Rodney Stark is distinguished professor of social sciences at Baylor University. He has written a number of books (32 to be exact). In preparing for a class on church history for the Bluegrass Bible Institute in Grant County, KY, I read Stark’s book The Rise of Christianity (1996). What is unique about this history of the rise of Christianity is that Stark is not a historian. He is a sociologist. This book describes how the church grew, from a sociological perspective.
Dr. Stark has studied why people change religions in modern times and looked at evidence in the first five centuries for the same reasons. He recognizes the limits on such research but he argues – and I tend to agree with him – that human beings have not changed. What motivates someone to change religions today are probably the same motivations that led pagans in Rome in the fourth century to accept Christianity.
I’ll just provide one reason Dr. Stark gives – the church’s position on marriage in general and women and children, specifically. In ancient Rome, the ratio of men to women is estimated to have been 131 to 100. Female babies were often aborted or exposed to weather or wild animals. Abortion and exposure were legal and widely accepted. Very, very few families had more than one daughter. You can easily imagine that women often died during an abortion procedure.
But Christianity was against both abortion and exposure. All forms of infanticide and abortion were condemned by the church. This position would be quite appealing to the tender, gentle nature of women. Additionally, women tend to be more religious than men and evidence suggests that women outnumbered men in early Christianity (as they very well might today). If a pagan woman became a Christian because of Christ’s moral teaching, this would have been a primary conversion. Her husband – if he was not an adamant pagan – might follow her in to the Christian faith, considered a secondary conversion.
Also, Christianity upheld the status of women and recognized their value to the cause of Christ, even if the New Testament does not allow them in leadership roles. Women found that respect appealing. Relative to families, Christianity condemned divorce, incest, adultery (even for men!), and polygamy. In all these ways, the cause of Christ elevated the role, value, and position of the female while paganism kept her under foot. Widows were cared for by the church (cf. 1 Timothy 5).
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In contrast, Christians pursued a lifestyle that reflected Christ’s teachings. That begins with a high respect for the marriage relationship. Promiscuity is condemned among both men and women. Husbands and wives have an obligation to one another. Abortion and infanticide, therefore, are also wrong. Thus, the Christian fertility rate was higher than the pagan rate.
Christianity grew both through conversions and through the natural fertility rate. The long and short of it is – what allowed Christianity to prosper in the Roman Empire and eventually bring about the destruction of that pagan realm can have the same effect on our own 21st century society.
Let’s not turn our backs on New Testament teaching. “Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: ‘It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.’ But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control” (1 Corinthians 7:1-5).
–Paul Holland
