Economic Origins of Roman Christianity

Robert B. Ekelund Jr., Robert D. Tollison

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780226200040
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In the global marketplace of ideas, few realms spark as much conflict as religion. For millions of people, it is an integral part of everyday life, reflected by a widely divergent supply of practices and philosophical perspectives. Yet, historically, the marketplace has not always been competitive. While the early Common Era saw competition between Christianity, Judaism, and the many pagan cults, Roman Christianity came eventually to dominate Western Europe.   Using basic concepts of economic theory, Robert B. Ekelund Jr. and Robert D. Tollison explain the origin and subsequent spread of Roman Christianity, showing first how the standard concepts of risk, cost, and benefit can account for the demand for religion. Then, drawing on the economics of networking, entrepreneurship, and industrial organization, the book explains Christianity's rapid ascent. Like a business, the church developed sound business strategies that increased its market share to a near monopoly in the medieval period. This book offers a fascinating look at the dynamics of Christianity's rise, as well as how aspects the church's structure—developed over the first millennium—illuminate a number of critical problems faced by the church today.

CHAPTER ONE

Roman Christianity: An Evolving Monopoly

Introduction

The longest-running institution in Western culture and arguably one that has had an enormous influence on Western civilization has been the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Church, as the “point of origin” for all Christianity, has been the subject of intense attention over the centuries. That attention is not misplaced: the history of the past two millennia of Western civilization cannot be understood apart from the development and dominance of this form of religious belief. The Roman Church has been a pivotal player in Europe for over a millennium and a half through its impact on European institutions, society, culture, and politics. The flowering of economic growth emanating from Europe to the rest of the world could not be analyzed apart from the evolution of the Christian church. We believe that simple economic principles help to shed light on this fascinating institution, both in the past and in the present. Previous studies, including our own, have primarily focused on the economic and social implications of church dominance in the High Middle Ages. Our goal in the present work is to chronicle in economic terms the successful rise and rapid spread of Roman Christianity, from its humble origins when it faced persecution and multiple forms of competition through the turn of the twelfth century, at which point it had become the dominant religious and economic institution in many parts of Europe.

Beyond the sheer success of an institution lasting for 2,000 years, a host of amazing facts surrounds the development of the Christian religion. First, there was the rapid rate of adoption and expansion from a tiny sect to become the state religion of the Roman Empire in a bare three hundred years. While all estimates derived from both Christian and non-Christian sources are necessarily speculative, a well-executed study estimates the growth of Christianity at approximately 3.4 percent per year between 40 CE and 350 CE (Hopkins 1998, 192–193). Under these estimates the number of Christians grew from about 7,400 members in 100 CE to 1,100,000 in 250 and to 32 million members in 350 CE. Other estimates give similar approximations.¹ If these data are even approximately correct, a small religious movement developed relatively quickly into a nascent monopoly over parts of Europe that began to dominate the empire that once sought to destroy it. Second, and even more amazing perhaps, is the subsequent development of the Christian church up to the early and late Middle Ages—a time when the Roman (or Latin) branch of that church held a veritable monopoly (with only fringe competition) on the belief system of much of Europe and England. This development—occurring through the decline of the Roman Empire and the multitude of social, economic, and political developments throughout Europe and elsewhere including the rise of nation-states in the Middle Ages—has been analyzed both historically and within the realm of religious history. Church monopoly and behavior, as is well known, led to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and the plurality of Christian sects today, numbering in the thousands worldwide.²

Beginning with Adam Smith, economists have been interested in the organization of religion. Contemporary economists have in fact created an entirely new field called the “economics of religion” in both macroeconomic and microeconomic terms. Beginning from initial theoretical perspectives on religious behavior (Azzi and Ehrenberg 1975), the study of cult behavior as a theory of clubs (Iannaccone 1992, 1995, 1998), and religion as a study of economic organization (Ekelund, Hebert, and Tollison 1989, 1992), investigations have taken scholars in a number of directions, primarily rooted in microeconomic theory.³ Theories of doctrinal strictness (Barros and Garoupa 2002) and the role of sainthood (Ferrero 2008) are also examples of this latter approach. Aggregative or macroeconomic theories, including those related to religious participation and economic growth (Barro and McCleary 2003, 2004, 2005; McCleary and Barro 2006a, 2006b), are extremely interesting and valuable contributions to the field.⁴

A contemporary economic analysis of the historical evolution of religion has also been underway as well. This project builds on existing contributions to the field and features market theory, industrial organization, and modern microeconomics to plumb the organizational structure of Christianity and its effects over time. In this spirit, the current book on the evolution of Christianity from the time of Christ through (approximately) 1100 CE is a continuation of two earlier books on the medieval church and its evolution to the present day. In Sacred Trust (Ekelund et al. 1996), the analysis focused on the time period of roughly from 1100 CE to the advent of the Reformation. In The Marketplace of Christianity (Ekelund, Herbert, and Tollison 2006), the central topics were the Reformation and entry of Protestant religions into the marketplace, along with many of the consequences of competitive Christianity. In the present work, as in the two previous books, we apply economic analysis to consider the rise and spread of early Christianity from the time of Christ until the Roman Church emerged centuries later as a powerful purveyor in the marketplace for religious services (roughly between 1000–1200 CE) over much of Western Europe.

