When sociologist Rodney Stark proclaims the “triumph” of Christianity, he is not expressing a religious opinion. He is presenting a social science fact: from its humble beginning among a handful of adherents the little Jesus movement now represents more than forty percent of the world’s population with the others far behind in popular support.

Stark is an unusual sociologist, starting in the mainstream but pulled by the facts to question it. The profession was invented in the 19^th Century by August Comte to replace outdated religion with a “positive” scientific basis for morality. Sociologists ever since have considered religion verboten as a serious matter of intellectual concern but simply considered it a system of myths and superstitions to comfort the primitive and uneducated. Its universally accepted premise was as the world progressed toward enlightenment religion would decline and simply die.

It did not quite work out that way. Two millennia later atheists and agnostics still represent a miniscule proportion of the earth’s population (Gallup’s World Poll says five percent) and religion remains the belief system utilized by the earth’s population to make sense about their lives. Positivism went nowhere. While some studies have found religion declining Stark explains how they just ignore the data. In the United States, non-believers represent less than ten percent of the population after all these years of sociologist education. Stark argues it is plain unscientific to ignore the obvious and sociology must overcome its founding prejudice—as he did—and face the facts.

Stark’s major contribution is the rather obvious one that religion is not its myths and ritual but what it professes. It is its ideas that have consequences. Before Christianity gods were “many and undependable” uninterested in humanity, manipulated by the state and often abusive, Zeus raping women and other gods even demanding human sacrifice. Only Zoroasterism and Judaism offered alternatives but just for a relative few. All faced an unstable world – only 19 of 76 even among the Roman emperors died natural deaths. Then Christianity offered an appealing message that God died for you, not you sacrificed to him, the female half of the population could be as saintly as men, or more so as with Mary, and offered meaningful stories that “echoed in ancient hearts.” Its founder gave the ultimate sacrifice and tasked every member to bring his message to the world.

Still, how could a group of merely 120 in Acts grow so large? Its Jewish roots that had spread worldwide, although in limited numbers, were essential to its growth. After persecutions in Jerusalem and then its destruction, the natural course for the Jews of the Jesus movement was to preach to the Diaspora mostly settled in the ports and cities of the Roman Empire. Many of the dispersed Jews had become Hellenized and open to the less ritualized practices that Christianity offered. The data show that this was in fact where Christianity spread. In contrast to pagans who attended many temples, Christianity’s localized communal organization helped it to take root once the churches were established and to further develop its outreach to families and neighbors with promises of social as well as moral fulfillment.

Christianity not only offered an attractive afterlife compared to a frightful or nonexistent one but its activities on this earth provided practical help here too. The pagan philosophers had taught that mercy was a fault (as the modern Nietzsche also did). When a person contacted a communicable disease or great plagues occurred as in 165 and 250 A.D. pagans simply threw him out (in the cities further spreading the diseases). Neutral historical sources show that Christians cared for their community and modern science demonstrates that even providing food and water in such circumstances can save up to two-thirds of those afflicted. Christianity also limited infanticide, abortion and pre-puberty marriage increasing fertility and further aiding its population growth,

By the time of Constantine Christians were perhaps a majority in the major Empire cities and a tenth of the total population. Whatever Constantine’s inner motives Stark argues the large Christian base in critical locales presented a crucial element in advancing his ambitions as emperor and was more important for his success than for Christianity’s. For the Christians he was a mixed blessing. With a few later exceptions, the persecutions stopped and his favoritism and financial support built the church infrastructure. But it also meant state control of church activities including appointing bishops which tended to secularize it. By the fall of Rome, Christianity had become a majority of the Empire and freed from control but now it was threatened by those outside its walls, who ultimately were also converted. By the 7^th Century, Islam rose and for the next 450 years pressured Christianity in the land its birth before finally provoking the Crusades to hold them back for 200 years before Islam finally drove Christianity from the region of its founding.

With state restrictions and Moslem assault it took a thousand years for the Christian Church to cast off the smothering embrace of the Charlemagnes in its remaining European home, to separate church from state power and allow the “church of piety” to free itself from the “church of power.” This freedom allowed the end of slavery, growth in trade, a scientific agriculture, a first industrial revolution, the development of universities and the rise of science over a half millennium only to clash with newly centralized monarchies claiming a divine right over the church and doctrinal and moral challenges from reformers that split Europe into northern Protestant and southern Catholic areas often at war with each other. When Islam closed the eastern trade routes the Christian powers turned west and discovered a New World where the religion again took root and prospered first through colonies and then later in independent states.

The most important effect of moving out to the rest of the world was to break the monopolies that the different Christian denominations held in Europe, which Stark argues made them lethargic, as with any monopoly, with no incentive to satisfy members or secure converts. While one of the aims of the Protestant reform was to give freedom of conscience, Martin Luther himself expressed frustration at being unable to activate the masses after achieving established status. While the Reformation created pluralism, it did not within each country as Catholicism and dissident Protestantism were outlawed in the north as was all Protestantism in the south. Even in the new world, monopolies lasted until after the U.S. Declaration of Independence, when church attendance was down to 17 percent before turning the U.S. into one of the world’s most religious nations. Europe did not liberalize until the late 19^th Century and still favors established churches today.  

Stark is equally critical of Protestantism and Catholicism. Both have favored the monopoly and state support that weakened their missionary zeal even to spread themselves within national borders. As a result, Christianity is atrophying in Europe and would be in decline generally if not for the rest of the world where more competition has helped both. Stark labels it “an immense irony” that the Protestant reform effort had more lasting effect on the Catholic Church in “permanently” ridding itself of the simony, politicization, restricted use of the Bible, and clerical ignorance that provoked reformation while the Protestant sects soon adopted a more worldly outlook like the church they set out to reform. At the same time in their effort to become less worldly, Catholics turned reactionary on practical matters like industry, the academy and science.

Today, Christianity is more popular than ever but has turned its face from Europe. Its greatest critics have long resided there, from Voltaire and his myth of the “dark ages” of Christianity during which time Stark demonstrates it actually fostered the rise of science in its universities, created the first world industrial and agricultural revolutions in its monasteries, and suppressed slavery and witchcraft (which was actually supported by such enlightenment heroes as Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle), with even the Spanish Inquisition revealed by modern investigation as no worse and perhaps better than the other state controlled suppressions of the time. But Europe turned its back on its tradition, failing even the energy to reproduce itself, facing replacement by Muslims immigrating from the south.

As it declines in the regions of birth, Christianity’s has exploded everywhere else. Tomorrow’s Christianity will be less wealthy and powerful militarily turning to the south and east in Latin America and Africa where population is increasing. It is even growing in Asia although often with small minorities facing much larger unfriendly majorities. In China there is active persecution but apparently it has not been any more effective in suppressing it than it was in its earliest years. Middle East politics has been more effective in suppression, with historic communities fleeing Iraq, Syria and Egypt and already almost absent elsewhere, often as an unintended result of NATO and U.S. policy.

At the end of the day, with 41 percent of the world’s population, Christianity is the most successful religion ever, well ahead of Islam’s 27 percent and Hinduism’s 19 percent, with the rest following in single digits very much including the few secularists. From virtually 100 percent, Europe still has 28 percent of the world Christian population but it is now dwarfed by the rest of the world: South America contributing 25 percent, sub-Sahara Africa 23 percent, North America 13 percent, and Asia at 9 percent. Christianity is growing even with persecution in Asia and where freed from both state control and establishment, there has been great competition within nations spurring vitality and thus forecasting an even more fruitful future.

Donald Devine, the editor of ConservativeBattleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 under Ronald Reagan and is Senior Scholar at The Fund for American Studies.