Joe Heschmeyer explores the historical factors that enabled Christianity to conquer the Roman Empire (and how we can do it again.)

Transcription:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and guys, I don’t know if you’ve thought about the Roman Empire yet today, but it’s time to. So I want to talk about not just the Roman Empire, but one of the weirdest phenomena historically that happened within the empire. Whether you’re a Christian or not a Christian, we should be able to recognize there’s something really fascinating and bizarre by the fact that a tiny band of followers of Jesus became a massive force in the Roman Empire, basically took over the Roman Empire and then from there took over much of the Western world. So to put that in context, I want to quote from a recent book review. It’s the review of the sociologist Rodney Starks book, the Rise of Christianity. The book reviewer right now is anonymous. It doesn’t really, it is part of a book review contest, but the reviewer says this, he says, the rise or she the rise of Christianity is a great puzzle.

In 40 ad there were maybe a thousand Christians, their Messiah had just been executed and they were on the wrong side of an inner continental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By the year 400, there were 40 million and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history. I actually think that slightly understates the case on both ends. I think on the one hand, there were probably more than a thousand Christians and 40, but not a lot more than a thousand. On the other hand, I think that it wasn’t just the next millennium that was dominated by Christianity. I think Christianity remains one of the largest, if not the largest single force on earth today. I understand you can debate that, but I think this at the very least, captures something massive happened here. I like the way the reviewer puts it. Imagine taking a time machine, so you’re going forward to the year 2300 and you find that everybody is a Scientologist.

The US is over 99% Scientologists, those Latin American, most of Europe, the Middle East follows some heretical, pseudo Scientology that thinks El Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet, right? You would find that to be a really shocking situation. You’d say, what on earth happened in this very short span of time, a little under 300 years to lead this massive sea change? And yet that’s exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about Christianity. There was at the year one, a very clear religious system in place in the Roman Empire, and then you jump forward about 26, or excuse me, 260 to 300 years, and you find something massively different is afoot, and you go just a little beyond that and suddenly the empire itself has become Christian. Now, the popular version of this story goes something like this, well, that’s Constantine, and so you can expect his name to be thrown out, but people who don’t really understand history very well here, so the argument is, oh, Constantine made everyone become Christian, and that’s why Christianity survived. And then you say, well, why did Constantine become Christian? Well, because he wanted to consolidate power and why? Would that make any sense? How would you consolidate power by becoming a member of a persecuted religious sect? And the explanation falls apart pretty quickly, the religious skeptic, but also good historian or scholar, Bart Airman talked about this on the Thinking Atheist Podcast where he just explains why the Constantine theory doesn’t really make any sense for the rise of Christianity.

CLIP:

When we talk about the rise of Christianity, the first, especially in regard to Rome, the first name that comes up almost always, Constantine, Constantine, Constantine. And you argue that we may at least fractionally be missing part of the big picture as to the rise of Christianity. You want to explain,

Well, when I started writing the book, I had the opinion that a lot of people still seem to have, which is that the reason Christianity succeeded was because of the conversion of Constantine. So Constantine was the emperor at the beginning of the fourth century, and he converted to Christianity, and after that, the masses started coming in. And so I had just assumed that it was because of Constantine, but what I ended up realizing and as I argued in the book, Christianity almost certainly would’ve succeeded without Constantine at the rate it was growing at the time. It was going to take over the Roman Empire at that point by the early fourth century, unless something really cataclysmic had happened to stop it, the Roman Empire was trying to stop it at the time there was a major persecution going on, but it wasn’t succeeding and the droves were coming in. And I think, so I show this in the book, I show how it actually that the growth rate would’ve indicated that if Constantine hadn’t converted, maybe another emperor would have, but Christianity was bound to take over at that point.

Joe:

Just to put a little more meat on the bones there, number one, as we’re going to see the growth rate in Christianity was such that a huge portion of the Roman Empire was already Christian by the time Constantine was coming up in the world, and by the year 400 had, it just continued at that rate of growth. It would’ve been the overwhelming religion of the Roman Empire, whether anything else happened in terms of a Roman emperor imposing anything or anything else. Second, Constantine didn’t actually make Christianity the legal religion of the empire. He didn’t outlaw paganism or anything like that. That’s a myth. He did become Christian. He did legalize Christianity. That’s not the same thing. Third, the idea that this was like a power move that took Christianity from obscurity and made it the official religion doesn’t make sense even on its own terms.

