The Rise of Christianity

How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries

by Rodney Stark

[Texts]

Christianity rose because:

• it became popular amongst the middle & upper classes,
• it gave Hellenized Jews a chance to fuse their Hellenic and Jewish identities, and Hellenic Jews were a substantial portion of the population,
• it was better than paganism at letting Romans cope with the epidemics of the 2nd century, and also encouraged charity that massively improved the survival rate of those with closer connection to Christians via nurisng etc.,
• it was more popular amongst women because it discouraged abortion & infanticide and promoted mutual chastity till marriage, and as a result early in the Christian movement # women >> # men (correlated with/caused greater freedom for women),
• Greco-Roman cities were atrocious, horrifying, and disgusting—Christianity was primarily an urban movement, so is it really surprising that it took root where hopelessness would probably have been the highest?
• early Christians had a lot of skin in the game (exemplified by the martyrs of the 60s), making the religion extremely potent & able to give benefits exceeding that of paganism to their believers
• above all, Christianity is virtuous, and virtue wins.

Smattering of useful frames here: sect vs. cult movements (sect movements being offshoots and having a base from which to draw from, cult movements being new sprouts and fringe and ostracized in the beginning), not-very-rigorous models that involve a lot of assumptions can be surprisingly accurate (see: Fermi, see: this book’s estimation of travel distance from Jerusalem), martyrdom as central to Christian belief, and Christianity as (in some ways) this weird bastard child of Roman paganism and Jewish monotheism.

Apparently Roman cities were 1.5x-2x as dense as Indian cities are today, without the ability to build upwards. Also apparently, the racial mixing in the Roman empire was as if the entirety of the British empire was squashed together with freedom of movement. Strangely ancap?

It won because it was the better tech. Jesus was the ultimate startup founder