "the design of universal nature" (5:8). The other gods are his subjects, like Yahweh's angels, and whatever Zeus wills is good. It's a small step from Marcus' philosophical polytheism to Christianity, a trend reflected in all of the philosophical schools.
Community. Supposing that a cult of a supreme, loving god-king was emergent, why Christianity? Judaism attracted a following of gentile "God-fearers" and might have been competitive if it hadn't required converts to adopt a new ethnicity with dietary restrictions, even surgery. In contrast, Christianity recruited people of all ethnicities while being, like Judaism, a social support community that promoted morality. In Stark's terms, it produced collective goods shared among its members and thus demanded and rewarded exclusive commitment. A pagan might dabble in multiple schools or temples, but Christianity created an exclusive community like a family, a bond ritualized in shared weekly meals with fellow believers and their God, calling each other brother and sister. Anyone could join, and Stark suggests that the church's demands yielded greater rewards in the chaos of urban life in the late empire.
Fertility. Christians out-procreated pagans. In the centuries of Christian expansion, the Empire declined in population, depending on barbarians to staff its legions (pp. 115-116). The average late Roman family had two children, below replacement level, as a result of practices that Christianity opposed, including non-procreative sex acts, abortion, prostitution, and infanticide. Sons were preferred over daughters, female infants routinely killed, resulting in an estimated thirty percent surplus of men over women. One study found that only one percent of families raised two or more daughters (p. 97). Christianity emphasized reproductive sex and eliminated infanticide, producing not only larger families, but daughters to marry pagan neighbors, a practice approved as early as Paul's letters in the 1st century. Christian wives raised Christian sons and daughters and often converted pagan husbands, amplifying the increase from fertility alone.
Charity. Stark identifies deadly epidemics that struck the empire in 165 and 251 as contributors to Christian expansion. No exact numbers are available, but the consensus is that each plague killed between a quarter and a third of the population (p.73). These times of terror challenged normal beliefs, weakening the traditional gods. Christians took the sacrifice of Jesus as a model. Confident in the afterlife and called to love their neighbors, they visited infected homes, bringing food and water. If they were infected and died, they were martyrs, and if they survived, they were seen as protected by their God. In contrast, pagans shunned infected homes. The great physician Galen sheltered in his country estate rather than treating patients. Abandoned by their neighbors, pagans died of hunger and dehydration.
Not only did more Christians survive the plagues, but they visited their pagan neighbors--whom they were called to love as themselves--and this led to more conversions. It's hard to reject a missionary who has saved your life, especially if she seems protected by a powerful and loving God. Statistics are not available from this period, but Stark uses recent evidence for a two-thirds greater survival rate with ordinary nursing to calculate that Christians grew from about one-eighth to one-quarter of the population through the plague years (p. 89) because of their revolutionary theology of love and sacrifice.
Theology. Stark takes a rigorously quantitative approach, running numbers when possible, but rejects the methodological atheism of earlier sociological studies of religion that bracketed off theology as irrelevant. Christian theology was superior to pagan beliefs because it mandated and supported behaviors that benefitted converts and promoted conversion. In a Darwinian sense, Christian beliefs were the fittest, promoting the radical new belief that "Christians may not please God unless they love one another." Earlier philosophers had rejected mercy and pity, "defects of character to be avoided by all rational men." Mercy violated injustice by awarding unearned benefits (p. 211). Christians, by elevating mercy and pity to primary virtues, created communities of mutual support that attracted outsiders, social insurance. Of course, ultimately Christianity became established religion and saturated the population, incorporating half-hearted converts. Thus, the revolutionary benefits diminished, given that doctrine without community support is notoriously ineffective.
Today. What does all of this tell us? Certainly, today's Christianity, seventeen centuries after Constantine mainstreamed it with the Edict of Milan, bears little resemblance to the emergent cult that Stark describes. A dizzying variety of Christian sects, lumped together, constitute the world's largest religion--4.2 billion members with very little in common but a gospel story. The conditions that produced its dominance have passed away, leaving only traces of the revolutionary cult of house churches and marginalized converts. The miracle is that anything has survived. Subsets of Christianity today--and certainly in the past--have been guilty of sectarian violence, moral intolerance, and other betrayals of the law of love.
Auguste Comte (1796-1857), a founder of sociological study of religion, rejected theology as a relic from a pre-scientific stage of human development. Still, the anarchy after the French Revolution gave him an appreciation for the social virtues of Catholicism, specifically its teaching of altruism (a term Comte invented), social unity, and morality. He believed that God was a projected image of ideal humanity, so he invented a Religion of Humanity, which he regarded as universal because it specified no deity and accomplished the "real" (i.e. social) purposes of religion: "regulating each individual" and "rallying all the separate individuals" (Comte, p. 34). Comte's church, described as Catholicism without Christianity, had some success while he functioned as its Pope out of his Paris apartment, but it survives only as a small sect in Brazil.
Abstract concepts of human virtue lack the theological force of an eternal, loving, and universal person with a God-man at its center. That's heady stuff. A friend recalled that he was out smoking on his driveway one day when, on impulse, he promised the Lord that this would be his last cigarette. It was. His earlier private resolutions hadn't been able to combat addiction without an all-seeing witness to his pledge.
Fertility. The issue of fertility is more troubling. Clearly, a population group becomes larger and more influential if it makes more babies. That was a strength of the early Christians. On the other hand, world resources are finite, and we may not apply the lessons of 200, when the earth's population was less than three percent of what it is today. Exaggerated alarms have been raised about population growth, notably The Population Bomb (1968), which predicted mass starvation in the 1970s. Still, even if the direst predictions haven't come true, world population continues to grow along with environmental damage, dwindling resources, and the promise of more warming and sea-level rise. There is a limit to population growth, a time in the not-to-distant future when uncontrolled expansion will cause mass suffering. The gospel of love is not served by unlimited fertility.
It's a vexing issue. Giving back to my children what my parents gave me was certainly an act of love, but it is questionable as a tool of cultural expansion. What is less questionable, supposing an ideology that we love and want to promote, is the impulse to evangelize by human contact. In decades of teaching Basic English, Composition, and Literature to community college students of many backgrounds, I did more to spread what are (to me anyway) the benefits of my culture than I did by raising four sons. I often saw myself as a sort of missionary.
References
Comte, Auguste. The Catechism of Positive Religion. Translated by Richard Congreve. 3rd edition. Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1891. Reprinted by Elibron Classics, 2005.
Stark, Rodney, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. HarperOne, 1996.
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