Roman Republic v Christianity

Would Christians be persecuted under a Roman Republic?

  • No, they would be tolerated almost universally.

    Votes: 1 4.0%
  • For the most part no, but occaisional state persecutions are likely.

    Votes: 19 76.0%
  • Yes, about the same as under the Roman Empire of OTL.

    Votes: 3 12.0%
  • Yes, and more than under the Roman Empire of OTL.

    Votes: 2 8.0%

  • Total voters
    25
Assume that, somehow, the Roman Empire remained a republic (it really doesn't matter how) and lasted pretty much as it did in OTL. How would its treatment of Christians be? Generally, the major reason that they were persecuted is that they didn't respect the divinity of the Emperor (they also made convenient scapegoats, and they met in the dark, which arroused suspicion). If Rome was still a Republic, there would be no divine Emperor to pay respects to. There would still be the Roman State religion though. So, what'dya guys think about it?
 
IIRC the Romans would have left them be, after all there were lots of competing religions in the Empire, The Christians wouldn't accept the- live and let live Rule. If U have the True word, U don't accept anyone else. It would take the 200 years of Religion wars 1500-1700 to finally beat some sense into them. :rolleyes:
 

Diamond

Banned
As you said, the major reason for their persecution was their failure to recognize the emperor as divine. Take that away, and there is no real reason they'd ever become a dominant religion. IMO, part of the reason they began to attract so many converts was because of the persecution - being fed to the lions and all that. People would look at them dying, still yelling that God would protect them, and some said 'they're idiot.' ...But a lot of other people said 'hmm, maybe there's something to this whole Christianity thing.'

So my answer is 'no', they would be much more accepted in a roman republic. There might be local pogroms against them when some provincial governor needed a scapegoat, but thats nothing different than any other mystery cult went through. With no major 'us-against-them' mentality, this religion becomes one among many.
 
DuQuense said:
IIRC the Romans would have left them be, after all there were lots of competing religions in the Empire, The Christians wouldn't accept the- live and let live Rule. If U have the True word, U don't accept anyone else. It would take the 200 years of Religion wars 1500-1700 to finally beat some sense into them. :rolleyes:
Actually, the vast majority of Christians seemed to be really blase about the whole thing (kinda like us good catholics now :D). Most Christians would just mind their own business, and when they had to make a sacrifice, they'd just work around it (the rich would pay a servant to do it, middleclass would just bribe someone, or you could just make the sacrifice, knowing that it didn't really matter anyway). Think of them as the silent majority of the christians. However there were a few that were really adamant about not paying tribute to false gods, and they tended to be a bit more vocal and noticable (kinda like fringe groups now).
 
Actually the persecution of the Christians under Rome has been greatly exaggerated. I think it was the 17th century jurist Grotius who pointed out that more people were killed for religious reasons in one reign in what had been a minor Roman province than Christians martyred in three centuries of the Empire. And Gibbon remarks slyly that a great deal of confusion has been caused by reading the abbreviation "M" as "a thousand" ,instead of "miles", "a soldier." The idea that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church" ,that people saw them dying for their faith and thought there must be something in it, has always struck me as a non-starter. Marcus Aurelius, for example, thought that Christians who refused to sacrifice to the Gods were not really making a free choice, that they "had been trained to die." In short, they were the suicide bombers of their age.

And I don't think the divinity of the Emperor was the real issue. What mattered (as far as the populace went) was the complete denial of all other religions, which they saw as "atheism" and responsible for various disasters. Republic or Empire, it makes no difference.
 
Prunesquallor said:
What mattered (as far as the populace went) was the complete denial of all other religions, which they saw as "atheism" and responsible for various disasters.
Well, it wasn't exactly that, as the Jews had official toleration, but Gentile Christians did not (Jewish Christians did), even though they both completely denied all other religions.
 
DominusNovus said:
Well, it wasn't exactly that, as the Jews had official toleration, but Gentile Christians did not (Jewish Christians did), even though they both completely denied all other religions.

The Romans were great respecters of tradition. Judaism was one of the oldest religions ion existence as far as they knew (that, at least, was the claim made by its adherents), so of course it had to be tolerated. It wasn't that the idea of people 'believeing nonsense' would have caused the Romans to lose much sleep. They were happy to condone almost anything. THe problem with Christianity was

- it was new. There was no precedent for dealing with it.

- it was secretive. Nobody quite understood what was going on. There was predcedent for dealing wih that, and it was judicial and violent.

- it targeted Romans. Unlike Judaism, Christianity actively sought converts. THat was in itself not unusual, but combined with a prohibvition against the practice of any other cult, it was unsettling.

- it denied not only the status of other gods, it forbade their worship. It really wasn't too much of a problem to say Jupiter Optimus Maximus was 'just' a daimon, but refusing to take part in acts of divine worship cut you off from participation in all society. A rough approximation of the scope of the prohibition: imagine refusing to participate in any activity that involved money. Divine worship was part of Roman civilisation. The theatre, the races, the baths, the courts, elections, public festivals, civic affairs, military service, trade - there was nothing you could do if you did not make a token of worship. Imagine the disquiet a religion like that would cause today.

