Chapter 11.                              Part E 

           But Christianity added some useful ideas of its own. Each Christian was taught to act humanely toward all other people, to behave honestly and compassionately in his dealings with them, and to commit in a deeply personal way, not a cerebral, philosophical one, to Christ's kind of faith and his compassionate way of life. Christians were programmed to live as if being kind to all was a desirable, moral way to be, even if any particular kind deed might not get its doer any rewards in this lifetime. 

            This was a huge change from the ways of the decadent, slave-owning, gladiator-loving, sensual, mid-Empire Romans. Why the Church later got to be so cynical as to conduct wars and own property, while the individual serf was not to even contemplate such things (unless the pope told him to make war on the heathens) became vague. But the grip and the social utility of Christianity's good ideas was so strong that the hypocritical authorities, for centuries, found ways to successfully steer ordinary followers' perceptions past the Church's inconsistencies.

             For ten centuries, the Church's explanations of the universe and human experience in it were adequate to attract, build, and retain a large following for the Church and the values and morés it endorsed. The values, in turn, made communities that worked. In evolutionary terms, that was all that mattered. Christian communities, over and over, enjoyed long periods of growing prosperity because they were internally stable, even though by modern standards, they were not very progressive. After the chaos that had followed the fall of the Roman Empire, stability was everything.

 

          Siemiradzki's conception of Christians made into human torches in ancient Rome 

  

            The behaviors these values produced had seemed effete to most of the citizens of the middle Roman Empire. What was this "Chrestus"? What system had he proposed that was stealing their children into its cult! The cross as its symbol yet! The cross was a symbol for losers. But that system, which gave legal status to all humans (even serfs had rights), mutual support through all tribulations (mutual aid in war, famine, and plague), and honesty in all dealings (God was watching!) proved superior to the Roman one in the final test. Dissatisfied with what had become the Roman way of life, a life filled with material comforts and pleasures,  but devoid of ideals, gradually, more and more people became converts.

            Christianity offered something else, a spiritual worldview, one that felt personal, and a way of life that made sense (to them) because it was (they believed) what God had said he wanted of us and because, over the long term, it fostered a kinder, more inclusive community. As contemptible as Christianity seemed to many of the mid-Empire Romans, who cheered themselves hoarse as Christians were tortured and murdered, it nevertheless assimilated the old Roman system under which it had arisen. Its ideas didn’t just sound nice; in the growth medium of human society, i.e. millions of people, and over a long term test period of hundreds of years, the ideas worked.