Thread by @BretDevereaux

As several other historians on this platform have pointed out, this view is historically illiterate nonsense.

This radical-traditionalist line about Rome's collapse being due to moral decline and decadence is garbled Gibbon, a wrong interpretation of an already wrong idea. 1/

https://twitter.com/BidenHQ/status/1720525403817746781

So first the garble - these folks only know vaguely that someone attributed the fall of Rome to moral decline; that's Edward Gibbon (d. 1794).

So they say America's decline is due to Christian moral decay, 'like Rome.' Except for Gibbon, Christianity WAS the moral decline. 2/

For Gibbon, part of Rome's fourth and fifth century decline was a result of replacing the practical, ruthless Roman paganism with a Christianity that was too focused on morality and the afterlife to have the newly Christian Romans do the practical violence required. 3/

This is, to be clear, pretty much nonsense and modern historians have poked all sorts of holes in it. Roman military expenditures didn't decline post-Constantine, they increased. The Christian emperors weren't soft and indolent, but ruthless and power-seeking. 4/

But that leads to the deeper stupidity of the speaker's comments: he associates Roman moral decay with homosexuality. But the fourth and fifth centuries, with the spread of Christianity, was precisely the period in which the Romans became LESS tolerant of homosexuality. 5/

Here Gibbon is actually useful: he recognized that the brand of imperial Christianity that begins w/ Constantine was intolerant in a way that earlier Roman paganism wasn't: intolerant of other religions and cultures w/ other values. And that included other sexual practices. 6/

And *that* is a point that subsequent historians have confirmed and supported. Christian emperors eventually end up cracking down on pagans and also on the 'wrong' sorts of Christians, sparking disruptive conflicts both internally and with ('wrong')Christian barbarians. 7/

And that intolerance was a problem for a massive, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious Mediterranean-spanning empire. Roman persecution of Christians had been disruptive (Diocletian esp.), but Christian suppression of the 'wrong' sorts of Christians was MUCH more so. 8/

Now the attempt to enforce some kind of cultural unity wasn't new with the Christians - this is probably what Diocletian thinks he's doing with the Great Persecution - but it clearly intensifies with the merger of Christian and imperial power. 9/

Consequently, while I don't think Roman attitudes towards sexual mores were a factor in decline either way, it is in fact clearly the case that Roman hostility towards homosexuality correlates with decline, while relative Roman tolerance correlates with periods of success. 10/

So the choices here are 'no impact' or 'Rome's increasing rejection of homosexuality contributed to the decline of Roman power and the fragmentation of the empire in the West.' 11/

In any case, the fact that the Speaker doesn't know the first thing about Roman history bothers me less than that he is willing to speak out of utter ignorance in order to promote hate.

It speaks to a failure of character and an unfitness to hold high office. /end

For more on the question of Roman decline and the impacts of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, see acoup.blog/2022/01/14/col…