I recently finished reading a book by a sociologist of religion, Rodney Stark, titled The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History.
In this book, Stark seeks to answer the question: “How did a tiny obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of western civilization?” using sociological methods.
Stark spends a significant time in his writing explaining the sociological theories that explain how new religions take hold and grow.
I will try to sum it up for you as succinctly as I can.
New religions always involve innovative ideas that run counter to the prevailing and dominant cultural religious ideas.
The person or people with the innovative ideas then seek others to join them in their newly forming faith community.
Because these new religious ideas violate prevailing religious norms, those espousing them will frequently attract hostility.
For this reason, most new religious movements fail to grow beyond a small group of followers and quickly die.
However, some new religious movements are able to withstand this hostility and not only grow, but flourish and spread.
These successful new religious movements arise in times and places when the dominant religion has overly accommodated the worldly culture and large numbers of people have become discontented with the prevailing religious practices and beliefs.
It goes without saying that people do not embrace a new faith if they are content with an older one.
So, these new growing religions offer better answers to the spiritual and social problems of their time and place, and they find a way to reach out to adjacent social networks to invite new people in.
In other words, the existing members reach out to their family, friends and neighbors and invite them into their community.
People convert to new religious groups because of the relationships they have with people in that group.
Most new religious groups die because they become closed groups with little connection to social groups outside of their faith community.
I would add that this is probably how long-existing religions die too.
Jesus was not the founder of a new religion.
He was the leader of a sectarian movement within Judaism.
However, on the morning of the third day after Jesus’ death, something happened that turned this Jewish sect into a new religious movement.
These first followers of Jesus had experiences during the forty days after his death that changed them and how they viewed the world and lived in the world.
This recognition took time.
They had added far too much new culture to Judaism to still be Jewish.
But the question still remains, why did they spread so successfully and rapidly over the next 400 years?
Well, sociological theory would say that they must have had better answers to the spiritual and social problems of their time and place and they must have found ways to connect to adjacent social networks, thereby inviting increasing numbers of those they knew into their faith community.
And Stark argues that this is exactly what happened.
The Roman Empire of the first four centuries of Christianity was a brutal and chaotic place for most living within it.
Poverty and homelessness were rampant in the cities.
Women had no rights and were the property of their husbands or male relatives.
Slavery was the norm.
Order was maintained through the use of force.
Pandemics were the norm (in 165 A.D. a 15-year smallpox epidemic swept through the Roman Empire that killed ¼ to 1/3 of the population with another epidemic of measles beginning in 251 A.D. that had similar results).
And paganism offered little meaningful explanation or support for these societal challenges.
Charity existed in the Roman Empire but was not motivated by religion.
The pagan gods were an unruly and riotous lot who expected from mortals ritual sacrifice if humanity did not want the favor of the gods withdrawn, but otherwise these gods left humans to their own devices.
They made no ethical demands on their human subjects.
The idea that God loved the whole world and expected humans to return that love by loving each other, their neighbors, and their enemies was a revolutionary idea.
So, when disaster, such as epidemics struck, pagans, if they were able, fled, and Christians stayed behind and cared for each other and their pagan neighbors.
And they offered this care to everyone, regardless of gender, religion, ethnicity or social status.
This did not go unnoticed.
Paganism fell victim to its relative inability to confront the societal crises that faced the Roman Empire both socially and spiritually.
Christianity grew and blossomed precisely because it was exactly what the world needed.
Today, however, Christianity is no longer the new kid on the block.
Instead, Christianity is the dominant religion of our time and place and has been so for millennia.
In most ways, western Christianity is more like the paganism of the end of the Roman Empire than it is like the Christianity of the early church.
Not in belief and ritual, but in the role it plays in the world.
We are a religion that has completely accommodated the secular culture.
What I am talking about are the many ways that Christianity has at best been silent and at worst actively supportive of war, unregulated capitalism, destruction of the environment, oppression of people of color, women, and sexual and gender minorities, and policies and laws that have increased the socioeconomic gap between the poor and the rich.
For most non-Christians, Christianity is synonymous with colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and American nationalism and imperialism.
In a world in which we are facing many existential crises—the devastating effects of climate change, the growth of authoritarianism at home and abroad, racism, sexism, heterosexism, nuclear proliferation, and pandemics just to name a few—for most, Christianity offers no good solutions to the challenges we face in our time in place.
Indeed, many who long called themselves Christians have found themselves so discontented with the similarity between their faith communities and the world at large that they have simply drifted away, no longer calling any faith community home.
Add to this the fact that our culture is dominated by the idea that God is either not necessary or does not exist, and you can see why Christianity is in rapid decline in the west.
So, is our faith and our faith community doomed to extinction?
I don’t think so.
If we continue our path of accommodation of and complicity with the secular powers of the world, I think this is the path we will continue to follow.
But if we seek to learn from the wisdom of Jesus and the early church, I think we will find the Holy Spirit unleashed in our midst in the same way it was unleashed in the midst of those first followers of Jesus.
And this wisdom is simple: “love one another.
Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Love one another. And then love your neighbor as yourself.
This is what those first Christians did, and it was revolutionary.
And Jesus knew it would be revolutionary, that is why he told them to do it.
He knew that love is the greatest power of all.
When we love each other and those around us, we unleash the power of God.
God’s reign becomes real in every moment of love.
When you experience this kind of love, it is very difficult to say that God is irrelevant or does not exist.
And loving is hard.
When a pandemic comes it is easier to run away than to stay and care for the sick when we know it could make us sick too.
When our neighbor is arrested by ICE it is easier to stay quiet rather than garner the attention of the authorities.
When another member of the parish or a friend, or family member says something racist, sexist, or homo- or trans- phobic it is easier to stay quiet than risk conflict.
In short, it is easier to stay safe and focus on our own desires and needs than it is to risk and care for the needs of another.
And true life, real life, the love of God can only be found in the risk of loving.
Once received, love dies if not given away.
It cannot be stored for a rainy day.
Love is only love when it is passed on.
Jesus was obsessed with love.
Are we?
I wonder what our community would look like if we made love our primary focus and goal.
What if we sought not to be the church with the most beautiful building, or the best music, or the best liturgy, but instead the church with the most Jesus-inspired love?
To love as Jesus loved is an extremely hard bar to reach, but not an impossible one.
Those first followers of Jesus were a motely group of human beings just like us.
They had families and jobs and reputations just like we have.
They were just as scared to risk practicing the love of Jesus as we are and yet they did it.
And while we can trace all the ways Christianity went wrong over the years, we can also trace all the ways it transformed the world.
May we be a part of how it goes right in our own time and place through the way we show our love and invite others to join in this love.
Jesus said: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. (John 15:12-17)
