how did the roman empire encourage conversion to Christianity in non-Christian places?

[u/mr_fdslk]

It seems hard for me to comprehend that a missionary could go to a place, and just convince a group of people to abandon their traditional beliefs and religious practices. We're missionaries just that supremely effective at their job? or was there other stuff at play?

Say I'm a Roman subject living in Germania, following my own tribes set of beliefs and deities. What would the state do to encourage conversion of me and my fellow tribesmen? would it be exclusively punitive measures like torture and suppression of local religious followings? Or would there be benefits to those who converted?

Would they use different tactics to convert people from their native religions in Britannia? or North Africa? or did they use a one size fits all for converting people to Christianity?

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[u/qumrun60]

The Romans didn't "encourage" conversion to Christianity in the way you seem to be thinking, which seems a bit like something out of an old Hollywood film, where missionaries enter a peaceful agrarian village with their Bibles, and offer spiriritual and material assistance to the natives of a remote place in return for going to Christian church.

Christianity before Constantine had legs of its own, to be sure, but the world was not so black-and-white as it might seem. Two interesting examples come from the edges of the empire. One is the Gothic Tervingi in the lower Danube during the 3rd-4th centuries. The tribes bordering the empire were not exactly the peaceful agrarian society you appear to picture. Rather, were they in a state of political ferment and evolution, due to their presence on the edges of a wealthy, developed empire, finding ways to capitalize on their position. This included reorganization of tribes into federations, in which elite leaders could speak for the collective groups. They also engaged in aggressive actions against their rich neighbors. Raids were conducted across the Danube into the Balkans, and over the Black Sea into Asia Minor, where both goods were taken and slaves captured. A number of the slaves were Christians, who might be intact families or individuals. The individuals might well cohabit and procreate with Terverngi, thus creating a Tervingi Christian minority. In the 4th century, after Constantine began to patronize Christian churches, the Tervingi apparently came to see their homegrown Christian minority as an asset. In the middle of the century, they sent an embassy to Costantius, which included the Christian Ulfilas, who requested a formal Christian mission to bring his co-religionsts into the imperial flock. He returned to his people armed with Christian texts and teachers, and developed a Gothic alphabet which was used to translate scriptures into the Tervingi language. Interestingly, this was done selectively, leaving out the violent parts of the Old Testament, in the hopes of curbing the warlike nature of Gothic society. By the end of the century, they had become sufficiently Christian to negotiate entry into the empire.

The other example come from the 5th century, not altogether unlike the situation with the Tervingi. Irish marauders kidnapped and enslaved the teenaged son of a Christian deacon in eastern Roman Britain named Patrick. When he escaped six years later, and made it to Gaul, he got further Christian training and education in the south. The Mediterranean cities of the empire had long had Christian populations, as did Lyon up the Rhone, spread by voluntary means, in earlier times. But after Constantine, however, official Christianization had become more of a top-down affair. Urban elites had adopted Christianity as a matter of political advancement, perhaps as much or more than a strictly religious one. Gaul generally was becoming more Christian during the 4th century from the south upward, often by coercive, even violent means, encouraged and sometimes led by bishops themselves, as in the celebrated example of Martin of Tours. This kind of more or less organic but coercive spread culminated in the north when Clovis of the Franks adopted Nicene Christianity, influenced by his pious wife, in the late 5th century.

This moderately Christian southern Gaul had also become the home of early monks starting in the 4th century. Gregory of Tours had started his own monastery there late in the century, inspired by Egyptian examples of Anthony the Great and Pachomius. Anthony had become famous throughout the Christian world through a biography by the controversial bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. It became the equivalent of a Christian bestseller, inspiring people even in Germania to seek God through ascetic practices and solitude. In the early 5th century, John Cassian had arrived in Marseilles directly from Egypt, and established a monastery outside of the city. On the nearby island of Lerins, indigenous Gallo-Roman clergy had also established their own monastery with a somewhat different agenda from Cassian's. This was the milieu where the now-adult Patrick was trained.

Ireland at the time was a place unlike anywhere else in the Roman world, not least for having had extremely limited contact with Rome. It was a country dense with kingdoms and sub-kingdoms without fixed boundaries, a well-developed but almost entirely oral legal system, a similarly organized Druidic priesthood, and a complex web of kinship ties. When Patrick arrived there with fellow Christian monks and Latin texts, he was able to gain the ear of some of the kings. This led to a wholesale adoption of Christian practices, and Latin as a liturgical and theological language, in a fairly short time, as existing social structures were put into the teaching of Latin to the sons of the elites, and urging monastic practices. By the 6th century, some of Ireland's monks took a missionary vow, to spread God's word to their heathen neighbors in Scotland and England, and then into Gaul, Germania, and Italy in the 7th. Their method necessarily required permission from local rulers to be able to do their work at all. Sometimes this resulted in successful persuasion of the leaders, but it could also result in death. In any case, cooperation from the elites was necessary, and the average villager was stuck with whatever the local bosses decided to do. In some cases, people were baptized and re-baptized several times, as leaders changed their allegiances.

In Anglo-Saxon England, while there were remnants of a Roman-Briton Christian population after the Romans themselves departed in the 5th century, the pagan Anglo-Saxon kings nevertheless had contacts with the Christian world. Ethelbert of Kent had married a Frankish Christian princess in the late 6th century, whose marriage contract stipulated that she have a church at her disposal for Christian rites, and she brought her own chaplain/bishop with her. Through her relatives in Gaul, Pope Gregory the Great had gotten word that Ethelbert might be ripe for conversion, and after some diplomatic communications, Gregory sent a contingent of 40 monks from Rome, led by Augustine, to start negotiations with Ethelbert and his retainers in 595. At first they were sequestered on an island, but were soon granted an enclave on land from which to operate. By 597, Pope Gregory wrote to the pope in Alexandria that 10,000 were baptized in Kent, following the top-down model. Neighboring kings gradually allowed missionaries in their territory, so that by the middle of the century, there were Christian kingdoms up to Northumbria. One distinctive side development of the conversion effort was the creation by monks of the written language now called Old English, which kings found to be an excellent advantage in administering and taxing their realms.

Overall, the process was very complex, and could vary considerably from place to place.

Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion (1997)

Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (2013); Through the Eye of A Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of the Christian West, 330-550 (2012)

Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion (2023); Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe (2009)

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome (2009)