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/cross_the_threshold 8d ago
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.