The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History.

• Author: Larson, Bruce

Economists curious to see what sociologists have to offer their work could scarcely do better than explore Rodney Stark's fascinating, provocative, and very readable book The Rise of Christianity. In its pages one finds a thorough commitment to using social science to understand the development of Christianity from its early stages through the conversion of Constantine the Great and his subsequent edict of toleration [p. 313]. As Stark sees it "Constantine's conversion would better be seen as a response to the massive exponential wave in progress, not as its cause" [p. 10]. In these few words one glimpses Stark's approach - logical, empirical, and not content with conventional wisdom.

Stark has used his approach to great effect in a growing list of books, including The Future of Religion (1985), with William Sims Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (1987), also with Bainbridge, and The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (1992), with Roger Finke. The distinctive characteristic of his present book is the application of economic and sociological concepts to a time and place far removed from his previous investigations.

The concepts he uses are relatively simple - exponential growth, networks, and rational choice - and he brings to his work a knowledge of history which he frankly admits is not that of a New Testament scholar [p. xii]. But he artfully combines them to provide, insofar as possible, naturalistic explanations of the essential phenomena. He makes clear that one doesn't need miracles to explain the growth of the Christian population from the year 40 to 300, for a growth rate of 3.42 percent per year, not unlike the growth of the Latter-day Saints during the last one hundred years, accounts for things rather nicely [pp. 6-7].

The growth rate of the Christian population is explained through birth rates, death rates, and conversion rates, all three of which were strongly affected by "the Christian values of love and charity" [p. 74] and an environment which was usually urban and subject to epidemics and other disasters; apostasy rates, which parallel conversion...