The End of Christianity (9 page)

The Roman Empire was tailor-made to breed exactly such resentment and deprivation. There were enough people disenfranchised, abused, exploited, callously ignored, or all too often denied justice and the means to live, to feed the ranks of suicidal Christians.
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Such people basically had only two options: they could just “take it,” or they could decide not to take it anymore. Those who preferred the latter option are the segment of the population from which Christianity successfully recruited—until it had enough money to attract people for other reasons, and then enough power to find armed protectors, and then of course to control the entire apparatus of the state. After that point, persecution was no longer an obstacle. But until then, the resulting selection bias had significant ramifications for the attitudes and behavior of early Christians, who inevitably differed markedly from non-Christians precisely because they already differed from their peers, in attitude and behavior, before converting.
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They also would have differed in exactly the respect relating to martyrdom and sacrifice that Segal describes. Christians represented those who weren't going to take it anymore. The behavior of Christians, and the attractiveness of Christianity as a movement, can only be understood within this context.

Indeed, the logic of Christian ideology (as with all other comparable movements in history) is impeccable: if sinners go to hell or oblivion, and the faithful go to eternal heavenly bliss, then nothing else matters, for everything else is temporary and insignificant compared to the eternal future. The Christians promised that the faithful will even inherit the earth itself, gaining all the power and plenty they always longed for while watching their oppressors and exploiters suffer utter downfall and defeat. In other words, “everyone gets what they deserve.” Anyone convinced of this will suffer anything. They will endure any death, any torture, any discomfort, any indignity; all the while they will smile inside, knowing their abusers will “get it” in the end while they themselves will get twice the reward. In human history there has never been so powerful a motivator as this—a point well-taken by Islamic authorities who found a way to exploit it en masse to command entire armies and mollify oppressed and exploited populations. The very same motivation led Buddhists to set themselves on fire to protest the Vietnam War. Yet this doesn't mean there has ever been “irrefutable proof” that Islam and Buddhism are true.

Combine the Christian eschatological ideology with the scale of deprivation endured by many of the subjects of Rome, and all you'll get is a powder keg. Had Christianity not arisen of its own, it would have been necessary to invent it—or something like it—for such an apocalyptic movement was all but inevitable under the sociocultural conditions of the Roman Empire. It's human nature to long for peace, love, justice, and the control of your own life. Take all that away from millions of people, and it's just a matter of time before rebellions break out. Within a system like that of the Roman Empire, which lacked real democracy or even a sufficient scale of freedom of speech, there could only be two kinds of rebellion: the violent or the cultural. Violent revolution is always an economic contest of military resources, which Rome would always win—and Rome always did. Therefore, the only rebellion that could succeed was a cultural revolution, which meant a war of ideas—and that was a war the rebels could win, so long as they had the more popular ideas and employed the right tactics on the battlefield of the mind. Such a war still had casualties (martyrs) and hardships (persecution), but it was still a war, and like all well-motivated wars, soldiers didn't give up simply because of the prospect of dying or suffering. Indeed, as in any righteous war, dying and suffering is exactly what soldiers are willing to pay for victory.
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Clearly the sociocultural conditions of the early Christian willingness to endure persecution and martyrdom fit exactly those of every other comparable movement in history, matching every element of the above analysis perfectly. Yet it follows, since it holds in every other case known, that their motivation was not some particular historical claim or esoteric dogma. As in every other case, their motivation was rebellion against a corrupt social order in defense of a superior vision of society. Their motive was a moral system, a view of the way society should function and structure itself. That was what attracted recruits to the Christian movement, that is what they suffered and died for—not “proof” that Jesus stepped out of a tomb, or any other such claim. In none of the mass movements throughout history involving a willingness to suffer and sacrifice has the motive ever been anything like that, but always a socio-moral ideal. Christianity was surely no different. Indeed, its social program was the one truly tangible thing it had to offer. It should not surprise us that many were willing to die for it.

Once the battle lines were drawn in this culture-war of compassion against insolence, brotherhood against exploitation, justice against corruption, and equality against inequity, there would surely be plenty of volunteer soldiers fighting for the Christian side. And like all volunteers for every just war in history, they would be fully prepared to assume the burdens of battle with all its attendant miseries, sacrifices, and risks. That's simply human nature; nothing supernatural about it. The shame is that the Christian church eventually succumbed to the very same corruption, villainy, and injustice it began its faith fighting against.

HEY, SMART RECRUITMENT TACTICS
REALLY DO WORK!

