Reply #142: Of course, whenever religions become associated with state authority, political issues

[struggle4progress]

will be modeled as religious disputes

It's not a uniquely Roman phenomenon, but the state itself had a religious aspect in the time of the Empire, and Caesar Augustus literally Son of God, Savior of the World, just as Hirohito was divine two millennia later. The pre-Christian Roman state enforced its religious status, in various ways, with varying enthusiasm according to varying circumstances -- more stringently in time of crisis. As the empire began to collapse, the Roman state really demanded religious tokens of loyalty, rather resembling the demands for religious orthodoxy that accompanied the political upheavals in the Reformation era. When later Roman emperors called themselves Christian, they nevertheless operated within the same cultural context, with similar understanding of the relation between statecraft and religion. At the time of Theodosius, the Empire has been in crisis for decades, and it is about to irrevocably split: it is not a sudden innovation of Theodosius, to regard religion as a face of politics, since everyone then regarded it as "common sense" that the state had a religious status


... suddenly in the middle of the 3rd century, the year 250, the Emperor Decius decides that Christians are a real enemy of the Roman order, that they must be dealt with empire-wide, with all the police power that the emperor can bring to bear upon them. And he issues a decree that everyone has to sacrifice to the Roman gods ... It's not a criminal offense to be a Christian. What you have to do is get a ticket, a lebevos, a chit saying that you have sacrificed for the well-being of the empire ... http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/why/martyrs.html#perpetua#ixzz1O8sajpz7

... Then they came to me, and my father immediately appeared with my boy, and withdrew me from the step, and said in a supplicating tone, 'Have pity on your babe.' And Hilarianus the procurator, who had just received the power of life and death in the place of the proconsul Minucius Timinianus, who was deceased, said, 'Spare the grey hairs of your father, spare the infancy of your boy, offer sacrifice for the well-being of the emperors.' And I replied, 'I will not do so.' Hilarianus said, 'Are you a Christian?' And I replied, 'I am a Christian.' And as my father stood there to cast me down from the faith, he was ordered by Hilarianus to be thrown down, and was beaten with rods. And my father's misfortune grieved me as if I myself had been beaten, I so grieved for his wretched old age. The procurator then delivers judgment on all of us, and condemns us to the wild beasts ... http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/tertullian24.html