Christianity became a major religion by first generating mass appeal among the lowest class and then winning the support of key figures within the highest class. The class contradiction of the proletariat and aristocracy was (somewhat) reconciled through articles of religious faith that promised egalitarian utopianism to those that played nicely within their respective rolls.
The meme is overly simplistic, as it neglects the prevailing systems of violence predating Christianity. Systems which Christianity promised relief from - first by way of its evangalized utopianism and then by its capacity for resolving contradictions between classes which expanded the military and economic power of its adherents.
Later iterations of Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, and more baroque cult faiths like Scientology have repeated this pattern while the earlier iterations stagnate and calcify around a permanent gentry class. It isn’t the Truth or the Violence that gives these religions its rapidly growing pool of adherents, but the promise of upward mobility and economic expansionism.
These faiths fail when alternative social structures outperform them. One religion replaces another when the growing congregants create more opportunities to join the prelate class and rise above one’s inherited role in society. Capitalist institutions supplant church institutions when more people can join these large multinational management structures than can join the religious ministries (and church institutions infiltrate capitalist structures when religious denomination dictates one’s managerial ceiling). Socialist institutions replace capitalist ones when state bureaucracies outperform private enterprises and party politics expands to encompass more of the proletariat.
“Truth” only matters in so far as individuals can realize a better standard of living. “Violence” only matters when participants can harvest their higher standards of living at their neighbors’ expense. But the root of success in all these institutions is the speed and efficiency through which they incorporate more unaligned people into more (perceived) prosperous conditions.
While I do not endorse the Marxist view of history, I have to say that there was no proletariat in antiquity according to Historical Materialism. Slave societies had slaves, not the proletariat.
Sometimes words like this take on a more general meaning, like how “bourgeois” is used sometimes to imply association with the economic elite rather than specifically a middle class between peasants and aristocracy … it’s not necessarily wrong to classify slaves or the lower classes as “proletariat” in a general sense for the same reason, the term is just being used in a more generic way.
Point being, Christianity spread first and fastest among Middle Eastern slave populations. The violence inflicted on slave Christians was the same violence that had been inflicted on pagan and monotheist minorities in ages past. Christians were simply better at organizing into opposition, which freaked out the Pagans, which heightened the divide between wealthy masters and increasingly rebellious slaves, which fueled civil wars and ultimately toppled the smaller insular, sclerotic military cults ruling Rome up to that point.
Along the way, Christian social networks became a ladder by which the lower classes could climb into higher station. And Constantine claiming the imperial crown was the apex of this early Christian revolution.
Christianity became a major religion by first generating mass appeal among the lowest class and then winning the support of key figures within the highest class. The class contradiction of the proletariat and aristocracy was (somewhat) reconciled through articles of religious faith that promised egalitarian utopianism to those that played nicely within their respective rolls.
The meme is overly simplistic, as it neglects the prevailing systems of violence predating Christianity. Systems which Christianity promised relief from - first by way of its evangalized utopianism and then by its capacity for resolving contradictions between classes which expanded the military and economic power of its adherents.
Later iterations of Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, and more baroque cult faiths like Scientology have repeated this pattern while the earlier iterations stagnate and calcify around a permanent gentry class. It isn’t the Truth or the Violence that gives these religions its rapidly growing pool of adherents, but the promise of upward mobility and economic expansionism.
These faiths fail when alternative social structures outperform them. One religion replaces another when the growing congregants create more opportunities to join the prelate class and rise above one’s inherited role in society. Capitalist institutions supplant church institutions when more people can join these large multinational management structures than can join the religious ministries (and church institutions infiltrate capitalist structures when religious denomination dictates one’s managerial ceiling). Socialist institutions replace capitalist ones when state bureaucracies outperform private enterprises and party politics expands to encompass more of the proletariat.
“Truth” only matters in so far as individuals can realize a better standard of living. “Violence” only matters when participants can harvest their higher standards of living at their neighbors’ expense. But the root of success in all these institutions is the speed and efficiency through which they incorporate more unaligned people into more (perceived) prosperous conditions.
“Proletariat”
While I do not endorse the Marxist view of history, I have to say that there was no proletariat in antiquity according to Historical Materialism. Slave societies had slaves, not the proletariat.
Sometimes words like this take on a more general meaning, like how “bourgeois” is used sometimes to imply association with the economic elite rather than specifically a middle class between peasants and aristocracy … it’s not necessarily wrong to classify slaves or the lower classes as “proletariat” in a general sense for the same reason, the term is just being used in a more generic way.
Fair enough.
Point being, Christianity spread first and fastest among Middle Eastern slave populations. The violence inflicted on slave Christians was the same violence that had been inflicted on pagan and monotheist minorities in ages past. Christians were simply better at organizing into opposition, which freaked out the Pagans, which heightened the divide between wealthy masters and increasingly rebellious slaves, which fueled civil wars and ultimately toppled the smaller insular, sclerotic military cults ruling Rome up to that point.
Along the way, Christian social networks became a ladder by which the lower classes could climb into higher station. And Constantine claiming the imperial crown was the apex of this early Christian revolution.
The Jews were already militant, and we know that Christians were not even perceived as a distinct group from Jews by the Romans initially.