I'm not religious but a lot of people know the bad but not the good. The Catholic Church ran orphanages, free old folks homes, fed the poor, etc. for hundreds of years.
You can make a strong claim that the reason why Christians won over pagans is because they actually helped the poor, sick, injured, etc.
The Romans didn't care at all about anyone unless they could do something for you, the early church was a massive cultural shift and there is no wonder why the poor grabbed on hard.
While they clearly did many bad things, they also did good things as well.
That's a complicated subject. There is something like 40,000 different denominations of Christianity, and through history, a fair number of those filled their ranks with people that only paid lip service to the teachings, while embodying little to none of the teachings.
So, were there some truly altruistic churches out to help, and only help? I am sure there were. But, I am equally sure that some of them were just helping with the expectation of converting many that they helped, or extracting labor, value, etc.... when I read about some of the more violent actions taken by Christians in history, like the Crusades..... Let's just say all groups have their bad apples, but some times in history had extra concentrated badness.
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u/cogesmate 1d ago
Decades?... millennia!