1The Rise of Universalizing Religions

CORE OBJECTIVES

Around 180 CE, twelve Christians, five women and seven men, stood trial before the provincial governor at Carthage. Their crime was refusal to worship the gods of the Roman Empire. While the governor argued for the simplicity of his religion with its devotion to “the protecting spirit of our lord the emperor,” one of the accused Christians retorted that his own lord was “the king of kings and emperor of all nations.” This distinction was an unbridgeable gap between the governor and the Christians. The governor condemned them all. “Thanks be to God!” cried the Christians, and straightaway they were beheaded. As the centuries unfolded, however, the governor’s old Roman ideas of the supremacy of an emperor-lord would give way to the martyrs’ devotion to their Lord God as emperor over all. As with Christianity’s claim of an “emperor of all nations,” a religion’s capacity for universalizing—particularly its broad appeal across diverse peoples and cultures—became ever more important to its success.

From 300 to 600 CE, the entire Afro-Eurasian landmass experienced a surge of religious activity. In the Roman Empire, Christianity became the state-sanctioned faith. In India, Vedic religion (Brahmanism) evolved into a more formal spiritual system called Hinduism. Buddhism spread across northern India, central Asia, and China. Around the same time, the peoples living in sub-Saharan Africa and Mesoamerica, places where universalizing religion had yet to penetrate, also created common cultures that played a similar cohesive role in binding societies together. The Bantu-speaking peoples, residing in the southeastern corner of present-day Nigeria, began to spread their way of life throughout the entire southern half of the landmass. Similarly, across the Atlantic Ocean, the Maya established political and cultural institutions over a large portion of Mesoamerica. Across much of the world, communities that had previously been scattered began to converge either through shared faith or through the spread of common cultural practices. (See Map 1.1.)

This integration was facilitated in Afro-Eurasia in part by the spread of what we might call universalizing religions. Two faiths in this era—Christianity and Buddhism—fit the model for this type of religion particularly well. Islam does as well, though it arises in the following century. Two older world religions, Judaism and Hinduism, are generally considered “ethnic” as opposed to universalizing because they are confined to specific groups or places and generally do not engage in proselytism, even if they consider their truths valid for all the world. Six main features that characterize universalizing religions are their appeal to diverse populations (men and women, freeborn and enslaved, rich and poor); their adaptability as they moved from one cultural and geographical area to another; their promotion of universal rules and principles to guide behavior that transcended place, time, and specific cultural practices; their proselytizing of new believers by energetic and charismatic missionaries; the deep sense of community felt by their converts despite, and perhaps because of, their many demands on followers; and—in the case of Christianity, and, to a lesser extent, Buddhism—the support given to them by powerful empires. Even as the Roman Empire and the Han dynasty began to crumble, these universalizing traditions continued to flourish in their wake.

The peoples living in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, too, reached beyond their local communities, creating common cultures across wider geographical areas. As in Eurasia and North Africa, political and cultural transformations undergirded the emergence of these common belief systems, even though they were not connected to universalizing religions. In Africa, the Bantu-speaking peoples, residing in the southeastern corner of present-day Nigeria, began to spread their way of life throughout the entire southern half of the African landmass. Similarly, across the Atlantic Ocean, the Maya established political and cultural institutions over a large portion of Mesoamerica and laid the foundations of a common culture. As in Eurasia and North Africa, political and cultural transformations undergirded the emergence of these common belief systems.

Across Afro-Eurasia, universalizing religions were on the move in the fourth to sixth centuries CE. (See Map 1.2.) Religious leaders carrying written texts (books, scrolls, or tablets of wood or palm leaf) traveled widely. Christians from Persia went to China. Buddhists journeyed north from the Indian subcontinent to what would later become Afghanistan and used the caravan routes of central Asia to reach China. Voyages, translations, long-distance pilgrimages, and sweeping conversion campaigns remapped the spiritual landscape of the world. New religious leaders were the brokers of more universal but also more intolerant worldviews, premised on a distinct relationship between gods and their subjects expressed through specific rituals and attitudes. Religions and their brokers profoundly integrated societies. But they also created new ways to drive them apart.