By all rights, Christianity shouldn’t have succeeded. It began as a tiny sect in a backwater province of the Roman Empire. It demanded costly sacrifices from followers: strict sexual ethics, rejection of civic festivals, and refusal to worship the emperor. The threat of persecution always loomed. Material privation was expected. Yet by 250 AD, over a million people had pledged their loyalty to Christ. By the fourth century, Christianity dominated the Empire.
What explains this unlikely success? As David Crego and I argue in a new scholarly paper, the answer is smart governance. The early Church solved organizational problems that would have destroyed most social movements. A careful reading of Christianity’s oldest non-biblical texts reveals how.
The Need for Incentives
Around 95 AD, Rome’s Christian community learned that their Corinthian counterpart had descended into chaos. Younger members had overthrown the appointed elders. Growing factionalism threatened unity. Clement, Rome’s bishop, wrote a lengthy letter urging the Corinthians to restore order and submit to legitimate authority. This letter, known as 1 Clement, is an invaluable historical document. It contains a blueprint for ecclesial solutions to perennial governance challenges.
The problem Corinth faced was fundamentally economic, though early Christians wouldn’t have used that term. Economics is not about money. It’s about incentives. The Church needed to create incentives for both clergy and laypersons to advance the Church’s mission.
Worship was the Church’s primary activity—specifically, celebrating the Eucharist. Early Christians believed individual sins damaged the entire community, not just the sinner. They understood themselves as Christ’s mystical body: What one member did affected all. If someone impugned Holy Communion by receiving unworthily, the whole community suffered spiritual harm.
This created an incentive problem. Being a Christian came with valuable benefits: spiritual goods, social support, material charity, a life of meaning. But these benefits depended on every member maintaining high commitment levels. Low-effort Christians diluted the quality of worship for everyone else. Worse, if enough people slacked off, the community’s spiritual integrity collapsed entirely. Witness the clamor in Corinth: Disorder threatened the community to join together in worship.
The Church needed ways to screen out free-riders (the term economists use to describe those who consume without contributing) before they joined, as well as monitor behavior after joining. Without screening and monitoring, committed Christians would bear the costs while lukewarm members reaped the rewards. The group would stagnate.
Enter hierarchy and the sacraments.
Governance Through Hierarchy & Sacraments
Clement’s letter offers a clear pattern: Clergy specialize in the production of religious goods, while laity specialize in materially provisioning the Church. Only bishops and presbyters (bishops’ designated agents) could legitimately perform baptisms and celebrate the Eucharist. This wasn’t a power grab. It was a religious division of labor that solved governance problems.
Baptism became an effective screening device. Candidates underwent instruction from Church leaders who could assess their commitment. The ritual itself was private, known only to Church members, but the behavioral consequences were public. Baptized Christians didn’t eat meat sacrificed to pagan gods, even when that was the only meat available. They rejected sexual rites associated with pagan cults. They withdrew from civic festivals. These visible markers made baptismal status observable and raised the cost of faking commitment to Christ.
Because only the baptized could receive communion, Church leaders effectively metered access to Christianity’s most valuable good. This promoted quality control. Low-commitment inquirers, facing costly requirements and clerical scrutiny, would self-select out. Those willing to bear the costs revealed their genuine devotion.
For existing members, the Eucharist provided ongoing incentives for piety and faithfulness. As the letters of Paul reveal, Christians were supposed to worship collectively. Private acts of devotion were necessary but not sufficient. Church leaders presiding over communion could observe who showed up, who behaved appropriately, and who maintained Christian standards. Members who became lax could be excluded from communion until they repented, creating powerful incentives to maintain high effort levels.
The letters of Ignatius of Antioch, written around 110 AD, show these developments crystallizing into long-lasting institutions. Ignatius repeatedly insisted that nothing in Church life happened apart from the bishop. No valid Eucharist existed without him. No legitimate baptism occurred without his supervision. The Church recognized that survival required centralized authority over its most important practices.
Other early texts confirm the pattern. The Didache, a Church manual roughly contemporary with 1 Clement, provided instructions for baptism and the Eucharist, emphasizing proper procedure and legitimate authority. These documents show us how early Christian communities maintained discipline and integrity as they grew.
These governance innovations did more than solve organizational headaches. They shaped Christian consciousness itself.
A Sacramental Worldview
By linking the sacraments to clerical hierarchy, the Church embedded a unique conception of reality into its members’ daily lives. Christians learned that grace suffused the material world, as the Incarnation of Christ revealed. God bestows divine gifts freely but delights in human cooperation. Individual flourishing depends on communal health, and vice versa. Authority is service rather than domination. Christians lived these truths every time they gathered for worship.
This sacramental worldview distinguished Christianity from both pagan religions and philosophical schools. Pagan cults offered participation in so-called mysteries but not a compelling worldview. Philosophy promoted virtue but was often abstract and sterile, and largely remained confined to social elites. Christianity combined rigorous ethics with accessible ritual, offering a chance to participate in the divine. The Church created a comprehensive way of life that transcended family ties and social class.
The Church’s governance made this worldview sustainable at scale. Without effective screening and monitoring, Christianity might have remained a tiny sect of the ultra-committed or devolved into a loose network of inharmonious communities. Hierarchy and sacraments allowed rapid growth without sacrificing devotion. They enabled the Church to absorb diverse populations—Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, educated and illiterate—into a unified movement with consistent beliefs and practices.
This explains Christianity’s otherworldly success. The early Church didn’t just proclaim a compelling message. It built institutions that aligned individual incentives with collective flourishing, embodied its theological vision in concrete practices, and scaled without fragmenting. It solved governance problems that doom other social movements.
Two thousand years later, more than half the world’s Christians belong to churches emphasizing liturgy, sacraments, hierarchy, and apostolic continuity. The institutions the Church adopted in the late first century still shape billions of lives. This is the Holy Spirit at work—not just as individual piety, but as collective commitment.
Editor’s Note: This piece was based on the longer paper, “Clement Counsels Corinth: Efficient Hierarchy and the Rise of Christianity,” co-authored with David Crego, forthcoming in the scholarly journal Public Choice.
