New book project provisionally titled Envy of Empire: The Political Legacy of Second Century Christianity, under contract with Eerdmans.

The period between Jesus’s execution as an outlaw and Constantine’s conquest of the Roman Empire has long held fascination in the popular imagination. Readers are interested in the harrowing stories of martyrs, how Christianity came to “triumph” over paganism, what the founding “church fathers” taught, the conflict with “gnostics” and other heretics, and whether Christianity was an improvement or a decline of Western culture. The slow-moving Christian revolution is one of the great cultural inflection points in world history.  

This period has also been critical for making moral and political observations about what Christianity would become after these early years. The so-called triumph of Christianity in the fourth century is frequently depicted as a kind of accident, or worse a corruption of the more pure faith of the earlier era. The brutality and cruelty of Christian empires from Constantine on are seen as an aberrational development once Christians had control of the sword. 

This story is largely insufficient. It provides only a selective account of Christians before they rose to dominate the tools of government. That traditional narrative has slowly but surely been eroded over the last century, undone by a thousand cuts of where it just doesn’t add up. But where this story is most deficient is its failure to understand how Christians replicated imperial values and power long before they laid claim to the Roman throne.  

Rather than focusing on the history of how Christians came to power, there is another perhaps deeper question at play: how did Christians so easily adapt to power when it finally did come their way? The answer may be found by tracing a long development of the tradition through the second century. Envy of Empire promises to go even further to show how hiding in the story of Christian victimhood are the seeds of some of Christianity’s own propensities toward oppression.   

This book then explores a tendency among early Christians to adopt the values of their persecutors rather than become empathetic to others who were also persecuted. Christians were fierce critics of Roman injustice toward themselves. Yet, they also believed that they were the rightful wielders of such immense authority. Christian resistance to Roman power was drenched with a desire for it. This paradox helps make sense of these pivotal years.