I’m interested in ideologies. What is an ideology? How, in practice, do ideologies gain followers? How do they organize? How, and why, do they suppress competing ideologies? The first five hundred years of Christianity are an epic of ideological warfare: the story of a tiny religious cult which grew to dominate a continent-spanning empire, and then, after the empire’s collapse, built an organization amidst the ruins which would endure for a thousand years. One core assumption I make is that people’s actions are moral and rational within the framework of their own ideology. Given Christian beliefs, it was rational for Christians […]