How the Christian Church Conquered the World
Shadow of the Cross
The rise of Christianity is often celebrated as the triumph of moral enlightenment over primitive superstition. History tells a different story.
Christianity did not spread across the ancient world by gentle persuasion. It conquered through political power, systemic violence, and the calculated rebranding of the cultures it destroyed.
The Church did not inherit the earth. It seized it—and buried the memory of what came before.
The legacy of that conquest is not confined to ancient history. It echoes through the Crusades, the Inquisition, the genocides of indigenous peoples, the enslavement of millions, and, in Christian theology itself, the ultimate promise of a cosmic genocide of billions of souls.
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Conquest by Imperial Decree
Christianity’s first major transformation—from a marginalized sect to the machinery of empire—was achieved not through revelation, but through decree.
In 313 CE, Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, granting Christianity legal status within the Roman Empire. By 380 CE, under Emperor Theodosius I, the Edict of Thessalonica elevated Christianity to the empire’s official religion.
Pagan rituals were outlawed. Non-Christian worship was criminalized. Temples were seized or destroyed.
Historian Ramsay MacMullen, in Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400), documents that this transition was not the result of widespread voluntary conversion, but a process enforced by political coercion, social pressure, and economic reward.
Public officials, soldiers, and citizens were expected to abandon ancestral rites in favor of the Church. Dissenters faced legal penalties, loss of status, and escalating violence.
The destruction was deliberate.
Between 391 and 392 CE, Theodosius issued a series of edicts mandating the destruction of pagan temples. The Serapeum of Alexandria—one of the great centers of ancient religious life—was demolished by Christian mobs, incited by Bishop Theophilus.
The murder of Hypatia, the Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician, by a Christian mob in 415 CE, symbolized the collapse of classical philosophical freedom in favor of theological conformity.
Christianity did not gradually win the world by moral superiority. It was installed by imperial command, enforced by violence, and consolidated through cultural erasure.
Early Voices of Dissent
Even as Christianity ascended, it faced sharp resistance from those who saw its rise as a betrayal of ancient wisdom.
Porphyry, a Neoplatonic philosopher, penned Against the Christians, arguing that the religion rested on false prophecies and lacked the intellectual rigor of pagan philosophy.
Celsus, another early critic, accused Christians of forsaking ancestral traditions for a barbaric, foreign faith.
Emperor Julian, known as the Apostate, sought to restore traditional Roman religion, decrying Christianity as a divisive force that severed humanity from its cultural roots.
These voices, though silenced by force, reveal that Christianity’s triumph was not a universal embrace but a contested imposition, achieved through coercion and erasure.
The Council of Nicaea
The Church’s consolidation of power extended beyond temples to the very definition of belief.
In 325 CE, the Council of Nicaea, convened by Constantine, standardized Christian doctrine, suppressing dissenting sects like the Arians.
This was not a mere theological debate but a political maneuver to unify the empire under a single creed.
Heretics were excommunicated, their texts burned, and their followers persecuted. The Church’s victory was not just over paganism but over alternative Christianities, ensuring that only its version of truth would prevail.
Desecration of the Sacred
The conquest was not only political. It was symbolic. Christianity reversed the meanings of humanity’s oldest sacred symbols. All that was once natural was desecrated and corrupted.
The serpent, long revered across cultures as a symbol of wisdom, regeneration, and life force, was rebranded as the embodiment of evil.
The sacred Tree of Life—representing the interconnectedness of all existence—became the forbidden tree whose fruit condemned humanity.
The Goddess, honored for embodying fertility, wisdom, and balance, was recast as Eve—blamed for the original sin that cursed all her descendants.
Pagan cultures revered the child as a symbol of innocence and potential. Christianity sentenced every child to genetic guilt—born stained with sin, condemned before thought or action, requiring salvation through the blood sacrifice of a tortured savior to appease the wrath of its demonized god.
In the mythology the Church constructed, the natural world became a prison, the body became a curse, and life itself became a trial designed to end in judgment.
Concurrent with this inversion, the Church co-opted pagan festivals to cement its dominance. The winter solstice, celebrated as Saturnalia or the birth of Sol Invictus, was transformed into Christmas, stripped of its cosmic reverence. The spring equinox, a time of renewal across cultures, became Easter, tethered to a narrative of sacrifice and resurrection. This was not syncretism but appropriation, erasing the original meanings to serve the Church’s agenda.
The Pagan Perspective
From the pagan perspective, Christianity was not a revelation but a desecration. Gods and goddesses, worshipped for millennia, were demonized as devils. The natural world, once divine, was declared fallen, and humanity, once noble, was branded sinful.
Emperor Julian, in his Against the Galileans, mourned this cultural devastation, arguing that Christianity had severed humanity’s connection to its sacred traditions.
The figure of Satan himself, constructed from older deities like Pan or Set, became a catch-all for the Church’s demonization of pre-Christian spirituality, ensuring that the old ways were not just forgotten but feared.
The Crusades: Sanctified Expansion
By the 11th century, the Church had consolidated its dominance over Europe. It then turned outward, launching campaigns of religious violence under the pretense of sacred mission.
