Why is Christianity the first major religion?

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I thought about saying, “It’s because we’ve changed the meaning of the word to fit new realities. The last major religion before Christianity was…”

And I got stuck. Nothing else was major before Christianity. Judaism didn’t become major until long after Christians took over Europe, and even then only reluctantly, if they hadn’t been scattered everywhere by people that hated and persecuted them, they’d all still be in Israel.

Well, any time something blows up in the human collective consciousness, I like to look for a few things. First, what made people so willing to spread it. Second, what made people so willing to accept it. If you ask those two questions, you’re 90% on your way to understanding just about anything that relates to human nature and wanting things.

Judaism wasn’t interested in spreading, it was forced to spread, slowly, slowly building up momentum.

Christians, on the other hand, have the urge to evangelize. As in, they’re taught, from a very early age, that their faith is rare and special, and needs to be spread. This was a very unique thing two thousand years ago.

I answered a question yesterday about the relationship between Christians and Stoics. My answer was that obviously ideas cross-pollinate and spread, but you can’t really expect much more than that when the peoples involved were so far away from each other, and so different from each other.

The Greeks greatly admired the Egyptians, but it’s not like Greece could do much more than be inspired by them. They could take on Egyptian themes, even adapt Egyptian mythos but they couldn’t actually be Egyptian. To be Egyptian is to have your entire society dominated by the Nile’s floods. The Greeks didn’t have the Nile, their society had to be ordered by their unforgiving terrain.

The point of all this is to say that ancient peoples differed greatly from each other. Ideas spread, but culture didn’t. Culture comes from shared experience, and Egypt didn’t share the Grecian experience, so the two nations were extremely different.

So then why did Christianity manage to take over all of Europe? Well, in a word, Rome. Rome brought roads and peace to Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe, including the British Isles. Both of those things were critically important. Constantine declared Christianity to be the state religion of Rome and funded fabulous cathedrals and ensured that after every new territory was conquered, Rome-funded Christian missionaries brought Christianity to the new population. Roman Catholic basilicas, later cathedrals, paid for by Rome, sprang up everywhere.

Imagine living on a farm your whole life, and then one day seeing this. The Catholic Church made proselytising a priority. They wanted to be a world religion, and they weren’t fucking around. When the Roman empire broke up, it was Pope Leo III that legitimized Charlemagne as the new grand European empire.

So we’ve answered the question of what made it possible for Christians to overtake Europe, what we haven’t yet answered is what made them want to. For that I think it’s best to look at the specific way in which Christianity differed from Judaism, the concept of faith not deeds. Jesus exhorted his followers to spread his teachings, this was the first religious motivation for the adherents to proselytize themselves.

I need to take some time to outline exactly what made this special. The usual religion of the day was a syncretized pagan pantheonic faith that nobody really cared about, despite the best efforts of poets otherwise. Your little village six days away from Actium has been worshipping Dionysus for 400 years, the kids listened avidly to the merchant when he came to town, but the adults didn’t really care about the travails of Heracles. Those stories came from Heraclea, three weeks away. The people who did those rituals were all the way over there, here we do the much more serious and better rituals of Dionysus, the same rituals we’ve been doing for 400 years.

Could you imagine some doofus showing up in town saying you needed to spread the stories of Heracles all over the world? You’d laugh at him, what nonsense is this? You want me to go out there and spread your truth? Give it a rest man.

Spread the gospel of me all over the world buddy. I got faith in you man!

But again, Rome wasn’t fucking around. They needed a creed to stitch together all of Rome’s varied territories and make them much less likely to revolt, they needed it badly, and Constantine decided that creed was Christianity. It’s really hard to put together an army to go and march against your brothers and have them be really serious about it.

They were willing to do what nobody else would do, fund the building of the religion. The cathedrals didn’t build themselves. And you absolutely needed big, amazing temples in order to get people to believe in your faith.

The Greeks fought a lot of battles with each other, but they were more like American football matches where they shoved on each other with shields trying to get the other side to break and run. Not a whole lot of people died in them. It wasn’t until Greeks fought Persians that they had to get really serious. Rome knew this and realized that their syncretized warmed-over Greek myth just wasn’t inspiring anyone anymore. They needed to give every Roman a Roman identity, a reason to see themselves as Roman rather than as a resident of their own village, nation, or region.

When you bring people together, give them reasons to work with one another, they become more peaceful. This is what Christians realized as they accepted Rome’s quest to give the world Jesus. In the old Hebrew parlance, Christians made a covenant with Rome.

Between Roman law, Roman roads, and the creed of Rome, Roman Catholicism, Europe was civilized. And the Catholic Church grew into the very first entity of its kind, a large organization that derived its power not from land, but from people. But that’s another story.