It’s Easter again, and the media are filled with reflections on the dominant religion in Western culture, Christianity. One such article I came across claimed that this dominance was the result of free thinking, not in any way related to the idea that you’re likely to be Christian if you’re born into a Christian culture, more likely to be Muslim if you’re born into a Muslim culture, and more likely to be animist if born into an Animist culture. Well, let’s take a look at that — specifically, that Christianity’s spontaneous origins in the southern reaches of the Roman Empire was a result only of free choice and the reasonable nature of the Christian dialectic.

The argument that Christianity originated in a culture that was not pervaded by Christianity is a specious one, to say the least. Belief is not simply to be associated with milieu; it can also be an expression of rebellion.
A person living in, say, Ephesus, in the years following Paul’s teaching there, was living in a world dominated by Rome’s paganism. Paganism was not an exclusive religion, so people were free to associate their belief with any religious cult. Christianity, being exclusive, demanded an active rejection of Rome’s dominant culture. This made Christianity an attractive means of a people’s expression of rejection of all that was Roman. It is, therefore, not the reasonableness of Christianity but the novelty of it that drove many early Christians in their belief.