Christianity
The faith that shaped the West
Description
Christianity is the largest religion on the planet, with around 2.4 billion adherents, and the one that has shaped Western institutions so thoroughly that even people who have never set foot in a church live inside its inheritance. The calendar is Christian. The week, with its Sunday rest, is Christian. The vocabulary of conscience, sin, redemption, vocation, charity, and forgiveness the moral grammar most Westerners reach for without thinking is shot through with the assumptions of a particular Galilean carpenter's followers. The university, the hospital, the welfare state, and the human rights tradition all have Christian fingerprints on them, regardless of whether the people running them today would describe themselves as believers.
This is awkward to say in a moment when Christianity in its homeland is in measurable retreat. Mainline Protestantism is shrinking, Catholic mass attendance is collapsing in Western Europe, and even American evangelicalism is showing demographic strain. The category nones people with no religious affiliation has grown faster than any actual religion in the United States and most of Europe over the past three decades. The temptation is to write Christianity off as a finished story. The trouble is that the religion is also growing rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Asia, and Latin America, and the global center of gravity is moving south.
To understand Christianity is to understand a religion that began as a small Jewish sect in a Roman province, became the official faith of an empire that had previously executed its founder, fractured along several major fault lines, exported itself across the globe, and now finds itself culturally dominant in places where it is institutionally weak, and institutionally vibrant in places it had been told it was finished.
The question we're asking: what Christianity is, where it came from, and what it has done to the West that the West forgets it owes.
What we'll see: the Jewish origin, the imperial turn, the great fractures, and the long secularization.
Table of contents
01Sectarian emergence
Christianity began inside Judaism as one of several reformist movements active in first-century Palestine. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish teacher whose followers identified him as the long-promised messiah after his execution by the Roman authorities around 30 or 33 CE. The earliest community in Jerusalem, led by figures including James, considered themselves Jews who had recognized the messiah. They kept Jewish law, worshipped at the Temple, and saw their movement as the fulfillment rather than the abolition of Israel's covenant.
The decisive break came through Paul of Tarsus, a Hellenistic Jew who converted in dramatic circumstances around 34 CE and spent the next three decades preaching to non-Jews across the Mediterranean. Paul's argument, worked out in letters to communities in Rome, Corinth, Galatia, and elsewhere, was that the new movement extended to gentiles without requiring them to become Jews first no circumcision, no dietary law, no Temple obligations. The decision, formalized at the Council of Jerusalem around 50 CE, allowed Christianity to spread along Roman trade routes far faster than it could have as a Jewish sect, and it set the religion on a course away from its parent tradition that became unbridgeable after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.
02The bet that almost nobody believed in
The decision to produce Marvel's own films, rather than license the remaining characters to studios, was made in the early 2000s and required solving a financing problem first. Marvel lacked the capital to fund major film productions internally. The solution was a $525 million credit facility arranged in 2005 with Merrill Lynch, secured against the film rights to ten Marvel characters including Iron Man and Captain America. If the films failed, Marvel's creditors would own the characters. The company was betting its remaining core assets on its ability to make competitive Hollywood films something it had never done.
Kevin Feige, a producer who had worked as an associate producer on the X-Men films at Fox, was brought in to oversee creative development at Marvel Studios. His approach was specific: the films would share a continuity, characters would cross between them, and the comics' practice of building toward large crossover events would be adapted for cinema. The shared universe was not a new concept in comics Marvel had been doing it since the 1960s but it had never been attempted systematically in film. Each movie would function as both a standalone story and an installment in a larger narrative.
03How the MCU changed what a movie could be
Between 2008 and 2019, Marvel Studios released twenty-three films in what it called the Infinity Saga, culminating in Avengers: Endgame. The total worldwide gross of those twenty-three films exceeded $22 billion. Endgame alone made roughly $2.8 billion, briefly becoming the highest-grossing film in history. The consistency of the run no outright failures, several genuine cultural events was without precedent for a franchise of that scale.
Disney acquired Marvel Entertainment in 2009 for $4 billion, a price that looked expensive at the time and transformative within five years. Disney provided the distribution infrastructure, the marketing resources, and the theme park integration that Marvel Studios could not have built independently. Marvel provided the content pipeline and the audience relationship that Disney's own live-action division had struggled to develop. The acquisition is now studied in business schools as a canonical example of strategic content acquisition.
04What happens when a cinematic universe gets too big
The MCU's achievement and the difficulty it created is that it changed what audiences expect from franchise filmmaking. Before Iron Man, a sequel was a sequel: it continued a story, reused characters, and ideally justified its existence by being as good as the original. After the MCU, audiences began expecting franchises to function as serialized universes, with interlocking narratives, recurring characters, and payoffs that accumulated across years. Marvel created a standard it now has to meet indefinitely.
That standard is expensive to maintain. Each MCU film costs, on average, somewhere between $150 million and $300 million to produce before marketing. The films that underperform and some have create continuity problems as well as financial ones: a character who fails to connect with audiences in their solo film still exists in the shared universe and has to be addressed or quietly retired. The interconnectedness that makes the MCU distinctive also makes it harder to correct course cleanly.
05Conclusion
The characters that were used as collateral in a 1996 bankruptcy the second-tier heroes nobody had bothered to license are now the most commercially valuable fictional properties in the world. Iron Man's suit is in the Smithsonian. The Avengers are a theme park attraction in four countries. The company that could not pay its debts is now a division of one of the largest media corporations in history, and the films it makes are release events that restructure the theatrical calendar around them.