Why are we Christians? Part 1

“sticks and stones and bars of iron”

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Under my Unz Review article “The Satanic False Flag”, one commenter wrote that I am missing the point that “Christianity spread through voluntary adoption,” and that “the willing adoption of Christianity by so many disparate people indicates what’s analogous to a superior technology, where Christianity clearly was a much better understanding of the transcendent compared to other faiths.” In conclusion, he said, “rejection of Christ is folly and has no bearing on bettering the situation the West finds itself in.”

These are very important points to discuss. On the last claim, my position is that it is a matter, not just of betterment, but of survival for the West to get to the bottom of the Jewish Question, and the bottom of it is the Jewish God (the god of the Jews claiming to be God claiming to have chosen the Jews). Therefore, we cannot get around a critique of Christianity and of Christendom, and that is what I intend to continue doing. The Christian question is the flip side of the Jewish Question. But criticism of Christianity doesn’t mean “rejection of Christ”. It can actually mean liberation of Christ.

Christianity is the institutional religion first formalized under Constantine the Great (Council of Nicaea, 325). Is it vital for Western civilization? I doubt it, and have explained why in “The Renaissance Genius”: the greatness of Western civilization, in science, in philosophy, in art, in politics, stems primarily from its Helleno-Roman root.

Is Christianity’s understanding of the transcendent superior to other faiths? I think not, and I have argued the point in “How Jewish is the Christian God?” I will continue to dig into these essential questions.

In the present article and the next one, I will refute the theory that “Christianity spread through voluntary adoption,” and I will show that, from the time of Constantine the Great, when Christians represented no more than two percent of the total imperial population,[1] Christianity was forced upon both the Romans and the Barbarians by various forms of coercion, which included propaganda, intimidation, political and financial pressure, persecution, wars of conquest, mass killing, looting and destruction of temples, and State terrorism in many forms. Whether that was ultimately for the good of Europeans and humanity is another question, which I keep for later.

This is the first post of a series that will include a dozen or more posts dealing with the Christianization of Europe, a process that needs to be broken down in several parts: the early spread of Christianity, the conversion of Constantine (and his sons), the conversion of the Roman aristocracy and bureaucracy, the conversion of peasant communities, and the conversion of Barbarians. I will treat these topics in a different order. I will also be addressing such questions as: What exactly was “paganism” (what were Romans converted from)? Did Christianity contribute to the fall of Rome (as Edward Gibbon suggested)? Was Christianity good for the Jews? Did Christianity foster the unity, or the division of Europe? How “pagan” was pre-modern rural Catholicism? Can Jesus help us, and which Jesus? As inspiration comes, I will reflect on the influence of Christianity on Europeans’ concepts of truth, the individual, humanity, Jewishness, race, gender, filiation, vengeance, maternity, etc.

Let me insist: I don’t confuse Christ and Christianity. I value the positive power of both the historical figure of Jesus (the man that the Jewish leaders got the Romans to crucify because he challenged their authority) and the mythic Christ (the universal symbol of cosmic rebirth). I view the Gospels as a unique and fascinating corpus of Hellenistic literature, not the least for its social philosophy of the Kingdom of God.

Actually, my subject is not even Christianity as such: it is the process by which a certain Christianity became the compulsory and exclusive religion of all Europeans, and the long-term consequences of that process.

Even though I don’t believe in Christian dogmas, I have absolutely no wish to disturb anyone in their ancestral faith. What matters to me it is to understand the civilization I belong to, how it came to the point of total moral corruption, and what can be done about it.

All posts of this series, from this one, will be paywalled around the middle. Become a paid subscriber and earn both my gratitude and full access to this series. But I must be honest: hopefully, most of this material will end up on the Unz Review sooner or later. So as an additional encouragement, everyone who has become a yearly paid subscriber by the end of July will receive by email a pdf copy of my book The Pope’s Curse, which is the foundation I will build upon in this new series of articles (previous yearly paid subscribers will receive it too, if they haven’t yet).

Christianization as depaganization

The view that Christianization was a peaceful process (because Christianity is a peaceful religion) is, of course, the view of ecclesiastical historians, starting from Constantine’s advisor Eusebius of Caesarea, who admitted that he mentioned in his Ecclesiastical History “only those events which may be useful first to ourselves and afterwards to posterity” (you will not learn from him that his hero Constantine murdered his father-in-law, his wife and his son).[2] Because historians hardly have any other primary written sources, they have tended to repeat what really amounts to Christian apologetics—or propaganda. In fact, until the nineteenth century, secular historians preferred to leave the topic of Christianization to specialists of “Church history”, who were, with few exceptions, theologians formed in seminaries. A more objective history of the Christianization began in the late nineteenth century (the French Ernest Renan comes to mind),[3] but, like in many other fields, only since the second half of the twentieth century have historians given us a reliable picture, thanks to a more critical use of written sources, a better grasp of the political, economic and even military factors, and the new contributions of archaeology and epigraphy.

