For the first three centuries after the death of Jesus, Christians in the Roman Empire were persecuted.
They were a minority religious group that refused to participate in the imperial cult, the official state religion that required worship of Roman gods and emperors. That refusal was considered treason. Christians were imprisoned, executed, and thrown to animals in public arenas.
Then in 312 CE the Emperor Constantine won a pivotal battle and credited his victory to the Christian God. In 313 CE he issued the Edict of Milan granting religious tolerance throughout the empire. By the end of the fourth century Christianity had become the official state religion of Rome.
This is usually told as a story of Christianity's triumph. But look at it from the perspective of political power and it looks like something different.
What Constantine Actually Did
Constantine did not convert to Christianity and then figure out how to govern a Christian empire. He governed a crumbling empire that was held together by religious unity and found a new religious framework that could serve that function.
The old Roman religion was not working well as an instrument of political unity. It was diverse and decentralized. Local gods competed with state gods. The emperor worship system required constant maintenance and was generating conflict with growing minority populations.
Christianity offered something the old system did not. It was monotheistic, which meant everyone worshipping the same single God. It had an existing organizational structure with bishops and councils and established theology. It had a message of universal brotherhood that could potentially hold together a diverse empire. And critically, its God was a God of all humanity, not just of Rome, which made it more compatible with ruling a multi-ethnic empire.
Constantine did not surrender power to the church. He recruited the church into the project of empire. He gave bishops legal authority. He funded church construction with imperial money. He convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE to settle theological disputes, presiding over it himself as a political ruler deciding matters of religious doctrine.
By aligning the empire with Christian doctrine, Rome gave the Church both political and moral authority. In Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire, the emperor held supreme authority over both the state and the church, embodying the concept of Caesaropapism, a blend of secular and religious power in one figure.
The emperor and the church needed each other. The church got protection, resources, and official status. The emperor got a unified religious framework that could hold the empire together and a moral authority that claimed God was on his side.
What Got Left Out of Official Christianity
When Constantine and the councils of bishops decided what Christianity was officially going to believe and teach, they made choices about what to include and what to exclude.
There were many early Christian texts and communities with very different ideas about who Jesus was, what he taught, and what the church should look like. The councils decided which texts were authoritative and which were heretical. The texts that were excluded were suppressed. Some were destroyed.
The version of Christianity that emerged from this process was shaped not just by theological reasoning but by the political needs of an empire that needed a unified, hierarchical, obedient religious structure.
A religion that taught that the poor were blessed and the meek would inherit the earth was adopted by the most powerful empire in the western world and used to keep its subjects obedient. That is one of the more remarkable transformations in the history of religion.
The pattern it established lasted for a thousand years in Europe. Church and state working together, legitimizing each other, maintaining a social order that kept power where power already was.
Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.
