"...Christian marriage and childrearing immediately set Christians apart. According to [Rodney] Stark, Christian husbands and wives genuinely tried to love one another, as their religion required. Their mutual affection and their openness to fertility led to a higher birthrate, and thus to a still higher growth rate for the early Church. They did not abort their children, nor did husbands endanger their wives’ lives by doing so. The early Christians’ respect for the dignity of marriage made the faith enormously attractive to pagan women. So women made up a disproportionate number of the early converts. This in turn made Christianity enormously attractive to pagan men—who could not find many pagan women to marry, but saw young ladies attending the Christian liturgy in great numbers."
Posted on: Tue, 16 Jul 2013 14:39:28 +0000
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