Before Christianity, There Was Empire
This section asks a specific question: what changed when an already-existing empire adopted Christianity? To answer it, we must separate the machinery of empire from the moral language later wrapped around that machinery. Otherwise we make one of two opposite mistakes: blaming Christianity for conquest, slavery, patriarchy, and hierarchy that long preceded it, or treating Christianity as a harmless passenger after it began teaching Western empire what its power meant. Christianity did not create Western empire. Rome supplied the imperial hardware; Christianity increasingly became its moral operating system, supplying the language in which that machinery understood and defended itself. It helped inherited power present itself as righteous, while also giving the people beneath that power a sacred language with which to accuse it.
The Roman Empire already possessed conquest, taxation, class hierarchy, patriarchy, public execution, and one of the ancient world’s largest integrated systems of slavery when it executed Jesus. Roman slavery did not require Christianity. The central argument present for the rest of this post can be quickly observed via this diagram.
An empire is not merely a large country. It is an arrangement in which a dominant centre rules different peoples or territories without giving all of them an equal role in deciding how that power is used. Colonialism is one method of empire: settling, governing, or extracting from another land and its people. Imperialism is broader. A state can extend decisive control through armies, client rulers, trade, debt, sanctions, or investment without formally turning another country into a colony.
Empires begin with material desires: land, labour, tribute, security, trade routes, and resources. They may also build roads, suppress local wars, standardize laws, and connect markets. Those benefits can be real. They are also central to imperial self-justification. The empire says that the people losing control are gaining order, civilization, salvation, development, or peace. Material power places itself inside a moral sheath.
Removing Christianity from history would not remove that machinery. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, Rome, Chinese dynasties, Indian empires, African kingdoms, and American empires demonstrate that conquest needed no gospel. A serious counterfactual must also allow other traditions to keep developing: Stoicism, Roman law, Jewish ethics, civic philanthropy, Neoplatonism, political struggle, and material change might have expanded moral concern in different ways. We cannot make Christianity win by imagining every alternative frozen in the first century.
Christianity’s particular effect must therefore be traced in two directions. It placed existing rulers and hierarchies beneath God, allowing obedience to political power to become a moral and religious duty. But it also placed a person tortured and executed by that power at the centre of divine revelation. Christianity could sanctify the imperial hierarchy and accuse it from within. The first side of that contradiction appears clearly in the Christian treatment of governing authority.
Paul’s instruction in Romans 13 is crucial. It commands submission to governing authorities, says authority is established within God’s order, calls the ruler God’s servant, identifies the sword as punishment for wrongdoing, and joins taxation to conscience. Whatever limits a Christian interpreter places around the passage, its placement of civil authority beneath God is intentional, not ironic. It makes government part of a moral hierarchy. Romans 13 says this directly, and its central place in Christian political thought is well established. A Cambridge treatment calls it Christianity’s most important scriptural text on political authority.
Early Christianity placed duties inside existing hierarchies rather than abolishing all of them. Enslaved people were told to obey masters; wives to submit to husbands; believers to honour rulers. Those instructions remain plainly visible in the New Testament. Masters, husbands, and rulers also received moral obligations, sometimes demanding ones. The relationship was supposed to become more loving without necessarily becoming equal. That strategy helped communities live inside Rome. It also gave later authorities a scriptural lever: once the authority had persuaded a believer that a particular action protected order, family, civilization, or God, the commandment could move the believer’s hand.
Church and state do not need to be legally joined for a state to weaponize a church against itself. A government can amplify obedient clergy, reward allied institutions, frame opponents as threats to the faithful, regulate access, control information about danger, and join national identity to religious identity. It can make Romans 13 louder than Revelation’s image of empire as a beast, louder than the prophets confronting kings, and louder than the apostles refusing commands they believe violate God. Comparative research on authoritarian regimes finds both formal and informal methods of co-opting religious groups; legal establishment is only one possible channel. The institutions of religious co-optation are broader than parties or official church structures.
