[P]agans demanded specifically that Christians should worship the traditional gods. Recall that pagans such as Celsus were willing to tolerate Christians and their other various objectionable features, if only they would worship the traditional gods. But Christians were noted as typically refusing to do so, declaring that they worshiped only the one biblical deity and, still more offensively, that everyone else ought to do likewise. Granted, Christians deployed various arguments, including philosophical ones, to justify their stance and to mitigate thereby the negative reactions that it generated. Also, to be sure, the pagan demand to worship the traditional gods was intended to secure and promote social and political unity as well as what we would call “religious” conformity.
But I insist that at least we use the term, it was for non-Christians fundamentally a religious issue.— Destroyer of the gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World, page 44 (emphasis original)
<idle musing>
My, those Christians were troublesome creatures, weren't they!
</idle musing>
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