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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1155 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 4, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Do you guys like tortured Roman Empire analogies? No? Neverthelesss...

Trump = Julian the Apostate.

Let's start with a super oversimplified refresher. Rome was founded in 753 BC. They worshipped a variety of pagan gods and this state of affairs lasted for over a millenium. Throughout this time, a bunch of Eastern cults came and went. But it was Christianity that gradually spread until it started to threaten the Roman religion. At first the Christians were heavilty persecuted. But their influence grew and, in 313 AD, the emperor Constantine signed the Edict of Milan, giving Christians legal status within the Empire.

Finally, all religions could live in peace, right? Wrong. Religious freedom last for less than 70 years. In 380 AD, Nicene Christianity made the state religion. Now pagans were the ones that were persecuted.

Christianity conquered Paganism. Zoom out far enough and the result looks inevitable. But there was one little hiccup along the way: Julian the Apostate, emperor of Rome from 360–363 AD.

Here's what Wikipedia says:

Julian was the last non-Christian ruler of the Roman Empire, and he believed it necessary to restore the Empire's ancient Roman values and traditions in order to save it from dissolution. He purged the top-heavy state bureaucracy, openly promoted pagans to high political offices, and attempted to revive traditional Roman religious practices at the expense of Christianity. His efforts to build a Third Temple in Jerusalem were probably intended to harm Christianity rather than please Jews. Julian also expelled Christians from the military and forbade them from teaching and learning classical texts. Though his reign saw a brief resurgence of paganism in public and political life, his policies ultimately had no lasting effect on its continuing decline.

Sound familiar?

To make it even more on the nose, Julian ultimately died while fighting a military campaign against Persia.

Julian was just a tiny blip in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But that doesn't mean he wasn't ultimately right about almost everything. Christianity really was poisonous to the Roman regime. There just wasn't anything that Julian could do about it. Demographics are destiny. So while Julian could use state power to temporarily role back the clock, the Christians kept multiplying while the people who remembered the old gods died of old age.

Rome was in a dysgenic death spiral long before Christianity substantively expanded. Their upper classes had a low TFR and low marriage rate. Free workers were in constant competition with vast hordes of immigrants who worked as slaves to enrich a small elite. Thankfully nothing like this is happening today. (As a random and strange fun fact, Luigi Mangione of all people wrote an article about Roman Empire Christianity as a response to low Roman TFR).

Free workers were in constant competition with vast hordes of immigrants who worked as slaves to enrich a small elite. Thankfully nothing like this is happening today.

And there definitely wasn't a significant amount of energy put into the reform faction, and they never tried to throw the reform faction's leader in jail as soon as his legal immunity expired, and that question definitely had nothing to do with any resulting civil war.

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