The present book is fundamentally differentiated in theme and theoretical application from our earlier endeavors. The book Sacred Trust studied the activities of a monopoly that had already been achieved—how it manipulated doctrine, invented Purgatory and auricular confession, and used the Crusades and other methods to protect itself from competition. The study The Marketplace of Christianity, on the other hand, examined the consequences of successful entry into the Christian market by Martin Luther and other Protestants, many of which benefited from state-sponsored religious monopoly as well. The latter depicts the mature competition that the Christian market has undergone in the post-Reformation period. Indeed, thousands of Christian sects exist today. Economic Origins analyzes how traditional (Nicaean) Christianity emerged out of the competition with Roman cults, Judaism, and other Christian cults and, most importantly, how a Roman monopoly over Christianity developed thereafter. Again, we employ the tools of modern microeconomics, but in the present work we place special emphasis on cartel behavior, the search for monopoly power, religious preferences, and risk and product differentiation theory. The tripartite approach of the present book is to analyze economically and discuss the emergence of the early “competitive phase” of the Christian movement up to Constantine; then, to examine the fixation of doctrine under Constantine at the Council of Nicaea; and finally, to show how the vertical integration of church theology, ritual, and practice was, slowly and sometimes fitfully, accomplished from (roughly) 400 CE to 1100 CE as the church emerged as a Roman monopoly.

The various dates bracketing our current study are no doubt inexact, and it is not our intent to engage in a search for the exact moment when the church reached the pinnacle of monopoly power over the spiritual and over a not inconsiderable part of the temporal life of Western Europe. Many historians argue, correctly, that the “Christianization” of Europe was incomplete well into the Reformation era. Rather, one aim of this book is to explain how the church rose from a small group of believers at the time of Christ to a vast, supranational, quasi-monopoly religion some ten to twelve centuries later over vast parts of Europe. We offer this analysis as a foundation and complement to our earlier work dealing with later periods of church history. In this endeavor we do not (and could not) present a complete historical account of these centuries, as would a medieval historian. Rather, we seek to describe only some of the essential features of Christian development over this time. The fact-based and Christian- and non-Christian document-based approaches of many historical and sociological accounts (e.g., Hillgarth 1969; MacMullen 1981, 1984; Hopkins 1998) are central to understanding this millennium-long process. The social-scientific method of understanding Christianity and its growth, largely undertaken by Stark (1997, 2001, 2003, 2006), while open to criticism (Klutz 1998; Hopkins 1998), is yet another means to understanding the emergence of Christianity, and we owe much to Stark’s many inquiries. Drawing on all of these approaches, we would stress that economic concepts and arguments, when added to these historical and sociological accounts, have much to contribute to this multidisciplinary endeavor.

A completion of the political economy of the Roman Catholic Church as one of the longest-running institutions on record is only one of the two central aims of the present study. We believe that it is critical to understand, in the expanding domain of economic theory, how the drive to monopoly on the part of religion is but one example of the natural desire of institutions (and businesses) to eliminate competitors and competition as they develop over time. That was as true in the Roman and medieval period as it is today. A fundamental expression of a religion’s monopolistic tendency is to claim to profess truth and to see contradictory beliefs as heresy. A religion’s proclamation that there is only one “true” system of supernatural belief—a claim of exclusivity made by Christianity from the beginning—may and has led to strife, bloodshed and war. Our study therefore has implications for all religious movements, historical and contemporary. It is important to note that this analysis is not pejorative or normative in any sense relative to religion or to religious institutions. We are not discussing theological issues per se; rather, we are presenting a positive analysis of how religious institutions behave with respect to given events and under certain motives and constraints. A firm grounding in issues relating to monopoly organization and its evolution is therefore central to our study.

Aspiring to Monopoly

Textbook treatments of monopoly simply assume that a monopoly is a single seller of a unique product and trace the effects of such a structure on price and output. The basic economic concept is definitional and static in nature. A pure monopoly is said to exist in an industry composed of a single seller of a product with no close substitutes and with high barriers to entry. Prices are higher and output lower than under competitive (or intermediate) market models. Naturally, this definition must include the definition of the product or service; the meaning of “no close substitutes”; and, in context of a particular market, the meaning of “high” barriers to entry. The requirement of “single seller,” moreover, may be broadened to include a concept of a group of sellers acting as one—a cartel. But in this static conception, the process of monopolization is basically ignored.⁵ The emergence of the theory of rent seeking (Tullock 1967) has changed this situation somewhat and such interesting and important questions as how monopolies come into existence and why they sometimes go away (deregulation) are addressed (Ekelund and Tollison 1981).⁶ Sometimes the answers to these questions are easy (as when a patent is granted or when a collusive agreement is unstable), but in other cases, like that of the Christian church, answers are more difficult to uncover. So, given that a product and a market may be defined for religion, several critical questions emerge. How did a monopoly emerge from a competitive environment to begin with? What were the effects of monopolization on the behavior of the Christian church, and how did the Roman Catholic Church (from now on generally referred to as “the church” or the Roman Church) consolidate and protect its monopoly power?⁷