Why would a cynical politician choose an obscure persecuted unfavor religion and decide to become that as a political popularity move? It doesn’t really make any sense. I mean, again, to use the Scientology example, if you took a time machine and found that everybody was a Scientologist in the year 2300, and you said, well, how did this happen? And they said, oh, the president became a Scientologist. And you said, why? Well, to get more votes, how would that possibly get you more votes? This is even more true in the case of the Roman Empire, becoming a Christian wouldn’t win you popularity with pagan Romans. But not only that, if you’re trying to consolidate power who’s worshiped as a God in the Roman Empire, the Roman emperor, and so scuttling that in favor of Christianity isn’t a clear power move. So the whole Constantine theory doesn’t really make any sense.

So you say, okay, we’re going to leave that theory aside. Clearly the success of Christianity wasn’t because of legal imposition and Bart Airman in his book, as we’re going to see actually talks about how there’s very little evidence of violence and all of this. Occasionally there would be violence in terms of trying to impose Christianity, but this is very much the exception, not the norm, and it doesn’t explain the success of Christianity. So how did Christianity succeed and how might it succeed? Again, the good news is in reading books on this subject, I’ve found basically three clear steps everybody kind of agrees on, or at least all the major figures I was looking at agree on, and they’re ones that are imminently doable. So as we’re going to see, these aren’t just things that the church or Christianity or society could do differently. These are in many cases things you and I could do a little differently and maybe it wouldn’t bear some obvious fruit in our lifetime, but would have an enormous influence.

And I think all three of these are still relevant today, and they are beginning with step number one, convert a couple of people, and that’s not an understatement. The success of Christianity, as we’re going to see was not primarily mass conversions. There presumably were some mass conversions. We hear about one in Acts chapter two, and there were probably some other events, maybe ones that we don’t have good record of where there were mass, mass conversions. But that’s not the actual way this happened. Let’s get into a few things here. First, the book being reviewed at the very beginning of this episode was The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark. As you may know, Rodney Stark is a late historian, excuse me, sociologist. He died in 2022 and he wrote two books we’re going to be using here, one’s called The Rise of Christianity, and then he has a later one called The Triumph of Christianity, make this more confusing.

Bart Airman, who we just heard from also has a book called The Triumph of Christianity. He totally stole that name from Stark. And it does make it confusing because I’m going to be referencing three books by two authors with two titles, but they’re still three books, so I’ll try to make sure it’s clear as we go. And Stark is kind of the one who pioneers this field and Airman is somewhat critical but somewhat indebted to him as well, besides just for the name of his book. He also says, even though Stark is not a historian of ancient Christianity, he is a sociologist. As a sociologist, he knows how to calculate population growth far and away. The most significant and intriguing part of his books are his calculations. Okay, so quick warning, we’re going to do a little bit of math, not a ton, but there are going to be some numbers.

It’s not going to last very long. You’re going to get through it, you’re going to be okay. But in the rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark proposes a rate of population growth. Here’s again, airman’s description of Stark, and then we’re going to get to Stark himself. Airman explains to get from a thousand Christians to 6 million Christians 260 years later, the church would need to grow at a rate of about 40% per decade. So if you’ve got a thousand people, then by 10 years later you need to have 1400 people. That’s the idea. You keep doing that for 260 years and you get to about 6 million. So why do we know that’s roughly the right growth rate? Well, because well, we don’t have great records from before 300. We have a rough sense of how many people we start with in terms of the early Christians, and then we have a little bit of a sense kind of along the way, and we have a much clearer sense by the early three hundreds about roughly how many Christians there are.

Stark gets into all of those kind of details, but for our purposes, it’s enough to say this. If we assumed a growth rate of 30%, that would not give us nearly enough Christians. That would mean there would only be about 900,000 Christians by the year 300, and we know there were more than that. On the other hand, if the growth rate were 50%, that’d mean there’d be 37.8 million Christians by the year 300. We know there weren’t nearly that many. So we’re looking for something about squarely in the middle of that. So around 40%, that’s a 3.42% growth rate per year. Don’t worry, we’re almost at the end of the numbers and stark suggests that seems like the most plausible estimate of the rate at which Christianity actually grew. Now obviously there’s going to be peaks and valleys. There’s going to be on years and off years on decades and off decades, but nevertheless, you get something like this according to sarc, if you start with a thousand Christians in the year 40.