Several other claims you might hear from time to time are simply false. One such claim is that having women as witnesses to important faith-claims (such as the “empty tomb”) would have impeded Christianity's growth “because no one trusted the testimony of women.” This is flat-out false—both socially and as a matter of law.
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The claim that no one would believe in a god who didn't know everything is equally false.
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But some claims are true and in fact reveal how Christianity's success was indeed a product of entirely natural sociological causes, such as the claim that ancient cultures were subject to certain kinds of groupthink. The mindset of that period was strongly oriented toward collectivist psychology—not quite to the extent of Asian cultures but certainly more so than modern Western individualism. This meant that it was difficult to just pick off recruits from within families and towns and subgroups. People more easily yielded to pressures to conform and more ardently pressured others to conform. But Christians didn't succeed against the grain of these facts but actually exploited these facts to maximize their growth.
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All evidence indicates that Christian missionaries, especially in the first two centuries, routinely targeted heads of household and then used that collectivist authority to pressure or motivate the rest of their extended family to convert (medieval missionaries used the same tactic by first converting kings, chieftains, or other heads of state, and thus inspiring or compelling the rest of their nation or tribe to follow suit). At the same time they also harvested the disaffected, those who had already been separated from their families (such as migrant workers or widows and orphans), who were already in search of a new “family” they could belong to.
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They also recruited new members by exploiting established channels of social authority to which they already belonged and whose vernacular they had mastered, like synagogues. Many of their methods resembled those of Christian missionaries in later periods of history, such as retooling Christianity to resemble what their target audience already accepted (a tactic explicitly described in 1 Corinthians 9:19–23), or asking at first very little and offering attractive benefits, and then once the recruit has become integrated and invested, asking for more and more commitment until they are then committed to the faith with the same full weight of groupthink as they had been to their former lives.
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There are a number of complex ways the Christian message was constructed to be particularly successful in its ancient cultural matrix (which I further discuss in Not
the Impossible Faith
), and we can expect this from the lessons of natural selection: other Christian sects failed while those that picked up the right tools succeeded. This is exactly as we should expect if Christianity's success was merely a natural phenomenon like that of any other religion. Thus, for this and every other reason surveyed in this chapter, Christianity's purely ordinary growth rate has purely ordinary explanations.

WHY UNREMARKABLE = FALSE

The same analysis will follow for any other indicator or claim we examine. The conclusion is always the same: Christianity's origin, growth, and success look entirely natural and not supernatural at all. If they're not supernatural, we should wonder how they can even be true—and rightly so. A sound application of Bayes’ theorem proves that Christianity's being unremarkable entails that, in fact, it is false.

I explain the basic mechanics of Bayes’ theorem in another chapter (see
chapter 12
, “Neither Life nor the Universe Appear Intelligently Designed”). Here I'll only reiterate that when the premises in Bayes’ theorem cannot be denied, then the conclusion cannot be denied because that conclusion follows necessarily as a matter of inviolable logic.

Bayes’ theorem has four premises: (1) the prior probability that a given claim (say, C
HRISTIANITY
) is true; (2) the prior probability that it's false (~C
HRISTIANITY
); (3) the consequent probability that we would have all the specific evidence we do if that claim is true (or C); and (4) the consequent probability that we would have all that same evidence even if that claim is false (or D). All these probabilities are conditional on our total background knowledge (everything we know with reasonable certainty is true about history, science, and everything else). What matters for the present analysis is that when the prior probabilities are equal, then the probability that the claim is true equals C / (C + D). This is necessarily the case and cannot be denied.
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I believe the prior probability that Christianity just happens to be the one true religion among all the worldviews embraced across the world—which means the probability
before
looking at any specific evidence for Christianity—is exceedingly small. But I won't argue that here.
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Instead, just for the sake of argument, I'll say its prior probability is flat-out even money: 50–50. The prior probability that Christianity is true (that is, again,
prior
to considering any specific evidence for it) certainly can't be any greater than that. That leaves how likely the evidence we have would be if Christianity is true, and how likely that evidence would be if Christianity is false. What I've shown in this chapter (and support even further in
Not the Impossible Faith
and
The Christian Delusion)
is that there is nothing about the rise and success of Christianity that is at all unexpected on the hypothesis that it is false. If Christianity is just one more false religion, like Islam or Buddhism or Mithraism or anything else, then the evidence would be exactly like what we have: a movement founded on little verifiable evidence but instead exploiting known natural psychological and sociological processes to leverage its success in the marketplace of ideas, growing at a normal expected rate, and then capitalizing on historical opportunities that would have benefited any other religion in the same position just as much.
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The consequent probability of the evidence on the hypothesis that Christianity is false, in other words, is essentially 100 percent (or as near to it as makes all odds).

Is that exactly the same evidence we should expect, however, if Christianity is
true?
If it were, then we'd have to agree there is no evidence whatever that Christianity is true—because then all the evidence we have is exactly the same evidence we'd have if it were false. To argue that Christianity is true, we'd have to have evidence that's unlikely unless Christianity were true. But we have none. Even the “feeling” that Christ now speaks to us or lives in our hearts is not such, because people of completely different religions have exactly the same feelings and experiences, only of their own gods and spirits and forces, so we know the odds of such feelings and experiences being had even by believers in false religions is 100 percent. Christians experiencing such feelings, too, proves nothing precisely because this is already expected even if their religion is false.
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In contrast, when we seriously consider what evidence we would likely have if Christianity really
were
true, we find the evidence that we actually have looks nothing like that.
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If Christianity is false, we should expect exactly this: (a) reported revelations of a newly risen Jesus would occur only to die-hard believers, only for a very brief time, only in one single geographic location, and only exceedingly rarely to anyone else-and even they will be closely connected to the cult and thus (we can expect) in some way inspired by it to “see Jesus” too. Only if Christianity were
true
would it be at all likely that (b) Jesus would genuinely appear, and not only to die-hard believers but just as clearly and powerfully to a great many outsiders, all over the world, in every generation ever after. Outcome (a) is exactly what we expect if Christianity is false. Yet (a) is exactly what we observe. Outcome (b) is what we should expect if Christianity is true. Yet (b) is
not
what we observe. Thus the actual evidence is
less probable
if Christianity is true than if it's false. Therefore, C < D. And when C < D, the product of C / (C + D) will be less than 50 percent. And if it's less than 50 percent, the probability that Christianity is true is less than 50 percent. In other words, it probably isn't true.
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