I used to ask myself a question as a child: What would a Jesus freak do?
I didn’t ask it lightly. I lived inside it. I remember sitting with my friends, flipping through the pages of Jesus Freaks, a book filled with stories of martyrs, people who had died for their faith. We didn’t just read those stories; we dissected them. We debated them like it was some kind of sacred rite of passage. We would ask each other what the worst form of torture might be. Nails being peeled off. Teeth ripped from the jaw. Bones dislocated one by one. Bodies wrapped in barbed wire and slow-roasted over fire. We spoke about suffering as if it were the highest form of devotion, as if pain itself proved truth and loyalty to “God.”
That was the image we were given: faith as endurance, loyalty measured by how much agony you could withstand before death. But something happens when you grow up and have the courage to question. You start reading beyond the doctrine and theology you were handed. You start tracing the lines backward instead of just accepting where they lead. And what I found, as I stepped deeper into the history of the very religion I once clung to so fiercely, was not reinforcement of that childhood narrative, but its unraveling.
Because the deeper I looked, the more the story inverted. Yes, early Christians were persecuted. That part is true. The Roman Empire did, at times, execute and suppress those who refused to conform. But what is rarely spoken aloud is that these persecutions were not constant, nor were they as systemically expansive as modern retellings often imply. They were sporadic, politically motivated, and in many cases localized. As one historian put it, they were “too little and too late” to define the full arc of what Christianity would become. Because the real shift didn’t happen when Christians were powerless. It happened when they gained power.
By the fourth century, Christianity was no longer a persecuted minority. It had become aligned with imperial authority. And with that shift came something far more dangerous than oppression: control. Once the religion was backed by the state, it gained the ability to define orthodoxy—to declare what was true and, more importantly, what was not. And anything that did not conform to that definition was no longer treated as a difference of thought. It was labeled heresy.
At first, the consequences were administrative. Those who did not align could not gather publicly. They were restricted from building places of worship. They were denied legal rights, unable to make wills or fully participate in civic life. Then came financial penalties, fines that increased until they became impossible to ignore. And when compliance still did not come, the system escalated. Beatings. Exile. Execution.
What makes this history even more unsettling is the scale of it. At the time these laws were being enforced, historians estimate that only a small portion approximately ten percent of the Roman population adhered to what was considered the “correct” form of Christianity. The majority: pagans, Jews, followers of other philosophical or religious traditions, and even other Christian sects with differing interpretations were suddenly placed in a position where belief was no longer a personal matter. It became a condition for survival. Convert, be deported, or die.
This new Christian regime did not simply ask for belief, it enforced it. People were encouraged to spy on their neighbors, to report them, to denounce them, all under the banner of a faith that claimed allegiance to the teachings of Jesus, the same teachings that said, “love your neighbor.” Any gospels or writings that fell outside the approved canon were to be destroyed immediately, consumed by fire as if truth itself could be erased by flame. The laws were not vague; they were targeted. Specific groups were named, restricted, and systematically pushed out of society. And perhaps the most unsettling decree of all was this was the law: “The name of the one and supreme God shall be celebrated everywhere.” A sweeping command for universal conformity, despite the reality that, at the time, only a small fraction of the population is to have followed this particular expression of Christianity that became the cornerstone to the religion its know as today.
So we are left with a question history cannot ignore: how many lives were lost, and how many freedoms were stripped away in the name of this religion? How many people were bound by a system that claimed to represent a Spirit said to bring freedom? The numbers are not exact, but the weight of them is undeniable. From the suppression of nonconforming groups in the fourth through sixth centuries, to the Inquisitions, to the witch trials, to the Crusades, and the devastating religious wars of Europe, events like the Thirty Years’ War and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the estimates climb steadily into the millions. Thousands in the early imperial crackdowns. Tens of thousands during inquisitions and witch hunts. Millions in crusades and continental wars. Altogether, historians place the toll somewhere between five and twelve million lives. Numbers that are not just statistics, but echoes of each one a person who lived, believed, questioned, and ultimately paid the price for it.
As a child, I feared a government that might take away my ability to read my Bible. I was taught to see that as the ultimate threat to freedom. But now, looking back through the lens of history, I find myself far more unsettled by the opposite reality: a government that is beginning to use the Bible as a tool to remove freedom from others. Ecclesiastes says there is nothing new under the sun, and the more I study, the more I see how patterns repeat themselves, not because they are inevitable, but because they are ignored.
When I look at modern movements like Christian nationalism that seek to fuse religious identity with political power, I don’t see something entirely new emerging. I see an echo of 4th century Rome. Different language, different context, but the same underlying structure. The same belief that “truth” must be enforced. The same instinct to label heresy as danger.
So I return to the question: What would a Jesus freak do?
The word “freak” itself implies obsession, intensity, a refusal to blend into the expected pattern. As a child, I believed being a Jesus freak meant aligning myself completely with the religion I had been given. Now, I find myself wondering if it might mean something else entirely. Is a freak someone who blindly follows a system, or someone who is relentless in their pursuit of truth? Is it the one who defends doctrine and tradition at all costs, or the one who questions it when it contradicts the very essence of love it claims to represent?
History offers an uncomfortable answer. What we call “orthodox” today was not necessarily the truest expression of belief. It was simply the one that prevailed. The one that survived the debates, the politics, and, in many cases, the violence. The label “heretic” was not always reserved for those who were dangerous. Often, it was given to those who refused to conform. Even the word itself reveals this. “Heresy” comes from the Greek haeresis, which originally meant “choice.” Not rebellion. Not evil. Simply the act of choosing. In the ancient world, choice was not something to be feared, it was part of philosophical and spiritual exploration. But within a relatively short period of time, that meaning shifted. Choice became something to suppress. Curiosity became something to caution against. Questioning became synonymous with disobedience.
And so a system that began as a movement centered on transformation gradually evolved into one that often prioritized preservation of authority. You can see it in the writings of early Church leaders, in the language used to describe women, heretics, and those outside the accepted framework of belief. The tone is not one of open inquiry, but of certainty. Of boundaries drawn sharply and defended fiercely. And once those boundaries are tied to divine authority, they become nearly impossible to challenge without being cast as an enemy. Which brings us to the present.
We are still asking the same questions, even if we use different words. Who has the right to define truth? Who gets to decide what is acceptable belief? And what happens to those who step outside of it? It is easy to say in America that we live in a land of freedom. It is harder to examine whether that freedom truly extends to thought, to belief, to questioning. It is easy to claim that a faith is under attack. It is harder to acknowledge the ways in which that same faith, throughout history, has wielded power and the sword against others. So perhaps the question is not just what a Jesus freak would do.
Perhaps the deeper question is this:
Would you rather be someone who protects a system at all costs, or someone who seeks truth, even when it challenges everything you were taught to believe? Because history has shown us, again and again, that the most dangerous thing you can be is not someone who is wrong. It is someone who never questions whether they might be.
-Finn
