Liberal Christians leave churches, so represent a poor source of converts. One might as well convert the air.

The problem with the “growing churches don’t like non-breeders” theory is that many of the same religions which are deriding homosexuals also have monastic orders. So it’s ok for a person to become a monk or nun, but not to prefer the sexual company of a member of the same gender?

Agreed.

Likewise, one would expect that male bisexuality and heterosexual adultery would be expected in a simply-make-more-believers model. Tom’s statements just don’t make sense.

Lere,

Thakns for the comments! I don’t know about the replacement rate of the Empire (as opposed to just cities), though it does seem that the establishment of informal hospitals for the sick lead to a stable and exponential increase in Christianity over time. [1]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Christianity-Marginal-Movement-Religious/dp/0060677015

I’ve read that a Roman soldier had to wait the 20-24 years until he retired before he could marry.

The mystery religions such as Mithras are said to have been popular among soldiers and the upper classes in the late empire.

It is claimed that Christians outbred the other religions in the Roman Empire.

As Seccombe (1992) points out, the Roman Empire suffered from negative population growth. Not enough people married and had children to offset relatively high mortality among infants and young adults. In breaking down local collective identities, whether ethnic or regional, the Empire had created an atomized and increasingly anonymous society without the carrots and sticks that tightly knit societies use to push individuals down the path of family formation”

Population growth may lead to misery or happiness, but from ancient Sumeria to modern Lebanon, population growth rates lead to political power and influence.

Hmm. Not sure I’d be so general. Rather, in the advanced economies, encouraging population growth is important; in the developing economies, the effect of population growth is more ambiguous.

I think it’s fair to say that Tom means that in the past, encouraging population growth was important, so the Church was against homosexuality for that reason.

Agreed.

Of course, in the present, encouraging population growth is important. Nothing has changed there.

Curtis,

Thanks for the insightful comment.

Population growth is and was an important factor in deciding resource distribution, but this is not limited to Malthusian environments. Lebanon is nowhere near the Malthusian equilibrium, but the Shia proclivity for children necessarily diverts resources to that growth.

I think your point on homosexuality is interesting. The religious beliefs of the Israelites were largely identical to their neighbors (Eloah, the Elohim, Satan, etc.), with Moses, and four characteristics of his story. Unlike much of the cosmology, these two traits are entirely distinctive for the Jews

1. The Egyptian Exile
2. YHWH
3. Mount Sinai
4. The Law

Israelite beliefs apart from these characteristics appear to have been indistinguishable from their neighbors. With these attributes, the Israelites were able to pull the same trick as the Qin (with the Chinese) and the Macedonians (with the Greeks) — to affect a permanent cultural hegemony over their host nation. The prohibition on homosexuality, along with other distinctive aspects of the Law, would lead to greater in-group cohesion among of the people that were the 0GW Army of YHWH (Joshua 5:13-15).

“Tom’s point seems to be something about cultural group selection, but I don’t see how it’s Malthusian at all. ”

Not sure what Tom’s point actually may be, but in a world with limited supplies and resources for supporting a population, wild population growth in one group would promote that group’s ability to fight for, and acquire, and utilize, the resources to the detriment of the other group(s). I.e., the “Malthusian Past” may have been fact, since technological advancements vis-a-vis agriculture and trade would not necessarily keep up with the exponential population growth regardless of who is procreating “more.” This in turn promotes greater competition for resources, and at that time numbers (of people) would be an important deciding factor in who could secure those resources. Perhaps you are interpreting Tom’s use of “our” in “our Malthusian past” incorrectly; perhaps he is not referring to “our Christian” Malthusian past so much as “our shared” Malthusian past — so this confounding of that past with Christianity, as if he is referring to a Christian Malthusianism rather than a general Malthusian past (in which many groups existed) is leading you astray.

As for homosexuality and the Judeo-Christian past, cultural selection was effected also as a distinguishing and group-bonding feature. I.e., many of the surrounding peoples had fewer doctrinaire biases against homosexuality, and the Jewish proscriptions were used to distinguish the Jewish tribes from the surrounding tribes. Again, this may have helped in the fight for resources, since a stronger cultural binding would promote activities of a more unified nature and so strengthen the group with those cultural identities: it becomes “us” vs “them” in which the “them” don’t themselves see themselves as a very strong unified “us.”