Deviant Christians: Romanization and Esoterization as Social Strategies for Survival Among Early Christians

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between deviance and esotericism, particularly as this relationship relates to the emergence of new religious movements and the processes of social accommodation and resistance. Applying sociological models for the study of deviance, I show how emergent Catholics use a variety of accommodation strategies to better fit into Roman religious expectations, constructing a public face to their worship along with ancestral ties. As they do this, the emergent Catholics dissociate themselves from other Christians, like groups with gnostic orientations, whom they have marked as different from themselves and a liability for the survival of Christianity. They begin to argue that these “other” Christians are the deviant ones, not themselves. Their willingness to Romanize certain aspects of their religion reduces the tensile relationship between their new religion and the surrounding society, increasing their ability to attract and maintain new recruits. To make matters more complicated, gnostic groups largely resist accommodation to Roman religious expectations, a strategy that powers their countercultural critique of the hegemony of Rome. They esoterize their groups by privatizing and converting their deviance into secret social capital. The choice to maintain their deviance by limiting access to their internal social networks affects their ability to recruit, grow, and sustain their communities in the long term. The social politics of deviance goes a long way to explain the rise of Catholicism and its domination over other forms of Christianity.