The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History.

At the end of the fourth century, when the newly Christianized Roman state had begun to prohibit the pagan cults, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, prefect of Rome, submitted a moving plea to the Emperor Theodosius for tolerance of the old religion. Under the old gods, according to Symmachus, Rome had achieved world leadership and the gods of the fathers remained the guarantors of Rome's prosperity. In any case, he argued, truth was a mystery that could be approached by many paths. His eloquence was to no avail. A religion from the edge of the empire was to displace the gods almost completely from the state and from Western history.

The question of how Christianity managed this takeover is one of the central mysteries of the history of religion, and perhaps Symmachus might find some consolation in the variety of scholarly approaches to this mystery. Rodney Stark's recent book brings some of the freshest and most exciting of these approaches to bear on the question. Stark, a leading American sociologist of religion, draws on sociological reasoning, as well as on the quantitative methods of the social sciences, to investigate Christianity's early years.

Nonmathematical readers may approach the book without trepidation: Stark uses numbers judiciously, and the methodology is readily comprehensible. He views the problem of the rise of Christianity as a set of interlinked puzzles to be solved by logic and calculation. The first of these puzzles is that of the religion's spread. Stark questions the idea that Christianity became a dominant religion through sudden mass conversions and demonstrates how, as converts accumulated, a steady rate of growth could lead to a sudden rapid increase in the percentage of Christians.

Another puzzle involves the class identity of the early Christians. Was pre-Constantinian Christianity a proletarian faith or a religion of the relatively well-heeled? This is a question that dates back to Gibbon. Stark uses the results of his research on modern cults to argue that cult adherents come primarily from privileged backgrounds. Cultural innovators, he maintains, tend to be fairly sophisticated individuals, with little attachment to conventional faiths. His arguments on this point are intriguing, and do help us to see the development of Christianity in the light of comparative religion. At the same time, though, one might wonder whether conversion to Christianity was really comparable to contemporary conversion to Krishna consciousness or scientology. Given the rigid class boundaries of the late empire, it seems possible that the spread of Greco-Roman Christianity may have had more in common with the spread through India of Buddhism or Islam, both of which offered ideological escape from entrapment in the lowest castes.

Stark's most ingenious argument concerns why people kept converting to Christianity. Roman rule brought people together from all corners of the Mediterranean. This promoted the communication of ideas and of diseases, and the empire suffered periodic epidemics. Two of these, in the latter part of the second century and the middle part of the third, were especially severe and each seriously depopulated the empire. Stark argues that norms of charity lowered the death rate in Christian social networks, since simple care for the sick can significantly increase the probability of survival. This also meant that pagans with social attachments to Christians were more likely than pagans without Christian contacts to receive care and survive. With each epidemic, then, the Christian proportion of the population became larger, more pagans were connected to Christian communities, and Christians developed an aura of immunity. The actual physiological immunity enjoyed by surviving believers enabled them to move freely among the diseased, seemingly with miraculous protection.

Peter Kropotkin maintained that altruism is a source of evolutionary advantage. Rodney Stark's discussion of epidemics, Christian charity, and conversion provides a fascinating illustration of this thesis. Christian altruism, following Stark, does not make Christianity a religion of the weak, as Nietzsche claimed. Instead, altruistic beliefs provide a basis for a durable social order based on cooperation.

Stark employs the concept of the "religious economy," one of the major theoretical models in the contemporary sociology of religion, to make sense of the high level of commitment of early Christians and to suggest why this monotheistic religion managed to supplant polytheism. From the perspective of the religious economy, religions are firms, producing spiritual goods and supplying these to customers. Some firms, such as faith-healers or cults of the pagan gods, produce goods privately and sell them to consumers. Other firms produce goods collectively through the contributions of all members. For those involved with these firms, demands for self-sacrifice not only help to solve the "free-rider" problem, but they also magnify the rewards available to all and enhance the prestige of the ultimate sacrificers, the martyrs. Religious involvement, then, is not irrational at all, but a product of reasoned pursuit of goals.

This rationalist approach to the history of religion, while intellectually appealing, suggests a difficulty inherent in a strictly sociological analysis of Christianity. One of the essential characteristics of Christianity is its transcendent quality: beliefs about the nature of divinity are not produced by social relationships; rather, social relationships within faith are assumed to be products of individual relationships with divinity. Although Stark does, briefly, defend himself against charges of reductionism by pointing out the importance of doctrine and belief in his account, he does not seem to recognize the philosophical limitations of considering belief simply as a social factor, and not as an expression of a believer's experience of a mystery beyond human society.

From a purely sociological point of view, moreover, Stark's concentration on religious norms may have led him to give insufficient attention to the institutional reasons for Christianity's victory. The Christians and the Mithraists were probably the best organized of the late antique faiths, but Mithraism was too deeply rooted in the military and the imperial bureaucracy to win a spiritual monopoly. To use the language of the religious economy, the competitiveness of an enterprise depends on the structure of its management and the organization of its departments, as well as on its products.

While readers may feel that parts of Stark's book are highly speculative or that it underemphasizes some of the critical issues, it provides a welcome new perspective and compelling arguments on events at the heart of Western history.

Carl L. Bankston III teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.