The Rise of Christianity

by Rodney Stark - published by Princeton University Press, 1996

A Book Review by Father John McCloskey

As the year 2000 approaches, more and more people are asking why we celebrate the end of one millennium and the beginning of another. Obviously the dating goes back, more or less, to the birth of Christ. There began a world movement called Christianity, which took form and continuity principally in a universal Church that has perdured up to our own times, with over a billion adherents and another half a billion of the population adhering to schismatic or imperfect forms of it. The history of Christianity will continue to the end of time; at least you believe this if you are a Christian and believe in the second coming and a final judgment. How this Church grew from one Man, to twelve apostles, to several thousand during the time of the Acts of the Apostles, then up to approximately six million by the year 300, a few short years before the Edict of Milan, is one of history's most important questions and the subject of this fascinating book. It is ironic yet satisfying to find sociology, so often used to attack dogmatic Christianity, now objectively confirming some of the claims that Christianity has made for itself.

The book could not have appeared at a better moment. With the approach of the millennium and the total or near collapse of many ideologies rooted in atheism–most notably Marxism, Freudianism, and Darwinism–there appears to be an increasing return to a radical choice for humanity, not unlike the one represented in the first centuries of the Christian era, that between a fixed credal, hierarchical Christianity, with its sacramental system and the message of the " gift of self", and to a despairing hedonistic paganism with its corollaries in Gnostic and "nature" religions, the modern forms of which are worship of progress and modern science.

In The Rise of Christianity (Princeton University Press, l996), Rodney Stark, professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington, has written a thought-provoking book that will challenge many of the assumptions of both orthodox Christians and hardened skeptics as to the growth of Christianity during the three centuries after the birth of Christ. He asks himself (and us) "How was it done? How did a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization? Although this is the only question, it requires many answers–no one thing led to the triumph of Christianity." This renowned professional sociologist is not looking for supernatural explanations, which ultimately are a question of faith, but rather for the hard sociological data, to the extent that it is obtainable, which might explain the unique phenomenon of Christianity on the world stage. A Christian would certainly see in this growth and continuity a clear sign of the indwelling of the divine Holy Spirit that Christ had promised would be with His Church until the end of time. However, the Christian also believes that grace perfects nature and that God prefers to use secondary causes to spread the message of Christianity.

Dr. Stark uses the sociological tools of the trade and his own and others' research to explain the unique growth of Christianity. Why God chose the Jews as his Chosen people and the Catholic Church as its spiritual continuation always remains a mystery in the divine mind not accessible to us. Ultimately these methods will fall short as a total explanation but this study does provide insights into the human attractiveness of the faith which has produced a steady stream of conversions through the centuries and into the demographic factors which result from the moral attitude of the Christians towards marriage, family, and openness to life. I will examine just a few of his interesting insights and conclusions, leaving the rest to your reading of the book itself.

In a few short chapters, Stark comes up with some startling conclusions. He finds that, contrary to the established thought, Christianity was not a movement of the dispossessed–a haven for Rome's slaves and impoverished masses–but rather was based in the middle and upper classes, the solid citizens of the Roman Empire. This in no way diminishes the Church's historical "preferential option to the poor," which is a continual disposition coming from Christ himself directly, that Christianity grew much more rapidly in the populated cities, while the poor peasants were largely on the outlying land. This dominance of the middle and upper classes, given the generosity of the early Christians, would lead to an effective social welfare network of relief for the elderly, widowed, and orphaned, to the establishment of Christian cemeteries, and with time, to houses of worship, which, of course, prior to the Edict of Milan, were located in familial homes.

