PAGANISM AND STARK’S MARKET MODEL OF RELIGION
In the penultimate chapter of The Rise of Christianity (1997, 191–208), after
explaining much of Christianity’s growth in its first three centuries with lit-
tle reference to rival religions other than Judaism, Rodney Stark properly
turns to the pagan competition. What weaknesses in paganism, he asks,
facilitated Christianity’s remarkable success? Stark proposes a number of
factors, none of them particularly new. What is novel is the way in which
he shows these factors at work within an economic model of religions com-
peting as quasi-firms in a quasi-market (Stark 1997, 193–94). Religions
thrive or go under for essentially the same reasons as businesses: they suc-
ceed or fail in attracting and retaining consumers of their “product lines.”
Stark rightly points out that his approach allows him to “focus on the
behaviour of religious firmsrather than only upon religious consumers”
(1997, 194). In my view, Stark should have pushed his market analogy here
further than he does. He could have given the coup de grâceto that old
incubus on the study of competing religions of antiquity, namely, the deep
spiritual malaise that was supposed to have afflicted Roman society in the
imperial age (see Harland’s deconstruction of this myth, chapter 2) and to
have been remedied, inter alia,by the mystery cults, Judaism, and Christian-
ity. A hard-headed business approach suggests, however, that product often
precedes need and actually creates it. Which of us ten years ago needed a
computer of the power, speed, and versatility now deemed essential to our
trade? Likewise, might it not have been the production and marketing of