Christianity: From a Persecuted Cult to the State Religion

Michael Kulikowski has written a brief article for aeon.com on how Christianity transformed from a cult to a state religion in one century. At the start of the 4th century, Christians were hiding in dark corners to save themselves from the Roman officials but, at the end of it, they were advising the King and planning to use the state's power against the non-believers. The Third Century Crisis heralded the advent of a great age.

Michael Kulikowski is a professor of history and classics at Pennsylvania State University and the author of Late Roman Spain and Its Cities (2004) and Rome’s Gothic Wars from the Third Century to Alaric (2007). His most recent book is The Triumph of Empire: The Roman World From Hadrian to Constantine (2016) a small part of which is summarized in the aeon.com article, "Christians were strangers: How an obscure oriental cult in a corner of Roman Palestine grew to become the dominant religion of the Western world."

Some excerpts from the article are reproduced below:

The Roman empire became Christian during the fourth century CE. At the century’s start, Christians were – at most – a substantial minority of the population. By its end, Christians (or nominal Christians) indisputably constituted a majority in the empire. Tellingly, at the beginning of the century, the imperial government launched the only sustained and concerted effort to suppress Christianity in ancient history – and yet by the century’s end, the emperors themselves were Christians, Christianity enjoyed exclusive support from the state and was, in principle, the only religion the state permitted... 

That a world religion should have emerged from an oriental cult in a tiny and peculiar corner of Roman Palestine is nothing short of extraordinary. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew, though an eccentric one, and here the concern is not what the historical Jesus did or did not believe. We know that he was executed for disturbing the Roman peace during the reign of the emperor Tiberius, and that some of his followers then decided that Jesus was not merely another regular prophet, common in the region. Rather, he was the son of the one true god, and he had died to bring salvation to those who would follow him. 

Paul was a Christian, perhaps indeed the first Christian, but he was also a Roman. That was new. Even if the occasional Jew gained Roman citizenship, Jews weren’t Romans. As a religion, Judaism was ethnic, which gave Jews some privileged exemptions unavailable to any other Roman subjects, but it also meant they were perpetually aliens. In contrast, Christianity was not ethnic. Although Christian leaders were intent on separating themselves physically and ideologically from the Jewish communities out of which they’d grown, they also accepted newcomers to their congregations without regard for ethnic origin or social class. In the socially stratified world of antiquity, the egalitarianism of Christianity was unusual and, to many, appealing... 

By the third century, Christian communities had grown. One would have been hard-pressed to find even a modest town without a Christian household or three. From a fringe movement, Christianity had become a central fact of urban life. Yet the religion’s normalisation made it suddenly vulnerable in the middle of the third century, when – thanks to dynastic instability, epidemic disease and military incompetence ­– imperial government went into a potentially terminal decline. 

The years between 260 and 300 offered little reprieve to those who wanted to become emperor and govern, but they did amount to the first golden age for Roman Christians. Although it is likely that we’ll never have sufficient evidence to tell just how many Christians there were at any one time, or just how fast the religion spread, we can say for certain that Christian numbers grew dramatically. By the 290s, there were Christians in the senate, at court, and even in the families of emperors. 

Towards the end of the third century, an emperor named Diocletian (r. 284-305) had finally proved able to stabilise imperial government after 50 years of regime change and violence. In 293, he established a college of four emperors, all senior generals unrelated to one another except by marriage. The idea was to ensure that one emperor would always be on hand to deal with any outbreak of violence and to prevent rebellion or civil war. Diocletian intended for himself and his senior colleague to retire, after which their junior partners would bring two new emperors into the imperial college to replace them. The goal was to ensure a handover of power at a convenient and peaceful moment so that the framework of government would remain undisturbed. But Diocletian’s intentions were thwarted by rivalries, in which Christianity played an important role. 

That is where things foundered: only two of Diocletian’s emperors had adult sons, and everyone expected them to join the college of four emperors when the two senior emperors retired. But the childless emperor Galerius was a ferocious anti-Christian, while his colleague Constantius – who had a son – was known to be sympathetic to Christians. In fact, Constantius even had Christians among his family and household, and that fact gave Galerius an opening to revise the succession plans in his own favour. By targeting Christians for renewed persecution, Galerius would damage Constantius and exclude his son from the succession. He could enhance his own power, and also gratify his hatred of Christianity. 

