The Christian Revolution of Late Antiquity

What the Christians Did to the Romans
Laurent Guyénot
Self-published, 2026

Few revolutions in the history of European civilization have been of more lasting consequence than the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD, and yet few present greater obstacles to an objective assessment. It was a genuine religious war pitting Christianity against a bewildering variety of traditional religious practices which Christians themselves were the first to group under the single designation “paganism.” The story of this war was written by the victors, for whom it represented a simple triumph of good over evil and truth over error. We know the names of anti-Christian writers who presented the views of the defeated side—Celsus, Porphyry, Hierocles—but modern historians such as Peter Brown and Ramsay MacMullen are reduced to trying to reconstruct their thinking from brief passages quoted by their enemies solely for the purpose of refutation.

Laurent Guyénot’s What the Christians Did to the Romans incorporates the work of such scholars and seeks to extend it with careful consideration of the nature and significance of Christianity’s Jewish background. For the great mystery of Christianization, in Guyénot’s view, is:

How can we explain that Rome adopted as its spiritual foundation a doctrine and a book claiming that God chose the Jews, in a period of widespread Roman Judeophobia marked by endless Jewish rebellions and Roman repression? And how is it possible that, less than two centuries after destroying the unique temple of the Jewish God and turning Jerusalem into a Greek city Jews were forbidden to enter, Rome officially adopted a religion that announced the fall of Rome and a new Jerusalem?

An Anthropological Revolution

It was never the normal view of the early Christian church that the traditional gods were imaginary and without any objective existence. Rather, Christians understood them as demons, and construed inherited religious practices as a kind of devil-worship. This amounted to a rejection of nearly the whole social existence of their non-Christian neighbors. Ancient civic life, for example, centered around temple cults which were less matters of belief than of social cohesion and the securing of the gods’ good will. There were also countless private and voluntary religious associations:

Every social community, including professional corporations, had its gods and its cults. There was not a single social event that was not in honor of a god or goddess. There was no communal meal to which the gods were not invited.

Even the family life of the ancient Europeans was conceived as a service of the lares (spirits of the ancestral line and hearth) and penates (spirits which oversaw household provisioning), with the paterfamilias acting as priest. In short, ancient religion was not a limited domain which could be replaced while leaving the rest of life intact. As Guyénot writes: “What Christians condemned as ‘paganism’ was simply ‘tradition’ for non-Christians. Tradition is the life-blood of a civilization. It gives every individual his sense of belonging. It bonds the generations.” Christianization thus represented an extremely radical revolution.

Because ancient religion was interwoven with the whole of human existence, a pre-Constantinian Christian determined to avoid all “idolatry” had no choice but to avoid most types of interaction with the society surrounding him. Christianity thus alienated its adherents from the communities and identities to which they had previously belonged. In exchange, it offered them a new identity and a substitute family. In The First Urban Christians (1983), Wayne Meeks explains that such “resocialization” was an important factor attracting some people to the early Church: “The natural kinship structure into which the person has been born and which previously defined his place and connection with the society [was] supplanted by a new set of relationships.” This made the early Christians a kind of “people who dwell alone,” on the model of the Jewish nation. The successful conquest of the Empire by such a separatist sect amounted, in Guyénot’s words, to “an anthropological revolution.”

Traditional societies assume what might be called a “genealogical” view of man wherein the greater part of personal identity comes from one’s ancestry. Consistent with this view, the early Christian thinker Tertullian developed a theory known as “traducianism” whereby both the body and the soul are produced by a genealogical process from the “seed” of the parents. St. Augustine, however, rejected Tertullian’s theory in favor of the idea that God creates a new soul out of nothing for each new body. In this view, a person’s soul owes nothing to his ancestors apart from original sin, which is of course something strictly negative. Otherwise, the genealogical is confined to the material. Augustine’s teaching won out and became the orthodoxy of the church. One sees at once the compatibility between such a view and the “resocialization” of converts upon entering the church. Guyénot is undoubtedly also correct to see in the new Christian anti-genealogical anthropology the remote source of modern liberalism and social contract theory: “Contractualism is the overripe fruit of Christianity, a ‘covenant’ religion theoretically functioning on the basis of voluntary individual membership.”

Christianity’s Jealous God: A Jewish Inheritance

Because Christianity began as a heretical offshoot of Judaism, understanding Christianization requires grasping the essential differences between the European and the Jewish traditions of religious thought. In his previous book From Yahweh to Zion (2016), Guyénot recounts how the Midianite storm god Yahweh became a national god of Israel, how his priests and prophets gradually succeeded in enforcing a religious monopoly for themselves through their conception of Yahweh as a “jealous” god who brooks no rivals, and how such monolatry (exclusive worship) gradually evolved into monotheism (denial of the existence of other gods). As Guyénot explains, although Jews do conceive of their god as the creator of the world, including of the gentile nations, his role as their national god always remains foremost in their minds. No Jew believes God values the Amalekites as much as he does his chosen people.

