Rodney Stark

The Triumph of Christianity

How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion

Talking Points

Rodney Stark is the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University. His thirty books on the history and sociology of religion include The Rise of Christianity; Cities of God; For the Glory of God (which won the 2004 Award of Merit for History/Biography from Christianity Today); Discovering God (which won the 2008 Award of Merit for Theology/Ethics from Christianity Today); and The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. Stark received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where he held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. He is past president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and of the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

Description

How did an obscure Jewish sect—likely numbering no more than several hundred people when the provincial teacher at its heart was executed by the Romans—become the largest religion in the world?

Religious historian and sociologist Rodney Stark has spent his career engaging with that very question. Indeed, after thirty highly regarded books on the matter, he has created a true master course in Christian history. Now, for the first time, he distills his research to just the most important and interesting episodes—the seminal moments in the story that, he now believes, demand new perspectives. Stark gets right to the events of greatest interest, often turning them on their heads: He argues that Constantine’s conversion did the Church a great deal of harm, for example, and that the majority of converts to early Christianity were women. And he asks the questions at the heart of the human story: What role did Jesus’s family play in the early Church? How was Christianity’s rise influenced by the misery of daily life in Greco-Roman cities? What role did vigorous competition play in the success, and failure, of churches in colonial America? Finally, having brought readers to the present day, Stark makes a compelling case that the popular notion that religion must disappear to make room for modernity is amply disproved by the sociological evidence.

The Triumph of Christianity is a brisk and thought-provoking journey through events we think we know—and need to reconsider.