Stark’s “The triumph of Christianity”: review and notes

Rodney Stark, The triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus movement became the world’s largest religion (HarperOne 2011)

This post is a review of Stark’s book. My notes on each chapter are here. The extent of the notes on a given chapter is not proportional to the chapter’s length, but reflects the degree to which the chapter’s content caught my interest.

Stark’s title sounds decidedly triumphalist, but the book isn’t. One could infer from his title that the author is an evangelical Christian. Not so, apparently. The Wikipedia cites Stark and Bainbridge’s 1987 A Theory of Religion, where the authors describe themselves as “personally incapable of religious faith”. In a 2007 interview after he accepted appointment at Baylor University (a Baptist institution), Stark (born 1934) said that he is an “independent Christian” and he has “always been a ‘cultural’ Christian … strongly committed to Western Civilization.” This meshes with his perspective on the history of Christianity: sympathetic, yet dispassionate enough to challenge a number of preconceptions about the church’s history, sometimes showing it in a worse (but sometimes in a better) light than traditional perspectives.

The book is not a full history of Christianity, but an attempt to understand why an originally Jewish sect has become the world’s largest religion. It is a sociologist’s view of Christian history, less miraculous and more ordinary than the title implies. Stark is a sociologist, and several sociological themes surface at various points in the book.

One is that a religion gains adherents not through dramatic events but through the evangelisation of relatives, friends and neighbours. Stark believes this is sufficient to account for the early spread of Christianity (Ch 9). A second theme is that a monopoly religion in any society eventually becomes lazy and lax, leading to opposition from religiously more intense sects, as happened to the Roman state religion, to Judaism under Hellenised high priests in the Second Temple period, and to Christianity after Constantine (Ch 17).

Another theme is that, contrary to common belief, much of Europe has never been truly christianised, giving the lie to the claim that Christianity is on the wane in Europe (Chs 11, 15 and 21).

It is customary in the historical disciplines to distinguish between primary texts and secondary texts. Secondary texts are the papers and books that historians write. Primary texts are generally texts from the time the historian is writing about or shortly after, sources on which the historian’s analysis and secondary narrative are based. A good secondary text says clearly (often in footnotes) what the historian’s primary sources are. Stark footnotes his sources meticulously, but, with the exception of his statistical presentations, these are largely secondary sources rather than primary. This is perhaps inevitable in a work that covers so much ground. Sometimes a primary source is quoted in the text, but when one goes to the footnote it gives a reference to a secondary source rather than to the primary source of the quote. This is irksome, as it makes it more difficult for the reader to check the quote in its original context, and one wonders whether Stark himself has checked it (see footnote 1 for an example). More seriously, though, Stark sometimes rejects the accepted version of a piece of Christian history in favour of a new interpretation, but using secondary sources rather than primary, and, at least in this reader’s mind, this calls his reinterpretations into question. It is not that I think he is wrong (mostly I would prefer him to be right), but rather that I am not clear how well supported the  reinterpretation is.

Stark’s most challenging rewrite of recent views on Christian history is his view (see Ch 13) below that Christians do not need to apologise for the Crusades. For me, the jury is still out as to whether his account is fair, as his use of secondary sources makes it difficult to assess his verdict without chasing up his secondary texts and then the latter’s primary sources. But this issue is also particularly subject to the reader’s own beliefs and to how s/he thinks one should evaluate deeds done in past cultural contexts. For me, the matter is not as simple as Stark implies.

A claim that surfaces at various points in the book (Chs 11, 15 and 21) is that Christianity was never fully established in Europe, especially away from the Mediterranean coast, and that is therefore false to claim that Europe is undergoing secularisation (Ch 21), as it was never really christianised. I think this misses an important aspect of secularisation. It is very probably true that the level of European christianisation was low, but it is nonetheless clear that Christian values are being replaced by ‘progressive’ beliefs which have their roots in secular humanism and atheism. To what extent progressivism is penetrating the population at large is unclear, but it is certainly gaining ground in the media and on the political stage. Stark would perhaps respond that this is happening in precisely those countries where Christianity had never been firmly established because lazy state churches have been dominant, but progressivism is nonetheless a phenomenon dating from the European Enlightenment that aims to displace Christian values. It is thus a form of secularisation.

Posts by topic
Posts by title
Skip to content