Christianity began as a universalizing heresy within Judaism: “In their own eyes, Jews who converted to Christianity were not converting out of Judaism, and they were emphatically not converting to another god, but simply to a new, flexible Jewish identity with a universalist claim.” Yet even after it had become a largely gentile affair, the new religion preserved a number of Jewish aspects. The most important of these was the conception of God as “jealous.” This is what led Christians to conceive of the Empire’s traditional religious practices as idolatry requiring systematic eradication.

Guyénot stresses that monotheism as such was not an innovation of Judaism:

It is a misconception that monotheism was a revolutionary idea: it was both an old and a common idea. John North writes in One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire: “throughout the classical period and far earlier in the Near East, monotheistic assumptions are quite commonly found, without apparently raising any fears of weakening polytheistic practice.” Romans could be as monotheistic as they liked as long as they did not foment hostility toward the city’s gods.

Pagan philosophers had long developed the idea that a single spiritual reality underlay the bewildering variety of popular religious cults. According to Russel Gmirkin, “Plato’s Timaeus was the first text to combine a cosmic monotheism based on philosophy with a terrestrial polytheism based on civic religion and popular myth. This dual theology received almost universal approbation.” Plato bequeathed his practical and tolerant compromise not only to his own Academy, but to the even more popular Stoic school. We also find the philosophically eclectic Cicero using “God” and “the gods” interchangeably in his treatise On the Nature of the Gods. Only the Cynics and Epicureans rejected popular religion altogether, but these schools remained marginal.

Christians themselves recognized the reality of this philosophical “pagan monotheism.” About 175 AD, Athenagoras of Athens wrote: “We [Christians] are not the only ones who limit God to a single being; almost all those who speak rationally about the principles of the world are unanimous, even if unwillingly so, that the divine is singular.” We should note, however, that pagan monotheism often viewed God as imminent within the cosmos rather than transcendent, and that he was not usually understood as the creator of the universe, most often conceived by the ancients as having always existed.

What was new about Christian monotheism was its refusal to tolerate popular polytheistic practice. Guyénot calls it an “exclusive monotheism,” as opposed to the tolerant “inclusive monotheism” of the pagan philosophers. And this exclusivity is very much an aspect of Christianity’s Judaic heritage, that of the jealous god who approved the massacres of Baal’s priests by Elijah and Jehu.

On the eve of Constantine’s rule, the Christian fraction of the Roman population stood at around two percent in Guyénot’s view, and no scholar estimates it higher than five percent. It is also generally acknowledged today that the violence done to Christians before Constantine was enormously exaggerated by the later church. The research of the Bollandist Society and others has made clear that most accounts of martyrdom are fictions produced long after the age in which they supposedly took place. The last and most serious campaign of persecution was instituted by Constantine’s immediate predecessor Diocletian in 303 AD and ended everywhere in the Empire no latter than Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313.

It is impossible to reconstruct Constantine’s personal beliefs with any certainty from the available evidence, but Guyénot inclines to the view that he was raised a Christian and from the start favored the faith in his public acts as circumstances allowed. He did little in the way of attacking pagan practices directly apart from having a few temples converted into churches. As Christian control of the Empire solidified, however, calls for the elimination of “idolatry” became more common. Around 345 AD, a Christian convert named Firmicus Maternus exhorted Constantine’s heirs:

On you, Most Holy Emperors, devolves the imperative necessity to castigate and punish this evil, and the law of the Supreme Deity enjoins on you that your severity should be visited in every way on the crime of idolatry.

He would get his wish in 391 AD, when Theodosius began the process of formally outlawing traditional religious practices. Long before that, however, bands of marauding Christian zealots invaded pagan temples to smash “idols” with the assurance that a Christian government would not punish them too severely. Such material will not make edifying reading for modern Christians, but the historical record leaves it clear.

Once paganism had ceased to pose a danger, the church turned its attention to combatting Arianism, Pelagianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism and other purported heresies. “Religious wars are genetically programmed into Christianity, because they are the defining trait of the Jealous God,” writes Guyénot; “that is why, as soon as Christian bishops and emperors ran out of pagan enemies, they turned their wrath against each other.”

An Epistemological Counter-Revolution

One result of these “jealous” campaigns against paganism and heresy was a new way of deriving truth from authority. It worked like this:

At the foundations of knowledge stood the Scriptures. Declared to be inspired by God, they were “the truth” by definition. Next came the interpretation of scriptures by the Church Fathers, which had to be assembled and sorted. Interpretations certified as “inspired by the Holy Spirit” were deemed authoritative. These, in turn, had to be distilled into dogmatic formulas, which were promulgated and given the force of law.

Guyénot cites one scholar’s observation that “the new paradigmatic concept and practice of truth imposed by the Christian literati bear a striking resemblance to the Talmudic mindset that formed in the Jewish world during the same period.”

