So the Pope is a marxist.... (wait for it)

[kandrathe]

I don't see how you can tease the two apart. Without those alliances between early Christian leaders and their governments, Christianity as we know it would not exist today.

It's not even remotely true that all early Christian leaders were powerful and corrupt. But, many were. I guess its a matter of perspective. I consider Christianity, as practiced by devout Christians, to be more likely embodied by the humblest of farmers. I think becoming a priest or church leader may suffer from same issues I see with those drawn into being cops. Yes, many seek it for the service part, but also many are attracted by the power.

I'm not really sure what would have happened, had it remained a movement led equally by women and men, underground, and mostly in homes. I'd hypothesize that at least two or three major flavors would have emerged without the brutal repression of the Arians and Gnostics, but it may have fizzled out, perhaps. It lasted under persecution by the Romans for a few hundred years, so who knows. But, really, there are too many variables to contemplate past perhaps 400 AD. Without the force of Constantine I, or Justinian to root out 'heresies', and no ecumenical councils, the drift may have deepened and things would have continued as they had for the prior 250 years. Here we are today with about 41,000 Christian denominations -- maybe Constantine really didn't matter after all. However, the Romans did manage to kill off all the severe schisms, until Protestantism.

And, as a corollary to the above and apropos of your comments about the state of the RC Church in Minnesota:

The historian and moralist, who was otherwise known simply as Lord Acton, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So true.

[Occhidiangela]

Shadow, the fusion of the church and state didn't really get going until about the time of Theodosius and the Edict of Thessalonica. That's about sixty years after Constantine decreed Christianity to be legal and legitimate, which it was not considered previously in some parts of the Empire. Before that the Church was in many ways a counter culture movement, or subversive, or underground. Depended upon locale, and of course which group or heresy or school of thought one belonged to. (One of the great early theologians, Origen, seems to have eventually been declared anathema/heretic as the battle of ideas raged. ) Was there politics involved? I suspect the answer to that is yes.

There are a significant number of Restorationist movements that seek to model their congregations and churches along the lines of the Apostolic era and the Patristic period: before Christianity became mainstream and then official. That's a group of Christians I'd not be surprised to see not sit quietly for Caesar and any form of secular government. One such movement, Jehovah's Witnesses, object to serving in uniform. (They also do not give blood).

The "good citizen" movement and theology was as present in the Greek Orthodoxy and it was in the RCC, perhaps even moreso. No surprise to see it move to the C of E, eh? The Queen/Crown is still nominally the head of the Anglican confession. It also makes sense that the fusion happened over the years, since a great percentage of the clergy came from among the literate, who tended to be those materially well off enough to afford an education. Not all of the saints and clergy came from the mid and upper class, of course, but two immensely popular saints -- St Anthony and St Francis -- of the medeival period did.

As to the comment above about not expecting a pope bringing Christianity to Rome ... it's already there. It is Christianity, in its Roman Catholic form (which of course believes to be the One True Church) that brings the Pope to Rome. That takes us back to when that form of Christianity became the official religion: about 380 AD, and about the time that the Vulgate was published to get the Scripture into the lingua franca of the empire, Latin, from the Greek that most of the New T and Septuagint were preserved in at the time.