Christianity nevertheless put a permanent accusation inside empire. Its God entered history as a poor Jewish subject whom Rome successfully tortured and killed. That image breaks the equation between victory and divine favour: in the Christian story, the empire can win the public contest and still execute God. The faith imagines every people invited into one body, obligates care for the poor, and places the hungry, imprisoned, and humiliated near the centre of divine concern. Christian institutions developed organized forms of charity, drawing heavily upon Jewish ethical foundations. The growth of charity in Christian society is historically documented.
Then the empire acquired the cross. Conquest could become mission. Cultural destruction could become civilization. Forced conversion could become rescue. Papal doctrines helped form a legal-theological language for Christian claims over non-Christian lands, later remembered under the “Doctrine of Discovery”; the Vatican repudiated that doctrine’s use in 2023. Its own statement acknowledges the suffering produced by those policies.
Christianity therefore did two things at once. It crowned empire, and it made empire morally self-contradictory. Enslaved and colonized people, abolitionists, labour organizers, and civil-rights movements could turn the civilization’s professed God against the civilization’s conduct. They did not receive liberation as a gift from benevolent empire; they forced the contradiction into public life. Secular thought, Jewish ethics, Indigenous traditions, feminism, science, anti-colonial movements, and political revolution also transformed the West. The defensible Christian claim is not that Christianity invented morality. It is that Christianity changed the moral trajectory of Western empire by giving domination both a sacred grammar and a sacred accuser.
The animated series Castlevania offers a compact artistic image of this contradiction. Fiction is not evidence that history happened in a particular way. It can still reveal the shape of an argument. In the first season, a bishop has Lisa killed as a witch, helps unleash catastrophe, and then teaches the people to blame the wandering Speakers who stayed to help. In episode four, a daemon enters the bishop’s church and says, “God is not here. This is an empty box.” Then proceeds to “kiss” the bishop to death within the priest’s own sacred structure. Later, an ordinary properly ordained priest successfully makes holy water. Both moments appear in the episode transcript.
The point is not that God, ordination, or religion is fake. Within the story, the holy water works. The point is that office, title, and building do not guarantee divine presence. The bishop sincerely—or desperately—identifies his institutional judgment with God’s judgment. Once he classifies Lisa as witch and the Speakers as the cause of danger, faithful people can commit murder while experiencing themselves as defenders of righteousness. The institution does not merely order the action. It furnishes the moral world in which the action makes sense.
This is Part 5 of 13 in a long-form essay totaling 12,623 words. If this held your attention, return tomorrow for Part 6 and follow the remaining eight parts over the next eight days. If you arrived here late, begin with Part 1 and read forward through whatever has already been posted. Each part develops an idea of its own, but the larger argument builds across the entire series.
The worldview behind this essay is something I have sensed intuitively, observed, questioned, and slowly learned to articulate over decades. I am here now, expressing it as clearly as I can with the tools available to me, for whatever impact one man can still make on an underused platform.
I would genuinely appreciate a like, comment, or share. But I’m not your boss, and you have free will, so use it however you like. Subscribe or don’t. Support me through Ko-fi or don’t. I would rather your engagement be freely given than morally extracted. Consider this merely a reminder that we all play a role in building a better world, and that includes you.
After performing a quick analysis of 50-150WPM reading speed, which resulted in a 1.3 to 4 hour total read time, so I decided to turn this into a 13 part series:
- How Difference Became Hierarchy, How Hierarchy Became Holy, and Why the World Is Still on Fire
- The Ladder, the Sheath, and the Loop
- 1984: When Power Becomes God
- How Groups Inherit—and Remake—the Past
- Before Christianity, There Was Empire
- Three Religions in One Difficult Family
- Other Empires, Other Metaphysics
- How Difference Becomes Permission
- Race: Ancestry Turned into Destiny
- Misogyny: Hierarchy Disguised as Love
- Transphobia: Panic at a Moving Boundary
- Xenophobia: A Visible Enemy for an Invisible System
- Misandry: When Resistance Inherits the Old Machine
- Empire After the Flag
- Sin, Yu Yevon, and the Revolution That Returns
- Scripture, Contradiction, and Human Inspiration
- God Above, God Within
- The Final Refusal
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