Why Christianity Is So Contagious — Part 1 — Monotheism
Many of the features we now associate with religion — Heaven, Hell, sin, salvation, an all powerful God, a Bible, dogma — didn’t exist or at least didn’t feature prominently in pre-Christian religions.
Christianity was a major milestone that permanently altered the evolution of religions and ideologies. The equivalent in biological evolution might be the first vertebrate— 98% of animal species are invertebrates, but they’re smaller, significantly less complex, and are dominated by their bony cousins in almost every ecosystem.
It was a combination of novel adaptations that made Christianity an extremely powerful and contagious ideology that quickly displaced all its competitors.
In this article, we’ll look at one of these features: Monotheism.
Monotheism
I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God.
- Isaiah 45:5–12
Look into any ancient religion or mythology and the first thing you’ll notice is they have many many gods. Religions with more than one god are polytheistic. Until the rise of Christianity these religions were the norm in most of the world.
Monotheism, the belief in a single and all powerful God, appeared as early as the 17th century BC in Egypt, when Pharaoh Amenhotep IV banned the worship of all gods other than Aten during his reign — though, his successors immediately repealed these bans after his death.
Early Judaism was likely polytheistic, but became monotheistic sometime around the 6th century BC. Around this time, another monotheistic religion, Zoroastrianism, was developing in Iran. Both of these religions would go on to heavily influence Christianity. The influence from Judaism is obvious: the Old Testament is based on the Hebrew Bible and Jesus himself was Jewish. Zoroastrianism was influential in shaping the religious dichotomy of good and evil, which we’ll talk more about in a later article (eventually I’ll replace this with a link to that article, I promise).
Today, most people in the world follow a monotheistic religion — e.g. Islam, Judaism, Christianity — but most religions that have existed were polytheistic.
That a few monotheistic religions outcompeted thousands of polytheistic ones tells us there is something special about religions with only one God. Indeed, monotheism has many evolutionary advantages over polytheism, which we’ll discuss in this article.
Tolerance
The biggest advantage monotheistic religions have is their lack of tolerance for other religions.
Worshippers of polytheistic religions often accept the existence of gods besides their own. There’s plenty of evidence for this in the historical records. Archaeologists have found Viking molds for making both cross pendants and Thor’s hammer pendants side by side, an indication that pagan Vikings also worshipped Jesus Christ or at least tolerated the Christian religion. Evidence for worship of Egyptian Gods and Iranian gods has been found all over the Roman Empire.
The Romans are actually a special case because they, like the Greeks, practiced syncretism. They would take elements of other religions and combine them with their own, taking advantage of the inherent similarities in polytheistic religions. The Greek god Dionysus was combined with the Latin mead god Liber. The Egyptian goddess Isis was fully imported into the Roman pantheon. This practice helped to assimilate conquered people into Roman culture.
Syncretism was taken a step further once the Roman Empire became Christian. Catholicism, with its worship of patron saints, today seems oddly polytheistic compared to many Protestant religions where only Jesus and God are worshipped. This can be explained by syncretism. As Christianity assimilated the various polytheistic religions of Europe, the roles of their gods were transferred to saints. In this way, Saint Demetrius of Thessaloniki took the place of the Greek god Demeter. Festivals were combined too — Christmas has elements of both the Roman Saturnalia and the German Yule.
But there was much less tolerance from the Christians than from the Romans. The Bible teaches that all other gods besides the one true God are false idols. Whereas the Romans would say “your god Demeter is like our god Ceres”, the Christians would say “your God Demeter is a false idol, but luckily we have this saint named Demetrius who you can worship instead!”
This is the Paradox of tolerance as described by Karl Popper. Intolerant ideologies have an evolutionary advantage over tolerant ones because they are more competitive.
An ideology that does not allow any dissenting opinion can quickly displace one that does — as we are seeing today with progressivism displacing liberalism in leftwing American politics and Trumpism displacing traditional republicanism on the right.
God of Everything
Monotheistic religions are more totalitarian and less falsifiable than polytheistic ones. If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then it becomes very difficult to disprove his existence. The religion becomes much more robust and expands to fill in every possible doubt or question we have.
Polytheistic gods are often tied to very specific roles related to either human activity or nature. There are almost always gods of fire, thunder, the moon, a the harvest, the hunt, etc. Each is responsible for various “acts of God”. However, science has provided us with natural explanations for all these phenomena.
On the other hand, the Christian God is responsible for creating the universe and controlling virtually every aspect of our lives in an unseen way. That’s a much less falsifiable claim.
Ideologies that are unfalsifiable and provide “lazy” solutions to difficult problems are especially successful. Many conspiracy theories take this form: there is a hidden but all powerful group or person who’s pulling all the levers. Some examples of these “powerful groups” in conspiracy theories would be the deep state, aliens, reptile people, Jews, and capitalists. We’ll discuss conspiracy theories in greater detail in another article, but suffice to say that religion is the ultimate conspiracy theory.
The real world is polytheistic — there is no silver bullet explanation for everything but rather millions of small competing and often independent factors.
I’d recommend reading Karl Popper’s take on two contagious ideologies of his era, Marxism and Freudian psychology, to see why they’re so compelling but ultimately superficial because they can seemingly account for any outcome and are therefore unfalsifiable.
Monotheism gave Christianity an edge over the polytheistic religions of its time. This is partly because monotheism encourages its followers to reject all other religions, but also because personal and all-powerful gods are inherently compelling to people. All religions, but especially monotheist ones, are essentially conspiracy theories that suggest a hidden but powerful agent is behind all major events and milestones in your life and the world at large.
We should treat ideologies that claim to have a single answer for everything with extreme skepticism.
