Christianity Won Because It Behaved Like a World-Devouring Startup
This article kicks off Caseworx’s Summer Series 2018, a limited article collection centered around technology, media, storytelling and learning. We run from the 4th of July to Labor Day with different authors looking at this intersection from all kinds of wacky angles.
So, despite my best intentions, this will be a parody piece. It can’t not be. It will be as if ProfJeffJarvis think-fluenced this idea into reality. It’s unavoidable, so let’s not fight it. I’m sorry.
That aside, the whole idea comes from a pure place. If you haven’t read any Bart Ehrman, do yourself the favor. Maybe the most influential scholar on early Christianity right now — he must be the most prolific — Ehrman has written and edited over 30 books on the religion from his perch at the University of North Carolina. I got hooked from his book How Jesus Became God, but recently Ehrman tackled an even more fundamental question with his new work, The Triumph of Christianity:
Why did Christianity win?
We usually forget to ask that question because the world’s most popular religion is so ubiquitous. Every day on the Blue Line to Downtown Los Angeles, I pass the Iglesia de Cristo Camino de Santidad. Forget the colonial Spanish for a second; it’s nuts that the teachings of an illiterate, apocalyptic Jew from Galilee not only reached, but took root and now dominates Mexico and Los Angeles. Even the average non-religious person will spend her entire life being impacted by Christianity in innumerable ways, from calendars to holidays to everyday phrases. But…why? It’s not that scholars haven’t covered this ground, but the way in which Ehrman approaches the question touches on even broader questions of human adoption. Why do we choose one thing over another, and do so in fairly predictable ways, regardless of culture or era? Why do things with major structural advantages (better quality, more market penetration) lose to scrappy competitors from nowhere? Professional marketers understand this psychology, but the rest of us often don’t. So I’ve taken Ehrman’s insights about the rise of Christianity and applied it to venture creation in general. Why do some things win?
When the Roman emperor Constantine I underwent his Christian conversion in 312 CE, people were not hurting for new religions…there didn’t seem to be any real “pain” to cure, in startup speak. In the Roman Empire, people overwhelmingly relied on paganism, a loose confederacy of major and minor gods who held dominion over every part of waking life. Gods of the harvest, gods of the sea, gods of the city, on and on. There were also a whole slate of minor religions as well, the Jews being chief among them, with its off-shoot Christianity bubbling up in various provinces. The Romans were pretty cool about how people worshipped — cosmopolitan, even — so long as you had some religion. The government mostly left people of other faiths alone, and let pagans put together whatever patchwork of idols they wanted. It was very laissez-faire, and while there was no concept of separation between church and state like today, morality was not hard-wired into religious belief either. People paid homage and sacrificed animals because they wanted good crops and nice weather and good health. They were hedging their bets in a cruel, unpredictable and brutal world. Religion was largely transactional.
It was into this world that Jesus’s disciples went to work. At the time of Jesus’s death around 30 CE, he had around 20 disciples. At the beginning of the 4th Century as Constantine rose to power, there were about 2–6 million (somewhere around 7%-10% of the Roman Empire). By the end of the 4th Century, half of the Empire was Christian, there would never be another pagan emperor, and paganism itself was hurtling toward irrelevance. Think about that speed in a world without radio, television, and a mostly illiterate population who rarely strayed 100 miles from where they were born. That is shocking.
Shocking, but not miraculous. There are pretty good explanations on why this happened, as Ehrman lays out meticulously. Christianity won because it acted like no other religion before it. In many ways, it acted like a market-gobbling startup, or a cultural phenomenon like rock music. Let’s look at the ways.
Smart Evangelism.
See? Using the tech-inspired concept of evangelism to describe the spread of Christianity is already self-parody. But I’ll take the criticism because early Christianity was radical and aggressive about getting converts in a way that no one was ready for. In general, Jews didn’t and don’t evangelize; if you’re not already a Jew, no one’s waiting around for your conversion. The same was true back then. They kept to themselves (this was one of the reasons why Romans didn’t worry that much about Judaism, and thought the same about Christianity at first). And paganism, the real show in town…was just something you kind of did. Everyone was pagan, everyone had some idols and statues hanging around. If you weren’t even that pagan, you just attended the holidays and sacrifices (like Christmas!).
Saul of Tarsus (aka Paul) changed all of that. Our best bets were that Paul was an educated, deeply faithful Jew near Palestine who began his relationship to Christianity as a violent persecutor of Jesus’s Jewish converts. Yet he would convert around 33 CE, and go on to become the most important Christian in history, even though he never actually met Jesus. How? Strategically, Paul was incredibly clever about spreading the “good news.” It’s estimated that he may have traveled up to 10,000 miles around the Roman Empire as an itinerant preacher. He focused on urban centers like Thessalonica, Colossae and, of course, Rome (whereas Jesus himself stuck to small hamlets and villages). He “planted” churches: Paul would stay in a place just long enough to get a small church going, and then would move on to the next city to start another (even as he would maintain relationships with his churches through extensive letter writing and guidance). Instead of being a soapbox preacher in the town square, Paul would start a business in his new town — most likely leather goods — and preach to people as they came to buy or trade with him. Most importantly, Paul likely used the Jewish synagogues in a new town as a base of operations to reach gentiles (non-Jews). Until Paul, Christianity was a Jewish sect; he saw it as his divine mission to expose pagans to the word of Christ. This was the lynch pin to unlocking worldwide Christianity.
Paul was zealous and incredibly hard-working with no small degree of self-belief. But those traits alone don’t explain his historic success. His innate understanding of crafting the right message to the right people in the right circumstances shed was his true innovation and success. Paul had a killer value proposition.
