When did people stop believing in the old gods like Greek and Norse? Did the Vikings just wake up one morning and think ”this is bullshit”?
In: Culture
While a number of respondents have made the case for Christianity becoming the official religion and pushing out the “old” gods, this has never stopped underground believers from continuing their faith. Surely adherents to the Norse and Roman pantheons continued their beliefs.
The OP asked when people stopped believing that a bunch of humanoid deities sat atop Olympus. I am curious too if there came a point wherein people said “Okay, this is just too ludicrous to be believed.”
As I write, I realize there is an active religion today that purports to believe that an alien dictator brought billions of people to Earth on Dc-8’s and blew them up using hydrogen bombs so maybe there is nothing people won’t believe.
Greco-Roman religion was officially abolished as state religion by the Roman emperor Constantine (306-337 AD), briefly revived by Julian the Apostate and finally abolished by his successors. Since then, it fought a long defeat against Christianity, but pockets of Greco-Roman paganism still lingered in rural Greece until VIII century (the Maniot pagans), and a Byzantine philosopher Gemistos Pletho advocated a return to the old faith even later (he lived during the last years of Byzantium).
The Norse religion started to peter out similarly, after the Christianization of Scandinavian kingdoms. However, all Scandinavia did not Christianize in an instant, unlike Rome. Denmark became Christian around 1000, Norway Christianized under Olaf the Saint (1015-1028), Sweden was gradually Christianized from 990s until 1100.
Usually in those days the average person on the street, didn’t have too much choice in what religion they wanted to be. For the most part you were whatever religion everyone else in your village was and everyone was the religion that the person in charge said they were.
If the tribal leader or king converted to Christianity for political reasons, the people followed, not necessarily because they wanted to, but because they had no choice.
For example Harald Bluetooth for which the Bluetooth wireless connection is named became a Christian and then he became King of all Danes and then the Danes became Christians because he said so.
In practice many conversion efforts only slapped a new label on pagan customs and traditions. Old gods were relabeled as saints old feasts became Christian feasts and many kept doing what they had been doing all along with only gradual change of the underlying stuff.
Individual people may have converted because they were convinced by theological arguments, but the majority switched because they were told to by people you couldn’t disagree.
Generally speaking, Christian influence is to blame. Rome originally persecuted Christians, but after emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, Rome quickly became a monotheistic society. As religious tolerance wasn’t huge back then, it didn’t take long for Rome to start persecuting “old gods” instead, including the Greek and Roman gods. As Rome spread across Europe, so too did Christianity, making its way into England, France, and even Norway (Normandy is interesting reading, by the way). Missionaries converted those who were willing, and societal pressure persecuted those who weren’t, until eventually almost everyone was Christian.
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