Monopolies have been one critical form of political and economic organization throughout recorded time just as authoritarian or monarchical regimes have dominated democratic or market-based systems. The approaches of sociologists, historians, and political scientists have been important and applicable to understanding long-term processes. The masterful (if often challenged) views of Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) created a lengthy and often dense theory concerning the rise and fall of civilizations with multiple causes for cyclic activity.⁸ Religion, of critical importance in Toynbee’s conception, was the factor that bound civilizations together, a point that is not in conflict with our analysis of the interactions of church and state. We are, however, far more focused with the Christian church itself and its means of ascendance to monopoly power over the first millennium.

Other scholars in sociology and political science also offered trenchant insights into the progress and decline of societies. The eminent historian Paul Kennedy emphasized (1987) that the rise of the Great Powers is intimately related to relative resource availability and to economic sustainability. Conversely, decline is related to overextension and imperialist adventures. Such military challenges put unbearable pressures on the resource base of societies and create ultimate relative decline. Sociologist, political scientist, and historian Charles Tilly (1929–2008) examined the related rise of the nation-state as the dominant form of political organization from the Middle Ages onward (Tilly 1990). High resource costs of military innovations are emphasized in Tilly’s explanation, as is the high taxation necessary to finance competition between states. The summary observations of these two thinkers are not directly applied to the period we consider in this book but are undoubtedly relevant to the rise and fall of Rome and early medieval (“Dark Age”) dynasties. We argue, in complementary rather than competing fashion, that an understanding of how a particular emerging monopoly—the Christian church between (approximately) the first and twelfth centuries—helps provide insights into the course of European history over that period and beyond. In our view, history is not only explainable in terms of competition, resource endowments, or fractionalization; it is also about ideas, philosophies, or innovations that can lead to monopoly and monopolization. Most famously perhaps, nation-states—China, Japan, England, Spain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands included—attempted at various times in history to gain world domination through a variety of means reducible to the process of “competition for monopolization.” Tribes, ancient temple societies such as Egypt or Assyria, trading companies, empires, colonialism, robber barons, mercantilism, Microsoft, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and myriad other examples indicate that aspiring monopolists are a prominent aspect of economic history. So, too, are the occasions of the deregulation and dissolution of monopolies, as in the declension of mercantile policies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.⁹

The historical Roman Church fits well within this perspective. As noted above, we have previously shown how monopoly and monopolization were the hallmarks of church behavior in the High Middle Ages, and how Protestantism broke the hold of the Catholic monopoly in large parts of Northern Europe during the Reformation. In the present book, we complete an analysis of the long history of the Roman Church from its origins as a competitor in the market for religion, both Christian and otherwise, to its emergence as a vertically integrated, multinational, monopoly enterprise circa 1000 to 1200 CE.

We will stress the process by which the church became the sole supplier of religious and other secular services, with only fringe competition, over the first ten or so centuries of its existence. Key features of these developments are:

the early spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire, fueled by the entrepreneurship of Paul and other disciples of Christ;

the adoption of a particular form of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire (Constantine);

the homogenization of the doctrines of Christianity (completed at the Council of Nicaea after a long waiting period for Christ’s return); hereafter there was a monopoly over the theology of Christianity, if not over the interpretation of it;

the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe and liaisons with secular leaders (e.g., Charlemagne); this movement began the vertical integration of the church in the West;

schism between the Eastern and Western Churches over the powers of the pope; expansion of the economic and tax base of the Roman Church and establishment of the balance of power between the church and secular rulers;

extension and entrenchment of the vertical organization of the Roman Church with the Roman papacy and Curia at the upstream level providing doctrine and interpretations, regulating the “downstream” level (geographically local parishes, monasteries, and so on) to ensure “uniformity” of teaching and product to the laity;

ultimate triumph of the Roman Church as a religious monopoly in the High Middle Ages, the competitive breakdown in the sixteenth century, and briefly, the implications of these and earlier developments for contemporary Christianity.

The long and arduous journey to monopoly in the Middle Ages was, in addition to the early confrontations with Rome, naturally accompanied by great conflict as well as cooperation with the entire evolution of European society and culture itself. The bar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Roman Christianity: An Evolving Monopoly
• Chapter 2. Religion, History, and Social Science
• Chapter 3. Economics of Religious Belief
• Chapter 4. Entrepreneurship, Networking, and the Success of Early Christianity
• Chapter 5. Constantine and Rome’s Acceptance of Christianity
• Chapter 6. The Drive to Church Monopoly: Constantine to Charlemagne
• Chapter 7. Roman Christian Monopoly in the Early Medieval Period
• Chapter 8. Conclusion: The Roman Church Monopoly Triumphant
• Appendix The Impact of Saint Paul
• Notes
• References
• Index