In retrospect it is amazing how calmly most Romans accepted thiese goings-on. Most places and times, Christians and pagans coexisted more or less peacefully. Until Theodosius, that is.
 
The point is that the Jews may have denied all other Gods (and did at times suffer for this) but it was an ancestral religion and did have a central object of worship. They had a fixed place and only wanted to be left alone. By contrast the Christians were expansionist and definitely breaking with tradition. There was also a great deal of confusion about what they actualy believed. I might also remark that both the rise of Christianity and fears among some that Gods were inflicting punishment for this were different sides of the same coin- a retreat from reason.
 
Persecution of the Christians had nothing to do with the Emperor's "Divinity", and in any case is grossly exaggerated.

The problem with the Christians was their rejection of the entire Roman polity and their tendency to skulk around and not integrate.

The Jews were persecuted from time to time as well, BTW.

And a lot of the persecution occured under Julian, who tried to stop Christianity, but alas, failed.
 
I seem to recall that Nero was the one who officially began Christian persecution. With no emperor, that'd certainly not happen, although I suppose it's entirely possible that some upstart consul could do it.

And on the subjetc, with no emperor to officially declare Rome a Christian nation (a la Constantine) would Roman paganism still survive into the (relatively) modern world, at least as a minor religion?
 
Kuralyov said:
I seem to recall that Nero was the one who officially began Christian persecution. With no emperor, that'd certainly not happen, although I suppose it's entirely possible that some upstart consul could do it.

And on the subjetc, with no emperor to officially declare Rome a Christian nation (a la Constantine) would Roman paganism still survive into the (relatively) modern world, at least as a minor religion?

I doubt that paganism would survive in a monotheist world because most monotheist religions historically share the assumption that their truth is the only truth, and that forcing it on others is acceptable. It would not need an emperor to declare Rome a Christian state. Rome is a good test case for 'majority tyranny' in that fairly nasty 'morality' laws were passed both under the Republic and the Empire. A Christian-dominated Rome would very likely extend similar legislation to the religious sphere. Perversely, an emperor might be paganism's best chance in the long run. Up to Theodosius, the Christian emperors were interested merely in marginalising the pagans and even long afterwards, a number of officials were not exactly being efficient persecutors. The biggest problem for the first century or so was impunity, and that would likely get worse rather than better in a Republican system.

Maybe there'd be a kind of 'underground paganism' - without the mechanisms of an imperial church, persecution is left to local authorities and different in force and stamina. There could well be syncretistic cults that use Christian names and forms to worship older deities much closer to the surface - rather like Voudoun or Obeah.

As to Nero, the sources are very thin on the ground. It is entirely possible that he officially persecuted Christians, and many scholars assume that anti-Christian legislation can be dated back to him. Unfortunately, no documentary evidence at all survives. It is equally possible that Nero merely paraded a snmall group of Christians in front of the public, claiming these specific people guilty of the fire of Rome. Some have even questioned whether the victims of Nero's scapegoat hunt were Christians at all, assuming that later historians got it wrong. Personally, I don't think so, but the whole thing hangs by three or four lines in a handful of manuscript copies.
 
Christianity vs. Romanity

DominusNovus said:
Assume that, somehow, the Roman Empire remained a republic (it really doesn't matter how) and lasted pretty much as it did in OTL. How would its treatment of Christians be? Generally, the major reason that they were persecuted is that they didn't respect the divinity of the Emperor (they also made convenient scapegoats, and they met in the dark, which arroused suspicion). If Rome was still a Republic, there would be no divine Emperor to pay respects to. There would still be the Roman State religion though. So, what'dya guys think about it?

It has nothing really to do with Christian beliefs that they were persecuted. The Roman government, republic or imperial, TOLERATED other religions not because of any respect for civil rights, but simply because it didn't view other religions as a threat. When there were cults whose practices undermined the Roman social order or state control, they were crushed. This happened in the Republic against the Bacchanals as well as Christianity under the Empire. Christians were viewed with suspicion because they met in secret and had a belief system that suggested an overthrow of the current government with a "kingdom of god." During the 50 years of anarchy in the 3rd century AD, they were a convenient scapegoat for the disorder of the times. In fact, it is probably because of this period that Christianity became so popular. The earthly world seemed to be crumbling (aka Apocalypse) so it made sense to believe in another, better world.

It wouldn't change anything to change the government type, as even the Republic did these sorts of things. The question is whether Rome would descend into the same kind of tumult to bring forth a monster of its own making in Christianity.
 
carlton_bach said:
I doubt that paganism would survive in a monotheist world because most monotheist religions historically share the assumption that their truth is the only truth, and that forcing it on others is acceptable.

It's important to point out here that one of the geat modern religions - Hinduism- is polytheistic.
 
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