When Christianity Moved from the Margins to the Throne
White Theology and White Power Part II
The first essay in this series argued that all theology is done somewhere, by someone, within history. If that is true, then one of the most consequential changes in Christian history occurred when the social location of Christianity itself changed.
For its first three centuries, Christianity existed without control of the Roman state. Christians could persuade, preach, organize communities, care for the poor, argue about doctrine and sometimes confront political authority. What they could not do was command the resources of the Roman Empire.
Then came Constantine.
It is tempting to begin the history of “white theology” here. That would be a mistake. Constantine lived in the fourth century, more than a thousand years before the modern racial category of whiteness developed. The Roman Empire was ethnically and geographically diverse, and many of Christianity’s most influential theologians came from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.
The importance of Constantine is different.
Constantine did not create white Christianity. He helped create the conditions under which Christianity learned what it meant to possess imperial power.
That distinction matters for everything that follows in this series.
Christians had experienced periods of Roman persecution before Constantine. The Great Persecution initiated under Diocletian in 303 was particularly severe in parts of the empire. Yet within little more than a decade, Christianity’s circumstances changed dramatically.
Constantine and Licinius agreed on a policy of religious toleration in 313, commonly associated with the Edict of Milan. Constantine subsequently favored Christianity through imperial patronage, supported the construction of churches, granted privileges to clergy and involved himself increasingly in disputes within the church.[1]
One popular version of the story says Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome.
He did not.
That development occurred later. What Constantine did was still revolutionary: imperial hostility gave way to imperial favor. A religious movement that had periodically experienced the coercive power of Rome now had extraordinary access to it.
The theological problem changed with the political circumstances.
Christians had long asked: How should followers of Jesus live under Caesar?
Increasingly they would have to ask another question: What should followers of Jesus do when Caesar wants to help them?
And eventually: What happens when Caesar calls himself one of them?
The transformation can be seen at the Council of Nicaea in 325.
The theological dispute associated with Arius did not originate with Constantine, and Constantine did not invent the doctrine ultimately affirmed at Nicaea. Bishops and theologians were already engaged in intense arguments about the relationship between the Father and the Son.
What was new was the emperor’s role.
Constantine summoned bishops from across the empire and brought imperial resources and authority into an effort to resolve Christian disagreement. The council produced the Nicene Creed, although the controversy continued for decades.[2]
Something historically important had happened even if no one in the room could have known all its consequences.
An emperor had become a major participant in the institutional process by which Christians attempted to resolve theological conflict.
That created possibilities the persecuted church had never possessed.
It also created temptations.
Political rulers value unity because divided populations can threaten political order. Churches value truth because theology concerns convictions believers consider ultimately important. Once church and imperial power became closely connected, those two concerns—unity and truth—could reinforce one another in ways that were constructive but also dangerous.
The emperor could help the church gather.
The emperor could finance its institutions.
The emperor could protect Christians.
But imperial power could also make one Christian faction considerably more powerful than another.
Theology had acquired access to coercion.
Eusebius of Caesarea helps us see the magnitude of the psychological and theological transformation. He had lived close enough to persecution to know what Roman hostility could mean for Christians. Then he witnessed an emperor who favored Christianity.
His writings about Constantine sometimes sound astonishing to modern readers because political events could now be interpreted through the language of divine favor and providence. Yet Eusebius should not be reduced to Constantine’s public-relations agent. His response reflects a genuine theological problem confronting Christians of his generation: How do you understand history when the empire that once threatened the church suddenly begins building churches?[3]
The question remains surprisingly contemporary.
When political power harms Christians, Christians usually have little difficulty recognizing political power as something that requires moral scrutiny.
What happens when political power protects them?
The danger is subtle. Protection can begin to look like providence. Political success can begin to look like divine approval. The interests of the church can gradually become difficult to distinguish from the interests of the state.
Christianity did not become an imperial religion overnight. Constantine’s reign was a turning point, not the completed transformation.
Later fourth-century emperors carried the relationship considerably further. In 380, Theodosius I issued the decree commonly known as the Edict of Thessalonica, endorsing Nicene Christianity as the authoritative form of Christianity within the empire. Additional legislation and political developments intensified the connection between imperial authority and Christian orthodoxy.[4]
The reversal is historically remarkable.
