Audio only:
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 outweigh their tithe to outsiders who might oppose the conversion. And this often occurs before a convert knows much about what the group believes, and you can trace it. I mean, look at the spread of Islam. It’s happening with Mohammad’s family. Look at the spread of the moonies in the us. It’s I think the landlord or the landlady of the first mooning to arrive in the us. I mean with a lot of Joseph Smith, it’s family. So you see a lot of this kind of spreading outward from close kin.
As Stark says, one can easily imagine doctrines so bizarre as to keep most people from joining. And on the other hand, there’s also successful faiths that have doctrines that actually are widely appealing. You can find plenty of exceptions to what he’s laid out here. Nevertheless, we can say as a general principle, to convert someone, you must be or become their close and trusted friend. Consequently, when someone converts to a new religion, then they usually seek to convert their friends and relatives. And consequently, conversion tends to proceed through social networks. And so one of the hypotheses about why Christianity succeeds is because of things like the Roman roads. You have a whole network of merchants and people traveling from one city to another. So you can go from Jerusalem to Corinth and it’s not a big deal. It’s all one empire. When not long before those would’ve been two separate countries with maybe not a common language or a common culture or a common way of navigating that, people might’ve looked at you with more disdain, hostility, trepidation.
So there’s a lot that happens right before the coming of Christ that makes the spread of Christianity possible. Whether you view that as providential or just coincidental, it nevertheless points to the fact that it spreads along these lines of personal encounter and in many cases, personal friendship. So that’s step one, convert a few people, probably not strangers, probably some people share the truth with people that you love. Step number two, get married and have kids. Pretty self-explanatory. But let’s put it in context. One of the reasons that Christianity grows in the Roman Empire relative to Paganism is that Paganism had adopted a whole set of kind of, we might call antinatalists policies, not policies, but just practices. In fact, this is something the state was worried about as stark points out a primary cause of low fertility in the Greco-Roman world was a male culture that held marriage in low esteem.
And he talks about how in the year 1 31 BC a Roman sensor proposed that the state make marriage compulsory because so many men, particularly in the upper classes, preferred to stay single. They would sexually engage with prostitutes or with other men, and they wanted nothing to do with women in the sense of a common life with them. And he quotes from them acknowledging that we cannot a really harmonious life with our wives. The sensor pointed out that since we cannot have any sort of life without them, the long-term welfare of the state must be served. So suck it up lads. You got to go get married. These were not incel, these were vol cells. They were voluntarily celibate men, or not really celibate, but they weren’t getting married.
And when they did get married, they would still have small families. In fact, even with the power of the state trying to encourage large families, they couldn’t really achieve the goal of an average of three children per family. There were several reasons for this. One of those unfortunately was infanticide. Far more babies were born than were allowed to live. Seneca regarded the drowning of children at birth as both reasonable and commonplace. And then he cites to TAUs who I was really struck by tacitus in his histories. In book five, he’s talking about how weird he finds Jewish beliefs, and obviously this is going to be something the Jews and Christians have in common here. He says, those who are converted to their way follow the same practice, and the earliest lesson they receive is to despise the gods, to disown their country, to regard their parents, children and brothers as of little account, however they take thought to increase their numbers.
So notice it’s this kind of antenatal list versus pro natal list rhetoric. They’re wanting to just bump their numbers up for they regard it as a crime to kill any late born child, and they believe that the souls of those who were killed in battle or by the executioner are immortal, hence comes their passion for beginning children and their scorn of death. It’s a pretty striking kind of line there. Look at this weird practice they have of not murdering their children upon birth. I think a lot of times this is a bit of a digression. I think a lot of times you’ve got modern atheists who imagine that they’re just rationalists looking at the world without realizing how deeply their worldview is shaped by Christianity. And Dawkins is explicit about this, that he’s a cultural Christian. He doesn’t want to be a cultural Muslim. He also wouldn’t have wanted to be a cultural Roman, the Roman paganism that treated infant lives as being that disposable.
I think even a society that treats unborn life as very disposable kind of shutters at the open infanticide and the sort of bizarre mocking attitude of like, how can you think this was a crime? Statistic goes on to lament that the Jews bury the body rather than burn it following the Egyptians custom. They likewise bestow the same care on the dead and hold the same belief of the world below, but their ideas of heavenly things are quite the opposite. So they take care, in other words, of small children and of those who’ve died and they have this kind of compassion for other people that was just lacking in the Roman system going back to stark. So you’ve got infanticide as one reason for low fertility. You’ve got men not wanting to get married. You also have frequent recourse to abortion, and these often would kill both the unborn child and the mom or would render her infertile.
