Desert pointed out that my previous post reviewing the book "The Rise of Christianity, A Sociologist Reconsiders History" was deleted before he could respond to it. Don't know what happened but fortunately I saved a copy.
The most interesting tidbits to me...
1.) The modern day rise of Mormonism makes for a good statistical comparison to that of Christianity. The vast majority of converts are the result of what the author calls "secondary conversions", meaning that the person converts because a member of his household or someone
he knows converts. The author believes that the same was true of Christianity and the common belief in a miraculous spread of the new religion isn't supported by the evidence.
2.) The author asserts that the Jewish Diaspora played a much larger part in the spread of Christianity than it is given credit for, and that the early rift between Jews and Christians as it appears in the New Testament is overstated and occurred much later.
3.) There were two epidemics within a century in the Roman empire during the rise of Christianity, one believed to possibly have been smallpox, wiping out a quarter to a third of the population. The Christian sense of community and care for the sick not only resulted in a superior survival rate but impressed the pagan community whose gods had no help to offer.
4.) The role of women. The Roman empire suffered from an extreme shortage of women due to female infanticide and death by abortion. The fact that these practices were prohibited by Christians coupled with the fact that women tend to convert to new religions in greater numbers than men meant that women began to outnumber men in the Christian community and thus Christian women began to marry pagan men, resulting in secondary conversions to Christianity (and there is evidence of this in the New Testament writings of both Peter and Paul).
The author's final conclusion....
Christianity did not grow because of miracle working in the marketplaces (although there may have been much of that going on), or because Constantine said it should, or even because the martyrs gave it credibility. It grew because Christians constituted an intense community, able to generate the "invicible obstinacy" that so offended the younger Pliny but yielded immense religious rewards. And the primary means of its growth was through the united and motivated efforts of the growing number of Christian believers, who invited their friends, relatives, and neighbors to share the "good news".
I lived with one such person for two years, and it was a heartbreaking, exhausting experience. The deck is so cruelly stacked against them, and you want to help, but you really can't; the hurt is bigger than you. I must also note that the worst abusers were Christians. Some physically abusive, others emotionally so. Another common story at that school was that of the gay child disowned by their parents after being forced to undergo traumatic Christian "gay conversion" therapy or similar things. By contrast, I have never known any atheist or Unitarian parents to inflict the same kind of abuse on their children. To be sure, I've known plenty of bad parents of those flavors, but their problems were always more towards neglect or failing to provide a financially or emotionally stable household--never the outright physical and emotional abuse that some Christian parents seem capable of inflicting on their children.