The Crusades were not spiritual pilgrimages.
They were military invasions, fueled by promises of earthly spoils and eternal rewards. The First Crusade, launched in 1096, culminated in the slaughter of thousands—Muslims, Jews, and even Eastern Christians—as Christian armies captured Jerusalem.
The Crusades institutionalized the merger of religious fervor and imperial conquest. As historian Thomas Asbridge documents in The Crusades: The Authoritative History:
”The violence was systematic, celebrated, and viewed as divinely sanctioned.”
Contemporary Condemnations
The Crusades were not without their detractors, even in the fervent climate of medieval Christendom. Beyond the battlefield, voices of dissent rose from both within and outside the Christian world, challenging the Church’s righteous narrative.
The Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir, writing from the other side of the carnage, portrayed the Crusaders not as holy warriors but as ruthless aggressors, driven by lust for land, plunder, and domination rather than any genuine piety. To him, these so-called pilgrims were nothing more than barbaric invaders who cloaked their violence in the name of a foreign god.
Within the heart of Christendom itself, dissent flickered through figures like the philosopher Peter Abelard, who dared to question the ethics of slaughtering in God’s name. Abelard’s critiques, though, were quickly suppressed, his voice smothered beneath the Church’s swelling drumbeat of divine warfare.
Even when the Crusaders turned their swords against fellow Christians—most infamously during the Fourth Crusade’s brutal sack of Constantinople in 1204—the machinery of holy war continued to grind forward. The looting and desecration of a Christian city by supposed defenders of the faith shattered any remaining illusions of spiritual purity behind the campaigns.
The hypocrisy was so glaring that even Pope Innocent III, one of the most powerful pontiffs of the era and an ardent crusade supporter, was forced to issue public condemnations. Yet his words rang hollow, for by then, the Crusades had fully revealed themselves for what they were: imperialist conquests veiled in the garb of sacred mission, driven as much by greed, ambition, and power as by any whispered call from heaven.
The Children’s Crusade: Exploitation of Innocence
The Children’s Crusade of 1212 stands as a haunting testament to the perils of unbridled zeal and the exploitation of innocence. Led by youthful visionaries like Stephen of Cloyes in France and Nicholas of Cologne in Germany, thousands of children and adolescents were swept up in a fervent movement to reclaim Jerusalem.
Lured by apocalyptic visions and promises of holy deliverance, these young crusaders set out on grueling marches across Europe. Yet instead of glory, they encountered starvation, sickness, and treachery. Many were enslaved or died along the way, their innocence shattered by the same powers that had filled them with hope.
This tragic episode underscores the Church's willingness to sacrifice lives, even those of children, for its vision of divine conquest. The Children's Crusade was not an isolated incident but part of a broader pattern of manipulation and control that characterized the Church's expansionist endeavors. It serves as a stark reminder of the dangers of blind faith and the importance of critical inquiry into the narratives that shape our understanding of history.
The Inquisition of Horror
In the 12th century, the Medieval Inquisition was formalized, creating a system for the surveillance and punishment of heresy. The Church no longer sought only external domination; it sought to control internal belief.
Those accused of heresy—often without credible evidence—were tortured, coerced into confession, and publicly executed. The Spanish Inquisition, launched in 1478, intensified this machinery, targeting Jews, Muslims, and so-called "crypto-Christians" with bureaucratic precision.
Henry Kamen, in The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, shows that the Inquisition was not merely a religious institution but a state-sponsored mechanism of psychological and cultural control.
Belief itself became subject to policing.
Deviation became a crime against the cosmic order.
But the Inquisition's reach extended beyond the physical realm; it infiltrated the very psyche of society. The omnipresent threat of denunciation bred an atmosphere of paranoia, where neighbors, friends, and even family members became potential informants. This culture of suspicion fractured communities, eroding trust and fostering isolation.
The Inquisition's meticulous records, detailing confessions extracted under duress, served as tools of both oppression and indoctrination. These documents reinforced the narrative of heresy as a pervasive threat, justifying the institution's existence and methods.
Moreover, the Inquisition's influence seeped into art, literature, and education. Censorship became a means of shaping thought, with the Index Librorum Prohibitorum listing works deemed heretical. Intellectual exploration was stifled, and the boundaries of acceptable discourse were rigidly enforced.
This psychological control allowed the Inquisition’s authority to persist, not solely by instilling fear of punishment, but by embedding its doctrines within the minds of the people. Citizens became both oppressors and the oppressed, sustaining a self-reinforcing system of domination that outlived the Inquisition’s official reach.
In this way, the Inquisition exemplified a form of totalitarianism that transcended physical coercion, embedding itself within the collective consciousness and altering the very fabric of thought and belief.
Until this day, our global society is, to one degree or another, infected by the scourge of guilt and shame by the largest religion in the world.
—Zzenn
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Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400), Yale University Press, 1984. ↩
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 28. ↩
Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, Harvard University Press, 1995. ↩
Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land, HarperCollins, 2010. ↩
Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, Yale University Press, 1997. ↩
Papal Bull Inter Caetera, 1493. ↩
David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, Oxford University Press, 1992. ↩