Either way, this is obviously going to rapidly lower the birth rate. And then in addition to that, you also have widespread birth control. And start goes into great depth about the kind of ways that couples would avoid conceiving a child. This is everything from barrier methods using cow parts like bladders and things to herbal methods that were supposed to lower a woman’s fertility, and in some cases seemed to have actually done so somewhat. And then you also just had sexual deviations where conception was impossible, and the Romans even had a term for treating the woman like a boy, which speaks to another whole set of perversions that they had. So you have there, as you might imagine, a lower birth rate than you would in a sexually healthy culture. We don’t know the exact numbers, but it certainly seemed like the Romans were in something of a crisis with fertility.
And Christians came along and said, these things are wrong. They would have large families. They rejected birth control, they rejected abortion, they rejected infanticide, and they spoke very clearly about all of these things. And so as a result, one of the reasons Christians were growing so much faster than their pagan neighbors is because they were having lots of kids. So even if you were not able to convert a single soul, if you could raise Christian kids, you’re still bumping those numbers up, especially if your pagan neighbors are refusing to have kids or refusing to get married or are leaving their kids to die or drowning them when they’re born. So all of that is to say step two is very clear. So you might ask, well, would that still work today? I mean, some of the things are a little bit unique. You don’t see men just saying, we prefer the company of other men to the exclusion of women.
And so reproduction is becoming a problem. You don’t really see that. You see abortion, you see birth control. Do you have the same situation today that you had back then? I would suggest yes, at least broadly. And one of the reasons I would suggest that is the work of a liberal author by the name of Eric Kaufman, who has a book called Shell, the Religious Inherit the Earth, and he is not happy about this fact, but he’s looking at demography and politics in 21st century and realizing like, Hey, we are contracepting and aborting the next generation of liberal kids. And meanwhile, these religious fundamentalists, as he calls them, are having a bunch of kids, and you can see it in the numbers as Coffman puts it. He says, people are increasingly failing to replace themselves, and the openly among them are displaying the lowest fertility rates ever recorded in human history, sometimes less than one child per woman.
So remember, okay, so you’re going to have a certain number of children who die or don’t reproduce. And so for replacement rate, the magical number so to speak is 2.1 kids per couple, because that 0.1, obviously not everyone’s going to be in a couple. Not everyone’s going to be fertile. And so you need the average 2.1, and we’re getting well below that, less than one child per woman. Okay, well, that’s less than half of where you’re wanting to be. If a couple is not even having one kid on average, I mean less than one kid is the average among the non-religious. Those are shockingly low numbers sometimes. I mean, that’s not always he’s looking at the worst case scenarios. But this is still, I mean, we’re talking epically low numbers that even the Romans would’ve been shocked by. However, he says, this demographic transition relies on people’s desire to better themselves in this world, not the next one.
Those embracing the here and now are spearheading population decline. And individuals who shun this world are relatively immune to it. Now, this is an obnoxious way of trying to frame the question. It’s not like religious people don’t care about the world, but fine, everywhere one looks, religious fundamentalists are successfully bucking the trend toward fertility rates below the magic 2.1 child or children. For a woman, even if everyone else died off, homo Religios would endure the religious man that is would endure. And he gets a little bit into the numbers, but the fact that he’s written an entire book on how, hey, this might be a problem, is pretty striking. The economist, Philip Pilkington in American Affairs talks about this as well. He gets much more into the numbers and much more specific. He says, for one, the largest religious groups in the American population, Protestant, Catholic, nuns and the atheists slash agnostic have a combined fertility slightly below replacement rate.
So if you’re looking at just the broad label, you call yourself a Catholic or a Protestant or an atheist or none, chances are it’s pretty bad in terms of fertility. Fertility rates are very low. People are getting married later, they’re having fewer kids, they’re contracepting and abor children, all of that. But on the other hand, if you look at believing religious groups, now I’m going to flag here, this is an imperfect category, but he’s looking at groups that have kind of self-selected for maybe religious intensity, and looking at their numbers, they have way higher birth rates. So traditionalist Catholics, 3.6 kids, I’m shocked it sat low Orthodox Jews, 3.3, Mormons, 2.8, Muslims, 2.8, not to mention voluntarily isolating sex like the Amish and the Amish have grown tremendously. So I mean the number of Amish even a hundred years ago was really small and their numbers have exploded.