In one of the more startling conclusions from his research, Stark says that contrary to the current wisdom, the mission to the Jews of the early Christians was largely successful and continued right up to the year 300. According to Stark, the some four or five million Jews of the Diaspora had "adjusted to life in the Diaspora in ways that made them very marginal vis-a-vis the Judaism of Jerusalem, hence the need as early as the third century for the Torah to be translated into Greek for the Jews outside of Israel (the Septuagint)." For Jews who lived in the Hellenic world, "Christianity offered to retain much of the religious content of both cultures and to resolve the contradictions between them." As it is seen in the Acts of the Apostles the first Christians led by St. Paul naturally went to the Jewish communities in the big urban centers. These communities, accustomed to receiving teachers from Jerusalem, were not so easily scandalized by the Roman oppression that had been responsible, at least in part, for the crucifixion of Jesus. Archaeological evidence shows that the early Christian Churches outside of Palestine were concentrated in the Jewish sections of the cities. But Stark does not stop there. He submits that by the year 250, when there were approximately one million Christians (according to his estimate of a 40 % annual growth rate) the great majority could have been convert Jews, as many as 1 out 5 of the Jews in the Diaspora. One of the more difficult problems facing the Catholic episcopate well into the fifth century may have been persuading newly converted Jews to stop frequenting of Jewish synagogues and to abandon Jewish customs.

In 165, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, an epidemic struck that carried away during the course of fifteen years up to a third of the total population of the empire, including Marcus Aurelius himself. In 251 a similar epidemic, most likely of measles, struck again with similar results. Historians generally acknowledge that these epidemics produced a depopulation which led in part to the decline of the Roman empire, more than the normally attributed cause of moral degeneration. Stark points out that these epidemics favored the rapid rise of Christianity for three reasons. One, that Christianity offered a more satisfactory account of "why bad things happen to good people," based on the centrality of the suffering and Cross of Christ than any form of classical paganism. Second, "Christian values of love and charity, from the beginning, had been translated into norms of social service and community solidarity. When disasters struck, the Christians were better able to cope, and this resulted in substantially higher rates of survival. This meant that in the aftermath of each epidemic, Christians made up a larger and larger percentage of the population even without new converts." Last, these epidemics left large numbers of people without the interpersonal bonds that would have prevented them from becoming Christians, thus encouraging conversion. He says, "in a sense paganism did indeed 'topple over dead' or at least acquired its fatal illness during these epidemics, falling victim to its relative inability to confront these crises socially or spiritually, an inability suddenly revealed by the example of its upstart challenger."

In a chapter that is of particular importance given the current confusion in the West regarding the role of women in society and in the Church, Stark produces impressive evidence that "Christianity was unusually appealing to pagan women" because "within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large." He shows that Christianity recognized women as equal to men, children of God with the same supernatural destiny. Moreover the Christian moral code of prohibition against polygamy, divorce, birth control, abortion, infanticide, etc. contributed to the well-being of women, changing their status from powerless serfs in bondage to men, to women with dignity and rights in both the Church and the State.

Stark establishes four conclusions based on his study. One, Christian subcultures rapidly produced a substantial surplus of females as a result of Christian prohibitions against infanticide (normally directed against girl infants), abortion (often producing the death of the mother), and the high rate of conversion to Christianity among women. Second, as already pointed out, Christian women enjoyed substantially higher status within Christian subcultures than women did in the world at large, which made Christianity highly attractive to them. Third, the surplus of Christian women and of pagan men produced many marriages that led to the secondary conversions of pagan men to the Faith, a phenomenon that continues today. Finally, the abundance of Christian women resulted in higher birthrates; superior fertility contributed to the rise of Christianity.

Stark, using sociological and demographic research, shows conclusively that the rise of Christianity was almost exclusively an urban phenomenon for a very sound reason: that is where the people were, and that is where the first missionaries went and the first Christians converts , notably the hellenized Jews lived. He uses one of the first cities to be evangelized, Antioch, as his model for study, describing it as "a city filled with misery, danger, fear, despair, and hatred. A city where the average family lived a squalid life in filthy and cramped quarters...a city filled with hatred and fear in intense ethnic antagonism and exacerbated by a constant stream of strangers, a city where crime flourished and the streets were dangerous at night, and a city repeatedly smashed by cataclysmic catastrophes; where a resident could expect literally to be homeless from time to time, providing that he or she was among the survivors."

