Establishment Was Not Important to the Spread of Christianity

Submitted by David Ryan (United States), Feb 1, 2022 at 07:37

The establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire did nothing to spread the religion. Christianity was already throughout Rome and spreading to its immediate neighbors, as well as in spots as far as India and Ethiopia at the time of the Edict of Milan (313). All of the barbarian states that came to conquer Roman territory were Christian, albeit often heretical sects such as Arians, when they arrived or became so shortly after.

I believe in fact that the establishment of Catholicism in the West and Orthodoxy in the East did much to pave the way for rapid Islamic conquest (and the Vandals before them) due to the desire of people on the fringes who often held beliefs considered mutually anathema or heretical to one or the other or both, such as Arianism, Monothelitism, Nestorianism, Donatism etc., to be rid of persecutors sent by the central governments and be ruled instead by people who were neutral to their sectarian disputes. 200-some Christian martyrs under Islam is not much compared to the local genocides carried out by preceding "Christian" armies on their own people for heresy/lack of often mutually exclusive obsequiousness to the Pope, Patriarch and/or Emperor.

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