All that’s to say, even if you’re not really effective at making converts, if you are saying yes to life and your neighbor’s saying no to life, and you’re doing a good job of raising kids in the faith and they keep the faith, the next generation starts to look more like you than it does like your neighbor. That’s just how it goes. As Pilkington says, this suggested the current tendency for American culture to secularize will not last forever. At a certain point, groups with a more robust capacity to reproduce will replace groups with less robust capacities in a simple Darwinian manner. This is the thing Kaufman is worried about. This is why he writes the book, because he realizes the pipe dreams of liberal secularism where it just imagines it’s going to impede uninterrupted are based on there being enough people to carry that dream into the next generation, and yet they’re not having kids. And the people who are having kids are in many cases hostile to their anti-natal, anti-family kind of projects, as you might expect.
Currently, Pelkington says these groups, the very religious Jews, Muslims, Catholics, et cetera, represent a very small fraction of the American population. But because human reproduction follows a multiplicative path, these groups could grow rapidly in numbers, especially as the other groups decline. It’s the exact same kind of math that works with the population growth through conversion that we saw in step one. If you have a few kids and they have a few kids and they have a few kids and you’re outpacing your secular neighbors, well eventually you’ll overtake. It might not be a generation from now, but over a relatively short span of time, you will see those kinds of numbers offsetting. That’s step two, get married and have kids be open to life. Step three, proclaim that Jesus is Lord, these are the three steps. These are not difficult steps. I mean, I get it.
Getting married and having kids can be kind of difficult, but I’m not asking you to go to the moon. I’m not asking you to go convert a million people just saying yes to converting in friendship context to marriage and family and to the proclamation of Jesus’s Lord. So here I want to get a little more into the specifics. You might say, okay, look, I get that Christianity grew at this growth rate, but that still doesn’t explain why. Why did Christianity grow in a way that other groups didn’t? Why didn’t some pagan cult grow at 40% per decade? And why didn’t it overtake the empire? Bart Airman, I actually think does the best job of trying to get more into the weeds on that, and I find his explanations in some ways more convincing than Starks. He says the following, he says, one reason Christianity grows is that it is the only religion like this.
The others are not missionary and they’re not exclusive. So he says one reason he’s really going to say there’s two things. Number one, Christianity is missionary. People are going out and making disciples. And number two, it’s exclusive. It says, to become Christian, you have to say no to paganism. These two features make Christianity unlike anything else on offer. So you can imagine two different imaginary forms of Christianity, one that’s evangelistic but not exclusive, and then that’s exclusive, but not evangelistic. So he says this, so Christianity was the only evangelistic religion that we know of in antiquity, and along with Judaism was the only one that was exclusive. That combination of evangelism and exclusion proved to be decisive for the triumph of Christianity. He’s going to suggest there are really two features we should be looking at, that Christianity is exclusive and then it’s evangelistic. He puts it like this, he says, so Christianity was the only evangelistic religion that we know of in antiquity.
People were not going door to door proclaiming Zeus. And along with Judaism, it was also the only one that was exclusive it. That combination of evangelism and exclusion proved to be decisive to the triumph of Christianity. Maybe I shouldn’t have used door to door because a lot of this wasn’t door to door. It was talking to your friends, talking to your family, talking to people that you know about it. But either way, there was this idea, this is something that you want to spread. So there’s a desire and an impulse and a command to spread it. And then also this sense of exclusivity, which just means to become Christian, you have to say no to paganism. If you’re going to worship Athena, you could still worship Zeus. If you’re going to worship one Roman God, you could still worship another. It doesn’t work like that.
They’re inclusive. Christianity is exclusive. Follow Jesus and nobody else. You can’t serve two masters. And this rather than being a turnoff is something that was really attractive then, and I would suggest now, I think one of the things we’ve lost as Christians is a need to proclaim like, yes, we are different than the broader world, and that’s good, and we’re not ashamed of that. We’re very comfortable with that, and we are going to make demands on you to give up everything you have and follow Christ. That lowering the bar to make Christianity more inclusive would’ve actually thwarted the success of Christianity then. And now in airman’s terms, if Christianity had been evangelistic but not exclusive, it may well have gained adherence, but paganism would’ve been relatively unaffected. If you could be a pagan and a Christian, then becoming a Christian doesn’t get rid of paganism.
That just follows logically, right? And so then there’s less of a distinctive draw of Christianity. Pagans would simply have begun to worship Christ along with whatever other gods they chose. Jupiter, Apollo, Diana MIRIs, isis, take your pick. On the other hand, if Christianity had been exclusive but not evangelistic the way Judaism was, we would’ve simply had an isolated and marginal religion without masses of adherence. If it was just this group of Christians saying, we’re going to follow the Benedict option and we’re going to hunker down and be with one another while the world goes crazy, Christianity never would’ve spread. It would’ve just been this tiny little thing. Instead, you have Christians going out and spreading the gospel, but calling people to a radical kind of following that’s going on. And so he says, but it gained a massive following, not at first, but over time, progressively adding to its ranks the year after year, decade after decade as it grew.