Either/Or.
Simply put, paganism is additive polytheism. You can add and detract anything you want. Start worshipping a new god. Phase out an old one. Do whatever, kid. Christianity, like its Jewish forebear, is not like that. At all. It’s exclusionary, monotheistic. One God (or three). Give up everything else.
This feature, counter intuitively, is a really important aspect of compelling adoption. Most people want to play nice with others by nature, and not force a customer into a choice (which they might lose). But some of the most dominating brands (Microsoft, Blu-Ray, Apple, VHS to name a few) achieved dominance by not playing nice. Furthermore, forcing this choice on the user naturally clears out the soft targets who don’t want to choose, or it imbues those who say “yes” with a more powerful relationship to your product or service. Early Christians like Paul were fanatical; they were overwhelmingly lower-class, under-educated laborers who suffered abuse, torture and all manner of side-eye. It made their conviction stronger. They bore badges, not scars, for their faith. This simply would not have been possible if one could have been Christian on the weekends.
“Either/Or” is high stakes, confrontational and risky. It lowers your pool of potential adopters. But it also results in a more passionate user base, if successful. And once the users are there, it imposes very high switching costs to leave.
Big Rewards. Big Consequences. Big Stakes.
If a person made a pagan god mad, bad things could happen. Earthquakes, cold weather, illness…best to do some kneeling at an altar to keep the good luck nearby. Christianity, on the other hand, promises miraculous healing and good fortune for believing in God, while warning of never-ending hellfire and torment for those who did not. Christianity is always turned up to 11. Why would people want to get into such drama if they just had to offer up some goats for sacrifice at the next festival?
As we touched on above, the Christian Either/Or demand runs counter to a basic human trait: we like to have a lot of options. However, that fact is complicated by the repeated observation that we’re more effective at making choices when presented with less options. Paganism is never-ending options, always fluid, with somewhat muted outcomes (e.g., the dam holds, the harvest goes well). Christianity is about huge, simple, stark choices with world-shattering outcomes: get your leprosy cured vs. spend eternity getting stabbed by demons. To put it glibly…which movie do you go to?
Recognizable, But Better (For Everyone).
Christianity could have never succeeded among pagans if it was completely alien to them. The internet experienced such rapid adoption because it was an iteration of familiar things like libraries and communal communication centers that had existed for millennia. Television was radio with pictures (duh!). Hip-hop allowed people to participate with popular music of the time, and be a bit of a star themselves. In fact, the seemingly radical tenet of Christianity — that there’s one supreme, divine God of all people, in control of it all — was not as strange to pagans as one might think. Many pagans knew about Jews and their monotheistic beliefs. But there were also pagans who subscribed to the concept of The One (the Theos Hypsistos). Buried throughout paganism is a long-held belief that there has to be a most-powerful God above them all. This is a pretty core human tendency. We like to build and believe in hierarchies of power: in religion, at work, in all-time baseball teams and in our lunch-hour superhero squads. This tendency lived in even the fluid and dynamic paganism of antiquity.
The genius of Christianity’s value proposition is that it spoke to a desire for simple, Manichean choices that offered clarity and calmness on existential questions for every person, a desire that is inseparable from the human condition. One being was in charge of it all. Follow Him, or suffer the consequences. Be part of something. Again, Jews had been on this tip for a long time, but Christianity offered Judaism-lite to the gentile. We want you. God can solve everything because He’s in charge of everything. You can eat what you want. You don’t have to mutilate your infant sons’ genitals. You can still be “chosen.” To the average pagan-on-the-street, it was all of Judaism’s strengths without the weird stuff. It erased some of the structural weaknesses of paganism, while shining a light on the universal wants that just about everyone has. Christianity was the next logical step, not a giant leap, for mankind.
Hey, There Was a Problem After All!
It all leads to this: under the hood, paganism did have some major problems, and was ripe for “disruption.” It did not have to be Christianity to do it, but the new religion happened to have the right answers for paganism’s faults. So what was paganism’s problem?
As Ehrman and others point out, paganism was old and tired. It was incredibly complex and fractured. Moreover, it’s not even accurate to ascribe an “ism” to pagan beliefs. It was more a ragged framework of practices and rituals, not a codified system of beliefs upon which one could hang a moral identity (in fact, it was Christians who started using the word “pagan” in the first place to define the large majority as separate from them). People have yearned for that moral identity long before Christianity: people would find it in Yahweh, Sol, Mithra, the Purusharthas of Hinduism and beyond. But until Christianity, a religion’s faithful didn’t aggressively pursue people to join. Sure, a marauding army might enslave people and make them join a religion or culture, but Christianity asked and incentivized you to take part (which maybe speaks to why Christianity stuck around places far after colonialist guns receded). It simplified the world, instilled order and hierarchy, raised the stakes, offered community and the opportunity to be special, it made demands on the new convert, making it aspirational. This heady mix of universal impulses was new, revolutionary and utterly compelling, as evidenced by the amazing speed of conversion across the Roman Empire.
Strip away the question of divinity, and you’ll see the same template in a whole range of “revolutions,” whether they’re cultural, political, technological or economic. And today, in Christianity’s incumbency, we see it falling prey to same weaknesses of paganism in its muddled definitions, take-what-you-like philosophical offerings and transactionalism. People exchange presents in December and name their kid Paul because that’s just what you do. Maybe something comes along: simple, elegant, high-stakes, aspirational and aggressive. And we’re going to file out of churches straight to it. I’ve got some ideas…
Justin Wolske is the Founder @ Caseworx, and Co-Founder/EIR @ Grid110. What is dead may never die…
