Mark Arnold

“While contemporary Christians tend to equate morality with sexual ethics, our ancestors defined morality as welcoming the stranger.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Indeed, early commentators scarcely attacked Christian doctrines, but they consistently portrayed Christian devotional practices as radical and socially divisive. Christianity had effectively “created a social group that promoted its own laws and its own patterns of behavior.”7 These behaviors, at odds with Roman custom, earned Christians the reputation of being revolutionaries and traitors to the good order of the state. Christian defenders, such as Justin Martyr (ca. 100–ca. 165), used the example of Christian practice to make the case that Jesus’s way “mended lives”: We who formerly…valued above all things the acquisition of wealth and possession, now bring what we have into a common stock, and communicate to everyone in need; we who hated and destroyed one another, and on account of their different manners would not live with men of a different tribe, now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them, and pray for our enemies.8”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story