Christendom review by Josh

Christendom is a well written and insightful account of Christianity's growth from a minor cult into the dominant religion of Western world.

As Heather points out in the introduction, historically, most church histories have been written by Christians. For those authors, the spread of Christianity has seemed inevitable. It spread because it was true and God wanted it to spread.

Christendom, by contrast, is told from a non-Christian (though not anti-Christian) perspective. As a result, Heather spends a great deal of time discussing the role of contingency, chance, and self-interest in the conversion of the West.

Self-interest in particular played a larger role in conversion than many Christians today are probably aware. The religion initially spread almost exclusively among the urban elite (who were a tiny percentage of the population), who often embraced it for strategic reasons without necessarily knowing much about the actual substance of what they were signing up for.

One reason that becoming Christian benefited rulers is that (until the Investiture Controversy of the late 11th-12th century) rulers appointed bishops in their land, giving them de facto control over the church and marginalizing it's role as a potential competing power base.

One difficulty facing any writer on the medieval period is that a great deal has been lost. The church had a penchant for burning the writings (and sometimes the adherents) of other religions. So, there are many figures and beliefs that we only learn about from their, often scathing, Christian critics. Heather does his best to work around these constraints - analyzing and sometimes disputing the claims of primary sources. He also acknowledges there are major gaps in the record that simply can't be filled in without additional evidence.

Despite it's enormous scope, the book coheres surprisingly well as a narrative. It's not just 1000 years of one damn thing after another, but a story with some surprising twists and turns. Nonetheless, it may be too detailed for many readers. Heather dedicates a great deal of time to analyzing long forgotten historical controversies and disputes, which are important to the story but could probably be abridged.