Evangelicals, Toleration, and the Persian Empire
It is common enough to hear from New York Times Evangelicals that the natural state of the church is persecution. Rather than inured by politics and culture war, the faithful church remains above and beyond it all through a loving kingdom third way. It is the Pharisees that defend a cultural Christianity that ought to die, and it is the Pharisees that support Christian princes to impose some form of divine law. The true church rejects the idolatry of politics and culture, perhaps even celebrating the multivalent secularism that has supposedly marked American history. It is the liberalism of James Madison that affords Christians a right to coexist, but not bully, various other faiths that accept this shared pluralistic order. Of course, these Evangelicals seek conversions, half-heartedly through relationships and “bearing witness” (being safe-edgy with quirky beliefs), but these cannot come suddenly or immediately. It is only in respecting America as a multicultural, multiracial, religiously plurality patch of dirt that Evangelicals may make gains within a system that permits them to exist. The key to success is respecting this even more than everyone else, or so the logic goes. And for awhile, maybe this all seemed to work.
To better understand this Evangelical posture and its effects, we can turn to late ancient (250-600 AD) Persia under the Sassanids. A new dynasty, reconstituting the grandeur of Iran after the Parthians collapsed, the Sassanid reconstituted their reign through Zoroastrian political theology. The Shahanshah (King-of-Kings) who ruled on behalf of Ahura Mazda, the unconquerable light, who waged eternal war against Ahriman, his dark peer. Under a reconstituted warrior-aristocracy, this new Persia reemerged to carve back its western empire from its long rival, Rome. The ancestral fires were relit to worship their god and the lesser divinities that protected Iran. But in this grand empire, a minority of Christians had appeared, a product of trade routes into Rome, where western Syrians sent missionaries to advance the gospel, particularly rooted among merchants. The Christians had competitors in Jews, the syncretistic Manichees, and, of course, the magi, the hierarchs of Zoroastrianism. The conversion of Constantine, and a chain of Christian Caesars, had drawn Persian attention, but not persecution. Persia, as many liberal historians celebrate, was a multiracial, multicultural, and religiously plural empire. And yet Christians suffered.
One of the first instances of “persecution” was instigated by Christian failure to join the Shah’s administration. Shapur II was wary of Christians, but he had not gone looking for Christians hiding under floorboards. They were allowed to exist, if they were loyal. In an upcoming war with Rome, Shapur II needed taxes and he turned to the Christian bishops to collect them for him. Tax farming was generally challenging in large polities, especially ones so ethnically diverse. Local leaders were pressed into service to maintain the empire. Christians could prove their loyalty through their cash, but this required bishops to operate as agents of government. But the leading bishop Simeon, in the capital city of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, refused. Recorded in the hagiographic History of Simeon, the bishop argued thus:
“I bow to the king of kings, and I honor his commands with all my power, however, concerning that which is required of me in the edict, I believe even you know that it is not my business to demand taxes from the people of Christ, my Lord. Indeed, our authority over them is not in the things which are seen but in those things which are unseen.”
In short, Simeon appealed to a two-kingdoms distinction, between the spiritual power of bishops and the civil powers of a government. Reading between the lines, Simeon did not want the church to become an organ of the Zoroastrian state. For his intransigence, Shapur II had Simeon, along with a few dozen other ministers, executed. Was this religious persecution? Not exactly. Simeon was not executed for being a Christian or for failing to convert to the faith of the magi. He was executed for refusing to comply with the government, for not converting the Christian hierarchy into agents of a non-Christian state. Bishops could have received minor office within the imperial administration if they simply milked their congregation for taxes. It was a position that other bishops would later relish. By the seventh century, Ishoyahb III, the presiding “Catholicos” (a patriarchal/papal central office), became wealthy as an agent of the state, levying land and poll taxes on the church. Why not? The state allowed Christians to exist.
Not all Christians in Iran, however, accepted this tolerated status. The archbishop of Ormazd-Ardashir, Abda, was hauled before the imperial court for Christian sacrilege. A group of priests and laity had attacked a local fire temple, destroying it and putting out the sacred fire. The Christians not only violated property rights but had symbolically attacked the very core of the Empire, the faithful stewards of the god of Light. Abda demurred, he did not agree with the attack on the temple, but one of his priests was not so subdued. The Martyrdom of Abda recorded his reason: “I demolished the foundation and extinguished the fire because it is not a house of God, nor is the fire the daughter of God.”
Abda refused to condemn his subordinate for his behavior and, even more galling, he refused the court’s request that the Christians pay to rebuild the fire temple. For this intransigence, Abda and the blasphemers were executed. Similarly, the aged monk and poet Narsai destroyed the sacred fire in a temple that had previously been a church, constructed by an Iranian noble who had converted to Christianity and then reverted to Zoroastrianism, transforming the church he had built into a temple. Narsai refused to pay for the altar to be rebuilt and was executed. These martyrs appeared extreme to the Roman Syrian, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who kept in mind St Paul’s teaching that pagan idols and pagan temples were nothing. Nevertheless, even he thought it was insane for a Christian to pay to rebuild a temple. Were these cases persecution? Not exactly. The Zoroastrian magi had not crushed the Christians for merely existing, or even for desecrating their holy places. But they had to rebuild them for Persia belonged to Ahura Mazda, not Christ. It was fine for Christians to live in Persia, to perform their rituals and believe their fables, if they knew that it was the sacred fire that kept the Empire safe. That was the basis of their freedom and prosperity, and nothing else.