Even a rather conservative and Christian-friendly historian such as Richard Fletcher, who in The Conversion of Europe purports “to explain this process of the acceptance of Christianity” (my emphasis), has to start by underlining the heavy-handed favoritism of Christianity by Constantine:

Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire, though this is often said of him. What he did was to make the Christian church the most-favoured recipient of the near-limitless resources of imperial favour. An enormous new church of St Peter was built in Rome, modelled on the basilican form used for imperial throne halls such as the one which survives at Trier. The see of Rome received extensive landed endowments and one of the imperial residences, the Lateran Palace, to house its bishop and his staff. Constantinople, begun in 325, was to be an emphatically and exclusively Christian city–even though it was embellished with pagan statuary pillaged from temples throughout the eastern provinces. Jerusalem was provided with a splendid church of the Holy Sepulchre. Legal privileges and immunities rained down upon the Christian church and its clergy. The emperor took an active part in ecclesiastical affairs, summoning and attending church councils, participating in theological debate, attempting to sort out quarrels and controversies.[4]

The Emperor’s support of Christianity naturally extended to the promotion of Christians at every lucrative post in the administration. As Ramsay MacMullen writes in Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100-400):

people were joining the church partly to get rich, or at least less poor. That was a motive assumed by contemporaries. It hardly needed to be explained; nor was it considered anything especially to boast about. Accordingly, explicit testimonies of the sort, “I call myself a Christian because I can't afford not to,” are quite lacking. But the thought must have been there.[5]

But the promotion of Christianity was only one side of the story. Discrimination against other religions was the other side. The building and adornment of lavish churches was done at the expense of pagan temples, which were deprived of public funds, expropriated, or destroyed. Diana Bowder writes in The Age of Constantine and Julian:

in 331 a treasury depleted by the works at Constantinople and by his own extravagant generosity led Constantine to order the making of a general inventory of the goods, and probably revenues, of the pagan temples; and this was made the occasion for stripping them of their gold and silver and of such things as bronze doors and roof-tiles. Earlier emperors, pagans, had laid their hands on temple treasures in their hour of need, but this time there was an intentional element of derision, as gold plating was removed from cult images, and the core and stuffing materials exposed to public scorn. Land belonging to temples was also confiscated, and the more important sanctuaries consequently lost much of their means of support. Many of the statues—including cult statues—taken to decorate Constantinople were probably also plundered at this time. Several major temples were actually closed down…[6]

The looting of temples intensified under Constantine’s sons, Constantius and Constans, with the encouragement of bigots such as Firmicus Maternus: “Take away, yes, calmly take away, Most Holy Emperors, the adornments of the temples. Let the fire of the mint or the blaze of the smelters melt them down, and confiscate all the votive offerings to your own use and ownership” (On the Error of Profane Religions, XI).[7]

The physical ruin of paganism reached its final phase under Theodosius I (379-395). Here are MacMullen’s concluding words in Christianizing the Roman Empire:

Preceded by Constantine's pillaging of temples, by occasional recorded outbursts of destruction in the eastern and (archeologically attested) in the northern provinces, a phase of recognizably sharper physical attacks can be sensed only after 380. The mission was to be finished. Heads of households and owners of big estates were exhorted from the pulpit to get on with the job. They were to use every means of persuasion: flattery and battery alike. Laws were aimed at the facilities of non-Christian worship, to reduce their access for religious purposes. And, more than a step ahead of any law, now summoned forth from monasteries and basilicas by their leaders and watched benevolently or avenged by army units, the zealots for conversion took to the streets or crisscrossed the countryside, destroying no doubt more of the architectural and artistic treasure of their world than any passing barbarians thereafter. Through their triumphant forays, one thing they were able to make manifest and undeniable—undeniable in non-Christians’ own terms of thought: that the gods were never more than mere demons, they availed nothing in the defense even of their own homes. / Silencing, burning, and destruction were all forms of theological demonstration; and when the lesson was over, monks and bishops, generals and emperors, had driven the enemy from our field of vision. What we can no longer see, we cannot report. Here, then, my book ends.[8]

Ramsay MacMullen is one of the best historians on the Christianization of the Roman Empire, and besides Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100-400), I strongly recommend his two other major books: Paganism in the Roman Empire, and Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries.

The takeaway from all this is that converting to Christianity did not mean simply the acceptance of a new religion; it meant the rejection of all other cultic practices and beliefs, because all other gods were declared satanic demons conspiring to enslave humans and lead them to hell.

Christianity as a conspiracy theory