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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Murdered by Words
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This shit goes all the way back to Constantine.
Keanu Reeves, why hast thou forsaken me?
Leave my boy Constantine alone. He was a Roman statesman, trying to keep an empire from disintegrating, not a theologian. And his plan worked, for 1000 years and a bit more. If Christians are being assholes, that's their fault, not some guy's from 17 centuries ago, solving a problem for his own time.
Regardless of how much responsibility we assign to him, it's true that this shit does in fact go all the way back to his time.
If you ask me, the Roman empire was built on conquest and slavery and extending it 1000 years isn't really something to brag about. He co-opted a movement that had originally opposed many of the empire's harmful practices and turned it into a bastardized form that supported the state so long as it payed lip service to Christian icons. Nowadays, Christians do similar things, and they're drawing on a very long tradition to do so. That tradition doesn't absolve them of personal responsibility, but it does provide some insight in terms of understanding how Christianity turned into basically the exact opposite of Jesus' teachings.
You're making political, not theological arguments here. And you're demonizing the Roman Empire as if we're in any way special in its slaving and conquering in the ancient world. If there is something special about it, it is how Romanity came to be an identity and a political system with uncharacteristic resilience and longevity, lasting well into the 15th century.
That said, historically speaking, it's not at all obvious that you can ascribe to Constantine the idea of an orthodox Christianity. Even less obvious that you can charge him with a perversion of Jesus teachings. Bart Ehrmann has written lovely books on the weirdness and evolutions of early christianities. And James Tabor has talked about how already by Paul whatever Jesus himself was teaching was rather secondary.
If anything if you want to charge anyone with forcing anything you have to go to Theodosius a few decades later. And even then, what the emperors were doing was giving muscle to the most socially stable version of Christianity at the time.
In any case, theologically speaking, this idea of a pure original Christian message of Jesus that needs to be rescued by later impurities is a fundamentally protestant one, i.e., it's a very particular way of understanding Christianity that doesn't have any essential claim to be the only legitimate way of understanding Christianity. Not coming from a protestant (or a Counter-Reformation) background myself I don't even particularly feel the need to refute it, I find the very question basically irrelevant.
I said nothing of the sort. All I'm saying is that there were early Christians who opposed some of these things, and that movement was co-opted and started supporting them.
As I said, however much responsibility you want to ascribe to him, it remains true that this sort of thing goes back to his time.
I also find it irrelevant, which is why I never said anything like that. I don't believe there was a "pure" Christian message that needs to be "rescued." No, early Christians were weird cranks with many wrong ideas about many things, which is part of how they were able to be co-opted. Nevertheless, they were weird cranks that said and did some ok things some times, especially relative to the empire.
You're trying to create this false dichotomy where either early Christians were the pure, divinely inspired carriers of God's teachings, or else everyone at the time was equally bad, and the only measure of goodness is stability and survival. This is reductive nonsense. Early Christianity was a relatively progressive, flawed movement within the empire, and it was able to be subverted and co-opted by the empire into supporting many of it's worst practices. This is not a "fundamentally protestant" perspective, nor does it treat the Roman Empire as "special" in regards to other states in the ancient world, both of those claims are baseless strawmen.
Maybe you're right, but I don't think I'm making the false dichotomy you're sketching out. I'm just not interested in condemning the Romans of 1700 years ago or in tracing to them the christofascism of contemporary American right wingers.
Of course, there are more recent things that we can look at to understand modern American christofascism. However, I would argue that twisting around Jesus' words to justify bad things has a very long history, and that you can point to the time of Constantine and the ways in which Christianity came to support Roman imperialism as a starting point. It may not be a direct line, but it's part of the same tradition. By the same token, you could point to how Christianity was used to support colonialism much later. At some point, people should stop being surprised when this happens because it's been happening for 1700 years.
But you praised Constantine for preserving the empire. If you're going to apply that moral framework then I get to apply my own too.
Who was force babtised on his death bed!