There could be no question of Ganymede and his peers banding together
in some sect-like movement to reform the cult of Jupiter on the colony’s
capitol, in order to make it somehow a more meaningful religion. The very
idea is absurd. One notes, however, that proper religion, in Ganymede’s
view, is not solely a matter of performance. Right attitude (mentibus puris)
also plays a part. There is also a modest “compensator”: the pilgrimage to
the capitol is to be barefoot.
CONCLUSION
On the issue of cult, sect, and class, Stark’s principle fails because its cat-
egories of “cult” and “sect” do not apply across the board in the religious
world of Greco-Roman society. Why, then, does the principle hold, or appear
to hold, for early Christianity? What holds, I suspect, is not a principle at
all, but merely a comparison—an illuminating one, to be sure, for it is pre-
cisely the sort of interesting comparison that Jonathan Z. Smith encourages
scholars in the study of religion to make, the essence, indeed, of our “drudg-
ery divine” (1990, 53)—that early Christianity is like modern cults and
unlike modern sects in that it over-recruited among the (relatively) privi-
leged. When all is said and done, Stark’s generalizations are not universal
laws of human religious behaviour within any social context, but analogies
that happen to work well in the comparison of early Christianity and new
religious movements in modern Western society. The mystery and other
associative cults of Greco-Roman antiquity might be fitted, with some
adjustments, onto the same comparative grid, but not the paganism (or
paganisms) of public religion.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
An earlier version of this chapter was presented to the Religious Rivalries
Seminar of the CSBS at its 1999 meeting. I am grateful to members of the
seminar for numerous helpful comments, and especially to the session’s
respondent, Peter Beyer, for his lively and lucid explication of rational
choice theory, which underlies Stark’s book. I am likewise indebted to
Joseph Bryant for his sage advice and for sharing with me his critical per-
spective on rational choice theory (see Bryant 1997).