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Did Christians Outbreed the Competition? Scott Alexander & Rodney Stark's Rise of Christianity
In this episode, Malcolm and Simone discuss Scott Alexander's review of 'The Rise of Christianity.' They explore how Christianity spread rapidly in its early days, challenging common beliefs about widespread conversions driven by miracles. Instead, factors such as higher fertility rates among Christians, effective social networks, and the appeal of Christianity's treatment of women played crucial roles. The episode delves into the socio-cultural context of ancient Rome, comparisons with modern cult movements, and the implications for both historical understanding and contemporary religious dynamics.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! Today we are going to be discussing a very interesting piece, Scott Alexander's review of The Rise of Christianity.
And in it, he goes through how Christianity spread as fast as it did, it is astounding how quickly Christianity was able to spread in its early days. And it was not through the, tactic that most people think, which is widespread conversions based on either miracles or just the logic of what was in the text.
Instead, it appears to have mostly been downstream of Christians having more children, having more surviving children. And having an ability to convert women at a much higher rate in the early days.
But the children, childbirth appears to be the core of this. Also, their plague surviving rates appear to have been quite different. So we're going to go over each of these in turn.
Speaker: [00:01:00] In ancient Rome, where altars shone, the pagan gods once ruled alone. But quietly came a faithful breed Not through big signs, but with small seed They gathered in humble prayer No sweeping crowds or mass fanfare They built their homes with children glad More babes they bore than pagans had
Malcolm Collins: The challenge Well, Andy,
Simone Collins: even the Christianity seemed to have spread through the kindling of Judaism, which had already spread, which is also fascinating.
It's just such a cool
Malcolm Collins: overview. Yeah. The challenge with any Scott Alexander piece is he writes In a way, we're typically when we're reading a piece, we are throwing out 90 percent of it. This time we're keeping probably well over 80 percent of it with a number of factual and textual additions because there's a few minor errors [00:02:00] he makes.
And there are a few areas where I just happen to for whatever reason know additional information that helps flesh things out a lot.
Simone Collins: Oh, that's fun. Because what I love most about Scott Alexander's book reviews is you get a great summary of the book, then you get additional research and annotation from Scott Alexander, and now I'm getting layer three from Malcolm.
This is like tiramisu now, you know, first you start with the muffin and then you get a cupcake and now I'm getting, whoa, man, this is great. Let's
Malcolm Collins: go
Simone Collins: into it.
Malcolm Collins: All right, dive in.
Simone Collins: Scott Alexander writes, The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes.
By 400, they were 40 million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history. Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is a Scientologist. The United States is over 99 percent [00:03:00] Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo Scientology that thinks L.
Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet. This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be t
Published on 1 year ago