On the Role of Women in the Rise of Christianity

I just finished reading The Rise of Christianity, a book by sociologist Rodney Stark that attempts to find plausible explanations from a social science standpoint for how the tiny Jesus movement managed to emerge out of the cacophony of religious voices of the ancient Roman Empire, and within four centuries to overwhelm and ultimately bury them all. Stark is not a Christian, but claims instead to be agnostic. From reading his book I would describe him as a closet admirer of Christianity, both as a social organization and for its moral principles. I suspect his interest in Christianity was piqued in part by the hope that he might find some value for his own personal spiritual life there. I also suspect that he hasn't found it, at least not yet.

It's a good book that reminds me of an even better and more ambitious book, Guns Germs and Steel, which attempts to explain, and fairly well succeeds at plausibly explaining, all of human history from the standpoint of sociology, geography, climate and vegetation patterns. In many ways The Rise of Christianity has a more difficult task than Guns Germs and Steel however, in that it's attempting to explain a single religious movement in a very narrow (three and a half century) period of history, for which there is not nearly adequate historical data for the task.

Overall, Stark does a good job at providing insights into how and why Christianity grew at the incredible rate that it did. I didn't come away from reading it feeling that I fully understand the pagan mind, and in particular he doesn't shed much light on the phenomenon of Gnosticism. Instead, he focuses more on the state of the diasporan Jews, from which he suggests a majority or at least a significant proportion of converts came; the state of women in pagan society and Christianity's special appeal to women; Christianity's superior mechanisms for building the social networks that he considers key to conversion, especially during the two major plagues that occurred in this time period; and Christians' superior birth rates. He does spend some time discussing reasons for paganism's weakness in the face of Christianity, but I still came away from the book with the feeling that there's a gap in our understanding there.

But Stark does an excellent job of describing aspects of the spread of Christianity that often go unnoticed, and in particular I was struck by his depiction of the role of women in pagan society, and of the resulting attraction Christianity had for them. As he mildly puts it, "Amid contemporary denunciations of Christianity as patriarchal and sexist, it is easily forgotten that the early church was so especially attractive to women." Completely forgotten may have been more accurate. In reading this book I was amazed to hear in what low regard pagan society held women. It highlights how revolutionary Christianity must have seemed by comparison. And it was fascinating to hear how Christianity provided remedies to some maladies that we mistakenly think of as purely modern problems: low birth rates due to men postponing marriage (and living the life of the urban playboy) until late in life, rampant divorce, contraception and abortion, and the feelings of isolation that come from urban life. It seems to me that ancient Romans would have felt right at home among modern, Manhattan metrosexuals.

The State of Women in Pagan Society

Unknown Christian woman of the early church

Male-biased sex selection is a problem we normally associate with the abortion practices of modern India and China, but in ancient Rome it was not only common, it was legal and socially expected. Stark notes that "Dio Cassius, writing in about 200, attributed the declining population of the empire to the extreme shortage of females," and indeed by modern estimates the population of Italy, Asia Minor and North Africa as a whole may have been 58% male and 42% female.

This disparity was largely brought about by exposure of unwanted newborns to the elements, a practice that was legal for all female and malformed male children under Roman law, and encouraged by both Plato and Aristotle. According to Stark, "A study of inscriptions at Delphi made it possible to reconstruct 600 families. Of these, only 6 had more than one daughter." The Roman historian Tacitus "charged that the Jewish teaching that 'it is a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child' was but another of their 'sinister and revolting' practices." Women's status was especially low in the East. Stark describes the situation for Athenian women:

In Athens, women were in relatively short supply owing to female infanticide, practiced by all classes, and to additional deaths caused by abortion. The status of Athenian women was very low. Girls received little or no education. Typically, Athenian females were married at puberty and often before. Under Athenian law a woman was classified as a child, regardless of age, and therefore was the legal property of some man at all stages in her life. Males could divorce by simply ordering a wife out of the household. Moreover, if a woman was seduced or raped, a husband was legally compelled to divorce her. If a woman wanted a divorce, she had to have her father or some other man bring her case before a judge. Finally, Athenian women could own property, but control of the property was always vested in the male to whom she 'belonged.'

Stark caveats this depiction with a note that the situation was somewhat better for women in the city of Rome and in the West generally than in the East, but he also notes that Christianity took hold the quickest precisely in those Eastern cities where the status of women was lowest.

He mentions in the passage above that abortion was a factor in the unequal sex ratio in Rome. Again, we tend to think of abortion as a feature only of the modern world, but the ancient Romans practiced it with such frequency that, due to the primitive state of medicine in that period, researchers believe that it "was a major cause of death among women in the Greco-Roman world." In many cases, it was the husband who ordered the woman to abort the child. Under Roman law it was his right to do so; the woman had no legal option but to obey.

The subjection of women to men in Roman society could only have been exacerbated in the extreme by the practice of marrying young, often pre-pubescent, girls to much older men. While men tended to marry late, almost half (44%) of pagan women were married by age 14, and 10% by age 11, according to one study. It was normal and expected that these marriages be consummated immediately; we can only imagine the effect that must have had on these girls.

According to Stark, Rome had "a male culture that held marriage in low esteem." It also had very different standards of chastity for men and for women. He writes,

Although virginity was demanded of brides, and chastity of wives, men tended to be quite promiscuous and female prostitutes abounded in Greco-Roman cities--from the two-penny diobolariae who worked the streets to high-priced, well-bred courtesans (Pomeroy 1975). Greco-Roman cities also sustained substantial numbers of male prostitutes, as bisexuality and homosexuality were common (Sandison 1967).

As to why women were treated so poorly in the ancient world, Stark doesn't have a good explanation, though he argues somewhat circularly that men in societies in which men outnumber women will attempt to dominate them as "scarce resources."

But the fact is that it was so. It was into this world that Christianity came, with a vision of relations between the sexes that was not just attractive to women, it was revolutionary. Christianity would attract women in numbers that flipped the usual state of affairs in Roman society: among Christians women far outnumbered men. Within the Christian world they held positions of power and influence that were extraordinary in that time and place, and they were treated with a humanity that far exceeded anything they would have experienced elsewhere in Roman society.

But that will have to be a topic for another post.