Christianity began within the Roman world as the faith of people proclaiming a crucified man executed by Roman authority.
Within several centuries, Roman authority was helping decide which Christians possessed legitimate churches.
That does not mean the church simply became the servant of the emperor.
History is more complicated.
Bishops acquired enough authority that they could sometimes confront political rulers. Ambrose of Milan’s relationship with Theodosius is one famous example of the continuing struggle over the boundaries of ecclesial and imperial authority. Monastic and ascetic movements also created alternative Christian communities whose relationship to wealth, status and political power could be deeply critical.
Christianity’s encounter with empire therefore produced conflict as well as accommodation.
But something fundamental had changed.
Christian institutions now possessed property, patronage, political access and increasingly public authority. Bishops could become important civic figures. Theological disputes could carry political consequences. Imperial governments could intervene in ecclesiastical controversies, while Christian leaders could influence emperors.
Christianity was no longer simply preaching to power.
It was learning to operate within power.
That is the bridge between this essay and the larger argument of White Theology and White Power.
The racial ideology examined later in this series did not originate with Constantine. Neither did European colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, the Doctrine of Discovery, segregation, Christian nationalism or modern concepts of white supremacy.
We should not commit the very historical mistake this series is intended to expose by projecting later racial categories backward onto people who did not possess them.
But history also has institutional memory.
Ideas about Christian rulers, sacred political order, religious uniformity, divinely favored kingdoms and the relationship between ecclesiastical authority and governmental power did not disappear when the Western Roman Empire fragmented.
They were inherited, debated and transformed.
Over centuries, Christianity became deeply embedded within European kingdoms and institutions. European expansion later carried Christian theology alongside conquest, colonization and missionary activity. Eventually those systems encountered emerging concepts of race and whiteness.
The result would not simply be Christianity plus racism.
It would become something more structurally significant: Christian theology operating within societies whose political, economic and racial hierarchies could themselves be interpreted as part of the proper ordering of the world.
That story is still ahead of us.
For now, Constantine presents a more fundamental theological problem.
The problem is not that Christians obtained political influence. Political power can protect religious liberty, defend vulnerable people, restrain violence and serve justice. Christians have no theological obligation to make themselves politically powerless.
The question is what happens after power arrives.
Does theology remain capable of judging the ruler who favors it?
Can Christians distinguish the Kingdom of God from the political order that protects them?
Can a church benefiting from power still recognize injustice produced by that power?
Can Christians tell the difference between political success and divine approval?
Those questions began long before modern whiteness.
They become indispensable once Christianity and white power eventually meet.
Essay #1 asked why the social location of dominant theology so often goes unnamed.
Essay #2 adds another question:
What happens to theology when its social location moves closer to the throne?
That question will follow Christianity for the next seventeen centuries.
Notes
[1] Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall, trans., Eusebius: Life of Constantine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Modern scholarship emphasizes that Christianity did not become the official religion of the empire under Constantine, even though his patronage placed the church on an entirely different institutional footing.
[2] Henry Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee to Gregory the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Young Richard Kim, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Constantine summoned the council shortly after becoming sole emperor; scholarship distinguishes his political and institutional role from the theological disputes that preceded and continued after Nicaea.
[3] Eusebius, Life of Constantine; Michael J. Hollerich, Eusebius of Caesarea’s Commentary on Isaiah: Christian Exegesis in the Age of Constantine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). Recent scholarship cautions against the older reduction of Eusebius to a simple imperial mouthpiece while still recognizing the profound effect of the Constantinian settlement on Christian political and theological imagination.
[4] Codex Theodosianus 16.1.2; Stewart J. Brown, Charlotte Methuen and Andrew Spicer, eds., The Church and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Theodosius’s decree of February 27, 380, endorsed Nicene Christianity within imperial law, although scholars continue to debate precisely how the decree should be characterized and how rapidly a fully coercive Christian imperial order emerged.
[5] Neil B. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). The Ambrose-Theodosius relationship is important precisely because it demonstrates that Christianization of imperial power did not simply make bishops subordinate to emperors; it generated continuing contests over which authority could judge the other.
Principal Sources
Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall, trans., Eusebius: Life of Constantine; H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops; Henry Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society; Young Richard Kim, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea; Neil B. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan; Codex Theodosianus 16.1.2.