Pagan isn’t necessarily shrank, unlike any religion known to the human race at the time. Christianity thrived by killing off its opposition. Now, obviously he means that metaphorically. He’s not saying the handful of Christians went to war with the Roman army or something like this. No, it’s rather that they showed, okay, if you’re going to be part of this, you’re going to reject all of that. And enough people said yes to that offer that eventually Paganism sort of died out. There’s other factors as well. Once the upper classes start converting, then you don’t have anyone financing to keep the temples up kept and everything else. And you have just a interior deterioration of Roman paganism. The people with the money don’t want to support paganism anymore. And so the churches, the pagan temples just begin to decline and people start turning on moss to Christianity. That’s how it happens.
It’s not magic. I mean, certainly there is a spiritual reality and we don’t want to deny that at all, but we know the kind of things we can do to help spread Christianity. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We don’t have to do anything really kind of wild and crazy. Final thoughts. I want to actually turn to Rodney Stark himself because he kind of inspired this whole thing, and we haven’t actually gotten to hear from him yet. So this is from some remarks that he made obviously before his death. On the future of faith in secularism,
CLIP:
You’re all aware that at least once a month, sometimes more often, there’ll be a big story in the national press, always the same story, usually by the same suspects having to do with the fact that religion is doomed. Last week, Daniel Dennet, the sage of Tufts University, was quoted at great length in the Wall Street Journal about the fact that it’s all over. We finally won. According to de, religion is dead. And if it looks like it’s still healthy, that’s because that’s a dying spasm. Well, whatever else that may be, it’s not news. People have been predicting the end of religion for more than three centuries. And true to form, the very first person who did it was an Anglican clergyman writing. In 1710, Thomas Walston predicted that all traces of religion would be gone by 1900. Voltaire thought he was pessimistic. And in the letter to Frederick, the great Aire said, now it’ll all be gone. And over by 1810, subsequently, these sorts of people got a little circumspect, and now they will only say soon. They won’t say when.
Joe:
So that’s a critique in a nutshell like religion is over and done with, or very nearly so just around the corner, the days of fundamentalism, religion, whatever you want to say, they’re just about over. And as stark points out, they’ve been making these promises for about 300 years now, and they haven’t quite ever panned out, but maybe they will next time, except Stark’s got some numbers that suggest that’s not the trajectory the world is actually moving at all.
CLIP:
But the fact is that it’s the 21st century and it still hasn’t happened. Moreover, the facts are that the world is probably much more religious than it was a century ago. It may in fact be more religious than it ever was. Never before has organized religion enrolled such a huge proportion of the world’s population worldwide. 81% of the people belong to one of the major organized faiths. All of the great world religions are growing with the possible exception of Buddhism. And contrary to uninformed accounts, Christianity is growing far faster than either Islam or Hinduism. And regardless of their religion, 74% of the world’s people say religion is an important part of their daily lives. 50% say they have attended a worship service in the past seven days.
Joe:
Now, obviously there’s more to the story than that. It’s not enough that people just believe in religion or a faith. We want people to actually have true faith. We want people to have a proper religion. We want people to have a right view of God and of the world. But I share this to say two things. Number one, I think sometimes we can buy into the sort of bleak predictions like, oh, the golden era of Christianity is behind us, and Christianity is shrinking and atheism and agnosticism and the nuns are kind of the wave of the future. And that’s just not true by the numbers. And in terms of the longer term projections, the fact that people who tend to that view of the world also tend not to take the trouble of actually getting married and having kids and letting their kids live to birth, it makes a difference.
And then you have things like conversion that many of children of non-believers end up becoming believers themselves. And it just complicates this idea that atheism, secularism, agnosticism, whatever you want to say is the future. It just clearly seems not to be. It seems on the other hand that the future is with faithful and that there isn’t just demography as destiny, but rather is something we can take to heart and help to live out in really simple and practical ways by sharing the faith with others, by proclaiming Jesus’s Lord. And if God’s calling you to it by getting married and having a family, I find that to be good news. I find that to mean the battle is much more winnable than it might seem. It might just take longer. Just as the Christians in the first century would’ve had a hard time perhaps believing that someday they really would take over the entire Roman empire, we might have a hard time believing that someday we really will take over the entire world. For Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.