Christianity and women

I am reading now the brilliant The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion written by the sociologist Rodney Stark, one of the most active proponents of the Rational Choice Theory in the sociology of religion.

Although I am not a fan of this approach (to be discussed later) I came to the very intriguing chapter 7, where Stark affirms that women were, for a variety of reasons, crucial to the survival and later expansion of Christianity in the Roman Empire.

Here I present in a concise form the 6 major claims:  

1. Women in the early Christian communities were considerably better off than their pagan and even Jewish counterparts. They enjoyed more security and equality in marriage.

“Hellenic women lived in semi-seclusion, the upper classes more than others, but all Hellenic women had a very circumscribed existence; in privileged families the women were denied access to the front rooms of the house. Roman women were not secluded, but in many other ways they were no less subordinated to male control. Neither Hellenic nor Roman women had any significant say in who they married, or when. (…) Roman wives had very limited property rights; Hellenic women had none. Neither could be a party to contracts. (…)

Everywhere Jewish girls were married very young to whomever their father chose, they were easily and quite often divorced by their husbands, but wives could not seek a divorce except under very unusual circumstances, such as the husband being impotent or a leper.”

2. Because of the widespread among Pagans practice of infanticide, to which female babies were more exposed than male babies, substantially more Christian (and Jewish) female infants lived.

In Pagan families female babies were routinely killed because boys were favored. In contrast, Christians condemned the infanticide by considering it murder.

3. Christian women were married at a later age when they were more mature physically and emotionally.  

4. Pagan and Jewish women were divorced frequently without having any say in the process. In contrast, Christianity has explicitly condemned the remarriage and adultery, making it a sin for a male to divorce his wife: “And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery” (Matt. 19:9).

5. Devout Christian married couples may have had sex more often than did the average pagan couple, because brides were more mature when they married and because husbands were less likely to take up with other women.

6. There was a shortage of women in the Roman Empire in the first three centuries of Christianity mostly because of infanticide. It is being estimated that “there were 131 males per 100 females in Rome, rising to 140 males per 100 females in the rest of Italy, Asia Minor, and North Africa while Christians had their rates of females not affected by infanticide… If women made up 43 percent of the pagan population of Rome (assuming a ratio of 131 males to 100 females), and if each bore four children, that would be 172 infants per 100 pagans, making no allowance for exposure or infant mortality. But if women made up, say, 55 percent of the Christian population (which may well be low), that would be 220 infants per 100 Christians—a difference of 48 infants.”

All these demographic and gender factors combined, argues Stark, have helped Christianity not only to survive in the short term (immediately after the death of Jesus the community of his followers numbered not more than 30-40 people), but in longer term to  become the religious group with most adherents and to become the official religion of the Roman Empire.