Now if you want to say a thousand earlier than that, or if you want to say a little more than a thousand, maybe a few thousand, maybe 5,000, something like that, it’s not going to radically change. You adjust the numbers somewhat. But if you had a thousand Christians in the year 40, that is an extremely small portion of the Roman Empire, which has about 60 million people. So out of that, that’s not 1% of the empire. That’s not a 10th of a percent of the empire. That’s not even a hundred percent of the empire that is roughly one 500th of 1% of the Roman Empire. Now, again, it might be slightly more than that, but still we’re talking about an extreme minuscule fraction of 1%, and then you just grow at that same growth thrift of about 40% per year. So those thousand people need to have turned into 1400 people by 10 years later, and then another 10 years, another 10 years, another 10 years, and that gets you up by 60 years then to about 7,500 people, which is big, but still not massive.

It’s not noticeable particularly, it would barely be on the radar of the Romans. That’s exactly what we find. We’re only in the early one hundreds do the Romans seem to make a concerted view to like, we need to maybe keep an eye on this. You find periodic persecutions, Nero, for instance, persecuted to Christians in Rome, but you don’t find a massive empire wide kind of crackdown because they’re so tiny, but then you just keep that growth rate and it just continues to grow. So where you have about 7,500 Christians in the year 100 that balloons into 40,000 by 50 years later, and then 217,000 and then 1.1 million by two 56 million by 300 and then by halfway through the 300 is just continuing that same rate of growth. We don’t have to bring Constantine into the equation at all. You’d be at about 33.8 million Christians, which would be most of the empire that you go from about 10.5% of Romans being Christian in about the year 300 to 56%.

That’s the upward ascendancy. This is what airman’s talking about, that if anything like those numbers, those exact numbers obviously aren’t, nobody’s claiming those are the exact numbers, but if that rough growth rate is true, you can see the rise of Christianity. You can see how it takes over the empire very clearly just by continuing to grow at roughly that rate. And Stark whose background, by the way is analyzing cults and new religious movements and things like this. He starts with the Moonies, he does the Mormons as well. He was actually on the ground with the first Moonies, and so he is an expert in how these new religious movements grow. And then he just applies that expertise to Christianity and he points out 40% is a totally believable number because the Mormons between their founding and at least when he was writing this in the nineties, were growing at about 43% over the course of a century. So it doesn’t seem like an totally implausible set of numbers, and he suggests you don’t even need to hypothesize a miracle or anything like that. You just need to recognize, yeah, if you continue to grow at that rate, you’re going to hit those kind of numbers.

Now at the time, by the way, Rodney Stark eventually kind of converts Christianity. He becomes what he calls an independent Christian. I don’t know what he means by that. By the time he’s writing this, he’s an agnostic. He’s not writing this as a Christian saying, rah rah Christianity. He’s just a sociologist. He wants to know, okay, how did this one succeed as a guy who watches new religious movements and cults and everything grow? What did it look like for a new religious movement 2000 years ago to really take off and become mainstream? And he’s just curious about that and he finds, yeah, you just have a few hundred years of that continual rate of growth.

In the review of the book, the reviewer points out, if you think about that as each converting Christian having to convert 0.4 new people on average per decade, that starts to sound downright doable. If you can make half a convert every 10 years, you’ll hit those numbers. Now, obviously this is going to be more complicated by two factors. You also have to, this is net. So if you’re losing members, then you need to be making more. You need to net gain 40% every 10 years. But it’s also going to be easier because this is just looking at total membership, and we’re going to get into that in a second. But there’s another way the church grows, which is biologically Bart Airman in triumph of Christianity. Says again, he says, you need this 40% growth rate to get to 6 million by about the year 300. He says, if this year they’re a hundred Christians next year there need to be 103 or 104. That’s at 3.4% per year. So if you think about maybe your local parish, your local church, who’s coming in in RCIA, if you’re getting three or four a year in a church of a hundred, that’s a really good growth rate.

Or to put it another way, in any group of a hundred Christians, only three or four of you need to make a single convert over the course of the entire year, or one of you could help convert a small family that would meet your numbers, so to speak for the year. And he compares this growth rate is an exponential curve to something like compound interest. At first, not many people are converting, but at the same exact rate later when there are lots more converts, the numbers suddenly become enormous. If you’re going out there and making one convert every half a decade, something like that, great, or excuse me, half a convert every decade. So every 20 years you convert somebody to Christianity, that doesn’t sound like much, but if every Christian is engaged in that, that really does grow Christianity massively. So the three or four converts you win when there are a hundred of you become 30 to 40,000 a year when there’s a million of you.

