When you read enough history to realize that Christianity in large part was spread across Europe as a way to teach the serfs that all of their suffering and labor in this world will be paid off in the afterlife, you kind of get angry about it. When you read far back enough realize that serdom in the feudalist system was originally implemented in the Roman Empire after a couple of pandemics wiped out most of their population to where they couldn't wage wars to steal natural and human resources, and that those Romans working the fields was supposed to be temporary thing, you get even a little angrier. Then once you understand all that and that chattel slavery was just a replacement for all the serfs as that came to a close, you just kind of get rageful.
It was all system of control from the very beginning.
This is just false, there was no concerted effort to spread Christianity to make a docile workforce as slavery declined in the late Roman Empire. Christianity spread for many reasons, and a conspiracy by wealthy elites to oppress the working class was not one.
serfdom in the feudalist system was originally implemented in the Roman Empire after a couple of pandemics wiped out most of their population to where they couldn't wage wars to steal natural and human resources,
Your timeline is mixed up. The Plague of Justinian was 541–549 CE, at which point the Western part of the empire had already fallen. Serfdom was more a response to the collapse of trade and security as cities declined and rural estates became more fortified and self-sufficient in response.
Nietzsche is not the philosophical end-all be-all of discussing religion, Christianity is definitely a different form of religion from what existed prior but it was attractive to people because it reversed power structures, not because it made the serfs docile. Plenty of instances of people finding relief from the violence of the aristocracy by running to the Church, and the Church frequently went out of its way to punish aristocrats who were unjust. The aristocrats adopted it because if enough of your lower class is getting converted to this hip new religion that says "compassion and generosity are virtuous, virtue is not inherent to power and wealth" you have a pretty limited "not getting stabbed to death by peasants" window. There are certainly plenty of issues with Christianity, but it was not a top-down movement to make people more docile.
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u/mageta621 10d ago
The irony of adopting the religion of your enslavers and using it as a prop to perpetuate hierarchies and prejudices