To explain the shift, he turns to the work of Jan Assman (The Price of Monotheism, 2007), who contrasted “wild thought,” the traditional mythic and imaginative forms of thought originally native to the human race, with rational thought that submits to the principle of noncontradiction. The latter can be traced back to Parmenides, although it is more clearly displayed in Plato’s Socratic dialogues. The intellectual revolution pioneered by Parmenides and Socrates “places cognition, validation, and knowledge on an entirely new footing,” and marks a decisive advance in human thinking as a whole.

The Christian (and Talmudic) derivation of truth from authority marks a reversion to wild or primitive thought, as Guyénot explains:

In the wild thought that precedes the Parmenidean distinction, truth is a matter of opinion—and therefore of belief or faith: in short, whoever speaks the loudest speaks the truth. In the case of Abrahamic monotheism, the principle is the same, but in a world where the written word has superseded the spoken word: it is then the one who succeeds in giving his book the authority of divine revelation and the force of law who defines what is true.

Church authority thus represents the victory of the jealous god over the Western philosophical and scientific tradition.

Christianity Preserves Jewish Exceptionality

Many authors, including Dr. Kevin MacDonald, have emphasized the anti-Jewish character of fourth century Christianity. There are sound reasons for this, but there is another side to the story as well. Guyénot explains: “As all traditional cults were banned, Romans could not help but notice that one non-Christian religion remained legal and tolerated: Judaism.” Indeed, as early as 321 AD we find Constantine granting the city councilors of Cologne the right to nominate Jews to the council as well as to excuse them from duty on the sabbath. In contrast to paganism, Judaism always remained a religio licita under Christian rule. Jews were typically allowed to exist within Christian societies, but they were conceived as having rejected God. The traditional view was that Christianity had superseded the Old Testament.

Furthermore, Christians accepted the teaching that the one true and universal God had revealed himself uniquely to the Jewish people before the coming of Christ, an idea that sounded bizarre to pre-Christian Rome. As Guyénot notes, through the three-quarters of the Christian Bible known as the Old Testament, “Israel is the hero and the innocent victim of one evil empire after another, no matter how much they steal, destroy, enslave, slaughter and exterminate.” Squaring the genocidal commands of Yahweh with the specifically Christian doctrine of agape as expressed most memorably by St. Paul in I Corinthians 13 presented an obvious difficulty. There was, indeed, an early variant of Christianity known as Marcionism which explicitly rejected the Jewish heritage and the Jewish scriptures for this very reason, but it was quickly rejected as heretical by the Church. The tension remains unresolved to this day.

In any case, Christianity recognized the “special” status of Jews in a way pagan Rome never did. Christianity can thus be seen as having contributed to the preservation of both Judaism and the Jews themselves. As Kevin MacDonald has noted, it is not in the interest of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy for “anti-Semitism” to disappear entirely, since outside enmity is an important source of internal cohesion and group discipline. Guyénot suggest that “the ideal solution, in evolutionary terms, is a Gentile society that makes Jews feel excluded while minimizing violence against them. Christendom provided just that.” For this reason, he writes:

When anti-Zionist Christians protest against the term “Judeo-Christianity” on the grounds that Judaism rejects Jesus as the Messiah, I beg to differ. The very notion of Messiah is Jewish, and presupposes that Israel is God’s chosen nation. It seems perfectly legitimate to me to describe Christendom as a Judeo-Christian civilization.

The Contemporary Urgency of These Issues

Laurent Guyénot is anything but a disinterested antiquary. Near the beginning of his book, he announces:

What matters to me is to understand the civilization I belong to, how it came to the present stage of decay, and what can be done about it. It is important to study the Christianization of the Roman Empire precisely because we are now experiencing the final stage of the dechristianization of our civilization. What we need in order to survive dechristianization is to discover what Christianity took from us. For if dechristianization leaves us spiritually naked and starving, it is not only because Christianity is dead; it is also because it created a desert around itself before dying. Our Greco-Roman heritage is not just a treasury of profane inspiration, but is also an untapped reservoir of spiritual wisdom and metaphysical insight.

In Guyénot’s view, Christianity can offer little support for the project of restoring European ethnic identity “because its universalist and anti-genealogical principles have historically weakened the importance of ancestry and ethnic solidarity.” And it deserves emphasis that this problematic aspect of Christianity does not derive from Judaism. Indeed, the author marvels:

How did a people whose every member, according to Martin Buber, makes blood “the deepest, most potent stratum of his being,” perceives “what confluence of blood has produced him,” and “senses in this immortality of the generations a community of blood,” give birth to a religion that regards blood ties as an obstacle to salvation? From this perspective, Christianity is the most un-Jewish of religions.

Even our pagan ancestors could never match the Jews in the centrality of their concern with race and descent, and in the end, the individualism of the West will be the death of it. But the weakening of their common-sense genealogical understanding of identity by the church has now left the West in a dangerous position:

If, as our distant ancestors believed, and as Asians still believe, generational identity is essential to building families, communities and nations with a soul, then it is highly significant that we, heirs of the Romans, have now the weakest generational identity in the world, while Rome’s sworn enemies have the strongest one.