Stark underlines the fact that Christianity brought a new culture capable of making life in Greco-Roman cities more tolerable: "To cities filled with homeless and the impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services." Can it be that the very fact that any of our cities are livable today is due in large part not to technological progress, but to the Christian virtues and ideals lived by their inhabitants, and that the answer for those cities afflicted by the same ills as ancient Antioch is simply more lived Christianity?

Tertullian has told us in an oft quoted passage that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Christians." In a chapter on the first martyrs of Christianity, Stark asks the usual question, "What makes them do it?" but does not give the normal answers of secular sociologists, who considers the first Christians slightly mad or masochistic at worst and irrational at best. Stark claims that they were simply exercising a rational choice, between renouncing their faith through sacrifices to the gods, and dying to achieve a perceived greater good, paradise: "Martyrs are the most credible exponents of the value of a religion, and this is especially true if there is a voluntary act to their martyrdom. By voluntarily accepting torture and death rather than defecting, a person sets the highest imaginable value upon a religion and communicates the value to others. Indeed Christian martyrs typically had the opportunity to display their steadfastness to large numbers of other Christians, and the value of Christianity they thereby communicated often deeply impressed pagan observers as well."

The author goes on to ask a further question, "How could a rational person accept grotesque torture and death in exchange for risky, intangible religious rewards?" The answer he gives is the sensible one although not necessarily the one that one would want or expect. "First of all, many early Christians probably could not have done so, and some are known to have recanted when the situation arose. Second, persecutions rarely occurred, and only a tiny number of Christians ever were martyred...There was surprisingly little effort to persecute Christians, and when a wave of persecutions occurred, usually only bishops and other prominent figures were singled out." Thus according to Stark and other sociologists, only some thousands were martyred over the course of two and one-half centuries and not the hundreds of thousands or even millions that are sometimes claimed by enthusiastic Christian historians. There were, however, sizable numbers of defectors and apostates who could not face up to the trial of martyrdom. Indeed Stark claims that we probably know the names and stories of most of the martyrs since their martyrdom was often witnessed by many people, both practicing Christians and pagans, hence the almost immediate cults to them that took place. As a result of both the social stigma attached to being a Christian and the danger of persecution and even martyrdom, Christianity was largely free of what Stark refers to as the "free riders." Free-riders could be defined as those people who want to reap the benefits of religion without sharing in its sacrifices and commitments. Perhaps we could say that among the first Christians during the first several centuries of the Faith, there was considerably more wheat than chaff.

Why did Christianity grow then? According to Stark, "It grew because Christians constituted an intense community, able to generate the 'invincible obstinacy' that so offended the younger Pliny but yielded immense religious rewards. And the primary means of its growth was through the united and motivated efforts of the growing numbers of Christian believers, who invited their friends, relatives, and neighbors to share the 'good news'." At the heart of this willingness to share one's faith was doctrine, that which was to be believed. "Central doctrines of Christianity prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and organization." The chief doctrine, of course, which was radically new to a pagan world groaning under a host of miseries and saturated with capricious cruelty and the vicarious love of death, was that "because God loves humanity, Christians may not please God unless they love one another."

This book shows that Christianity ultimately survived and continues to prosper, through the power of the personal influence of the people who live according to its principles, that is, normal lay faithful and families who aspire to holiness according to the model of Christ. This conclusion naturally ratifies the core message of the Second Vatican Council, so often repeated by Pope John Paul II, namely the call to personal holiness which inevitably brings with it the fruit of evangelization through personal witness and family life. John Paul II has repeatedly called for a "re-evangelization" of the West while he personally has evangelized throughout the world, using all the technological advances of this century from the jet airplane to the internet in a manner undreamt of and, of course, not humanly possible for his predecessors. To build a post-millennial "civilization of love and truth," it would seem imperative that we continue to study how it was done, or begun, the first time around by our "role models", the first Christians, with such splendid results. This book gives us both concrete answers and suggestions for further research as we, to use Pope John Paul II's expressions, "cross the threshold of hope" into a "new springtime of Christian life."

First appeared in the November 20, 1996 issue of L'Osservatore Romano.