And again, he says, this is like compound interest. One point you have trouble believing it’s happening, but it is, and you’re making money hand over fist, and it doesn’t require substantial rates of growth, just the same growth steady over time. Okay, but how do you do that? I already alluded to the fact that a lot of this wasn’t kind of the mass Billy Graham style events that we might be envisioning. It wasn’t even the mass kind of St Paul kind of events. It wasn’t the Mass St. Peter Pentecost kind of events. As airman points out outside of the work of St. Paul after Paul, we don’t really have good evidence of organized Christian missionary work during this relevant period. We’re looking at the first 300 years of Christianity, and we can number on one hand the number of missionaries that we know. Now, there may have been others, but clearly you’d think if missionaries were a huge part of how Christianity was growing, you would know more about them.

So this was much more the exception than the norm. And so yes, well, okay, if that wasn’t how it happened, then how did it happen? He says, the answer is simple. It wasn’t by public preaching or door-to-door canvassing of strangers. Rather, the early Christians use their everyday social networks and converted people simply by word of mouth. So when I say you can do this, that’s what I mean. This doesn’t require some really unique skillset. It doesn’t require that you be a tremendous orator or a brilliant theologian or anything like that. Rodney Stark and his also named The Triumph of Christianity, explains this. He goes into a little more of the detail here. He says, conversion flows through social networks. Most people convert to a new religion because their friends and relatives already have done so when their social ties to the religious group outweigh their social ties to outsiders.

Now, just be clear here, I think there’s an important spiritual reality to all of this. I think there’s obviously something important to the truth of Christianity, but I’m looking just sociologically about how this happened as a couple of agnostics, like Stark and Airman can approach the question. So I think they’re getting something right here and something that we can imitate and copy, but I don’t want to suggest that this is literally all there is. Obviously the prayer and the sacrifice and all of these things have to be very much kind of at the heart of it on the interior level. But at the exterior level, I think this is something really fascinating because one of the things Stark makes the argument for is that most people when they convert it isn’t because they’re convinced of the doctrinal truth of the new system to which they convert.

And that’s striking because for a long time we assume most people converted because they liked the new teachings, especially if the teaching seemed to solve serious problems or dissatisfactions that afflicted them. That was the prevailing wisdom. But then remember how he said Stark was on the ground with the yearly moonies and he knew people who converted and he often knew they didn’t really know any of the doctrines they were saying yes to when they became new converts. So he actually was one of the influential sociologists in kind of getting people to revisit this. And so as he puts it, surprisingly when sociologists took the trouble to actually go out and watch conversions take place, they discovered that doctrines are of very secondary importance to the initial decision to convert. Now, look, you might think that’s good or bad, but it does mean this. So often when I talk to Catholics especially about why they don’t do more to evangelize, they say they don’t know enough that fundamentally misunderstands, if you are convinced of the truth of the thing and are a warm and inviting and engaging presence in the person’s life, they’ll trust you for a lot of that stuff.

They don’t need to know all the ins and outs. Likewise, most people aren’t Democrats or Republicans or fill in the blank because they have a nuanced understanding of the party platform. They probably have never read it. They may not be able to tell you what their preferred candidate even believes on certain core issues. They have kind of a general sense, people I trust go this way, the people I trust go that way. So it is with religion. So it is with a lot of things, frankly. And I think people who take the trouble to do things like watch a YouTube video on a religious topic might not realize that this is somewhat unusual and exceptional, but you should know this for your own effectiveness in evangelizing people who aren’t like you, who wouldn’t have made it this far into the video, his stark says, we’ve got to leave room for the rare conversions resulting from mystical experiences such as Paul’s on the road to Damascus.

But such instances aside, conversion is primarily about bringing one’s religious behavior into alignment with that of one’s friends and relatives, not about encountering attractive doctrines. So I mean some proportion again are going to be the real intellectual conversions. Those are often really interesting stories to read, but a lot of people’s like, oh yeah, well, I got married and my whole family that I just married into believed this and I didn’t have a strong belief system, so I accepted that. That’s not a particularly interesting conversion story in one sense. But oftentimes people aren’t just going through the motions. They really become believers in the new system because they’re starting to see the world and the way that people that they love see the world. And frankly, we do that a lot whether we’re aware of it or not. When we encounter people who are different than us, that doesn’t mean we are always converting, but we’re helping one another to see the world through new eyes.

And that’s an important part of the way conversion is working. So it’s part of this just shared life together rather than let me so logistically prove every doctrine as star said. To put it more formally, people tend to convert to a religious group when they’re social ties to members out... Read more on Catholic.com