Is religion good or bad for human civilization? | Anthony Kaldellis and Lex Fridman

In this conversation with Lex Fridman, historian Anthony Kaldellis addresses whether religion was constructive or destructive for the East Roman Empire. He argues that Orthodox Christianity contributed positively to the empire's historical success, though not without costs. Citizens were willing to pay these costs—including taxation burdens and governance constraints—because religion mattered deeply to them.

Kaldellis emphasizes that while religion and Roman identity were deeply intertwined, they should not be conflated as identical. He distinguishes between cultural/religious elements and pragmatic state operations, noting that governmental functions often intersected with religion only at the level of terminology and vocabulary rather than in actual functioning. He argues against colleagues who subsume all aspects of Byzantine society within Orthodoxy.

A key insight is that Romans and Christians were not perfectly overlapping categories. There were Christians who were not Roman (Bulgarians, Rus, etc.) whom Romans did not consider Roman, and there were pre-Christian Romans whom Byzantines remembered through weekly celebrations of Christian martyrs killed by Roman emperors. This historical awareness prevented these identities from being treated as synonymous.

Kaldellis presents the East Roman Empire as unique in history—a society simultaneously Roman, Christian, and Greek in different ways. Individuals had options to emphasize different aspects: some focused on Christian monasticism, others on Roman governance, and still others on Greek language and literature. He describes this as a "laboratory" of three coexisting elements in various combinations, with some people attempting to be purists in one dimension while most navigated combinations of all three.

The discussion concludes by acknowledging the analytical impossibility of isolating variables to determine which factor—taxation systems, religion, or Greek language—contributed most to the empire's remarkable longevity and stability, since these elements were fundamentally integrated into what made the empire what it was.