In my previous post dealing with how Christianity managed to take over the Roman empire, I stressed its two highly unusual (and therefore — to outsiders — weird) aspects that in tandem ended up more or less destroying all the other religions:  their stress on evangelism and their insistence on exclusivity.  It’s not that every Christian evangelized or that all Christians completely gave up all their other religious traditions, but enough did that it led to the Christianization of the West.

Here I want to explain a bit more about how the virtually unparalleled exclusivity worked, again drawing on my book The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster).

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One way to understand Christian exclusivity is to think about the Christians’ unusual approach to “choice.”   Of course everyone in the ancient world had to choose how to live, what to think, how to behave, and how to worship.   In fact, pagan religions in recent scholarship have been portrayed as a kind of “marketplace,” where “shoppers” would choose among competing options.  Just as you might choose to buy a fish, so you could choose a cult to follow.  And at the market you might buy not only a fish, but also some fruit, some grains, and some vegetables.  At every point you make a choice.  So too with religion, you can choose which cults to belong to and how often or rigorously to observe them.

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