Galerius convinced Diocletian that Christians were to blame for a series of calamities, including a mysterious fire in the palace and the silencing of famous oracles. Thus, in the year 303, the emperors began what we call the Great Persecution. The campaign against the Christians was bitterly violent in Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, more benign in the lands that Constantius controlled in the West. But it produced many heroic martyrdoms and appalling suffering among Christian communities, and left scars that would linger for centuries. The Great Persecution ultimately failed to expunge Christianity from the face of the earth. Christians were simply too numerous, and many were too stubborn to be turned away from their beliefs. Even Galerius, the most committed of persecutors, came to accept the failure of his plans, and in 311 issued an edict of toleration. By 313, persecution had ceased. 

In the meantime, in 306, Constantius’s son Constantine had succeeded his father in the imperial college. Within five years, Constantine had made himself master of the western Roman empire and openly embraced Christianity. Always sympathetic to Christians, he claimed to have had a divine vision that helped lead his troops, flying Christian symbols on their standards, to victory in civil war in 312. The most reductionist reading of the evidence would say that, in 310, Constantine saw a solar halo, a rare but well-documented celestial phenomenon, in the south of France and in the company of his army, but Constantine’s account of events changed over the years and we can’t be sure. We can say with greater certainty that for several years he wavered between Christian and non-Christian interpretations of the sign. He eventually decided, to the delight of the Christian leaders in his entourage, that he had been sent a sign by the Christian God. He became a Christian, as a matter of belief and perhaps policy too. 

A fictional depiction of Constantius appointing his son, Constantine, as his successor
by Peter Paul Rubens, 1622

We will never know for sure what Constantine’s true motives were in converting to Christianity. What is certain, however, is that from the moment he had sole power in the West, he ruled as a Christian. He restored Christian property seized during the Great Persecution and enacted legislation that favoured Christians. When he became sole ruler of the empire in 324, he extended similarly pro-Christian policies to the eastern empire, where he not only favoured Christians, but actively discriminated against non-Christians, restricting their ability to worship or fund their temples. 

Even more momentously, though, Constantine intervened personally in conflicts among Christians over questions of discipline and right belief. In North Africa, Egypt and other parts of the Greek East, problems arose over such things as how to treat Christians who had cooperated with the authorities during persecution (the traditores, ‘handers-over’ of Christian holy books), or the correct relationship between God the Father and God the Son. Such disputes mattered, not least because Christians who believed the wrong thing would forfeit eternal life – or worse, ensure their own eternal damnation. Right belief, by contrast, opened the path to eternal salvation. 

By placing the authority of the Roman state and the imperial office to police and enforce right belief, Constantine created a model that would have a long and ambiguous history. Councils of bishops, ostensibly informed by the Holy Spirit, would henceforth define what was orthodox. Those who chose to believe otherwise would find themselves branded heretics, and excluded from the communion of orthodox Christians. Bishops and theologians would find an almost limitless number of problems to debate – over the relationship of God the Father and God the Son, over the divine nature of Jesus, over what that meant for the status of his mother, and so on. Each solution opened up a whole new set of problems.

According to Michael Kulikowski, "We will never know for sure what Constantine’s true motives were in converting to Christianity. What is certain, however, is that from the moment he had sole power in the West, he ruled as a Christian." Constantine truly ruled as a Christian -- not as medieval Christian kings and emperors who thought it was their duty as Christian kings to persecute non-Christians -- as he did not persecute pagans and allowed them to practice their religion freely. According to an article in Encyclopedia Britannica, his commitment to Christianity was constantly balanced by his concern for the stability of his empire and ancient Roman (pagan) traditions:

Some of the ambiguities in Constantine’s public policies were therefore exacted by the respect due to established practice and by the difficulties of expressing, as well as of making, total changes suddenly. The suppression of paganism, by law and by the sporadic destruction of pagan shrines, is balanced by particular acts of deference. A town in Asia Minor mentioned the unanimous Christianity of its inhabitants in support of a petition to the emperor; while, on the other hand, one in Italy was allowed to hold a local festival incorporating gladiatorial games and to found a shrine of the imperial dynasty—although direct religious observance there was firmly forbidden. In an early law of Constantine, priests and public soothsayers of Rome were prohibited entry to private houses; but another law, of 320 or 321, calls for their recital of prayer “in the manner of ancient observance” if the imperial palace or any other public building were struck by lightning. Traditional country magic was tolerated by Constantine. Classical culture and education, which were intimately linked with paganism, continued to enjoy enormous prestige and influence; provincial priesthoods, which were as intimately linked with civic life, long survived the reign of Constantine. Constantinople itself was predominantly a Christian city, its dedication celebrated by Christian services; yet its foundation was also attended by a well-known pagan seer, Sopatros.

Saint Constantine's feast day is observed on March 21, both by Orthodox and Catholic Christians, and he is a revered figure in many Protestant churches.