It is not surprising, then, that the preservation of the sacred sites coincided with the preservation of noble blood. Persian aristocrats were not allowed to convert to Christianity on pain of death. The “law of apostasy” allowed patrilineal relatives to bring lawsuits for apostasy, bringing shame on a noble house and blaspheming Iran’s god, often involving the nobility and magi in the imperial court. One famous case was Gregory the Commander, a member of the noble House of Mihran. While leading his troops against Rome in 518 AD, Gregory infamously professed his faith in Christ before his soldiers, disavowing Ahura Mazda and the worship of fire. The Shah, Chusrow I, overlooked this indiscretion, but the House of Mihran could not tolerate this impiety from one of their own. At the behest of another Mihran, whose military successes made him impossible to ignore, a case was made to punish Gregory. The shah stripped him of his office and jailed him, but that was not enough to avenge Mihran honor. Gregory was eventually executed for his unrepentant apostasy.
Was this apostasy? Not exactly. Gregory may have died for his faith in Christ, but he did break the law that pertained to the nobility, and it was not only the court and the magi that were angry with him. Many Christian bishops and monks feared the trouble an Iranian nobleman could cause and simply turned them away when they asked for baptism. Gregory had to find an obscure Christian community to baptize him, men who were unaware of his office or heritage. While many Christian bishops lamented these laws, and while many Christian missionaries hoped to convert Persian nobility, these were all simply the ideal, not the practical reality, one that counseled prudence of not stirring up trouble, especially for someone as brash as Gregory.
One may find it hard to say these were not persecutions, but the liberal scholars are right to realize that these were not executions for the mere profession of faith. Christian refusal to participate, and thus legitimate via subordination, in a non-Christian state smacked of rebellion. Christian refusal to respect and resurrect fire temples was an attack on property and another faith, one that claimed the loyalty of most Iranians and especially the elite. And while it may seem unjust for laws to restrict conversions, it was not necessary to make a public confrontation, like Gregory, of rejecting the ancestral faith. These were cases of violating the terms of agreement for a multicultural empire of many peoples and many faiths. As Richard Payne, a historian of Sassanian Iran, described the so-called persecution that Christians suffered:
“These zealous Christians were killed not for failing to contribute to the organization of the empire but for intentionally—and unapologetically—dismantling its infrastructure. In addition to being sites of ritual functions, foundational of imperial authority, fire temples were an indispensable basis for the economic and social power of the aristocratic houses. It was through isolated acts of temple destruction that certain Christians openly challenged Iran’s social and political structures, with or without knowledge of how they were embedded in fire temples and their rituals. [Richard E. Payne, A State of Mixture, 48].”
In truth, Christians suffered for their faith, but the Christian faith included much more than the existence of churches. Christians understood that Christ not only claimed authority over them, but the whole world. Persian Christians did not wish to abolish the Sassanian dynasty, let alone the Persian Empire, but they did abjure false gods and profess the name of Christ. They sought not to topple empire, but to convert it. The above martyrs understood that there was no such thing as a neutral regime, that Christians must refuse to cooperate with the works of darkness.
Toleration is not a bad concept, but it reflects a power relation. In a Christian Empire, like Rome, toleration reflected the truth of Christianity under which others submitted. But under a Zoroastrian Empire, it meant tacit acceptance that Ahura Mazda had authority there that Christ did not. And this tacit acceptance led to Christians not only as tax farmers for the emperor but accepting that the best of the empire would never be allowed to convert. Did not St Paul appear before procurators and governors, setting sail to preach before Caesar?
Modern America is a rapidly de-christianizing nation, not far behind the Anglozone and continental Europe. The parachurch Evangelical unity that marked most of America’s history is nearly gone. Evangelical Christians are a moral minority, though more often than not operating in their own ghettos. It is unclear what exactly justifies American law and American polity at this point; it is unlikely to be even remotely Christian in the not so distant future if trends continue apace. New York Times Evangelicals, the half-educated and half-read opinion piece writers, comfort Evangelicals that this collapse is not really happening, but if it is, then it is a good thing. It is not hard to imagine that they would take the role of tax farmers for the good of their tribe, that they would profusely apologize for blaspheming some other cult or culture, or that they would apologize for outlandish conversions among a ruling class. But in so doing Christianity would not thrive but choke out as churches become religio-ethnic hovels. Every state has a reason behind its force, whether it was the sacred fires of the shah or the Chi-Rho painted on the shield of Constantine. Will Evangelical Christians be persecuted in twenty-first America? Not exactly.
Image: “Shah Suleiman I and his courtiers”, Folio from the St. Petersburg Album. Aliquli Jabbadar,1670. Wikimedia Commons.
