Atheist Memes

Sometimes words like this take on a more general meaning, like how "bourgeois" is used sometimes to imply association with the economic elite rather than specifically a middle class between peasants and aristocracy ... it's not necessarily wrong to classify slaves or the lower classes as "proletariat" in a general sense for the same reason, the term is just being used in a more generic way.

Slave societies had slaves, not the proletariat.

Fair enough.

Point being, Christianity spread first and fastest among Middle Eastern slave populations. The violence inflicted on slave Christians was the same violence that had been inflicted on pagan and monotheist minorities in ages past. Christians were simply better at organizing into opposition, which freaked out the Pagans, which heightened the divide between wealthy masters and increasingly rebellious slaves, which fueled civil wars and ultimately toppled the smaller insular, sclerotic military cults ruling Rome up to that point.

Along the way, Christian social networks became a ladder by which the lower classes could climb into higher station. And Constantine claiming the imperial crown was the apex of this early Christian revolution.