>>509494606
>Christianity’s rise coincided with the consolidation of empires that used religion as a tool to centralize power and suppress dissent.
I've been reading about the Viking age recently and this is the primary reason behind every Viking leader's conversion to Christianity. Either someone else was forcing them to convert as part of a peace deal in order to gain a feeling of centralized power over them, or they were converting to Christianity so they could consolidate their own power over their lieutenants. Spirituality in itself was sorely lacking as a motive, made obvious by the fact that they would "convert" and then just keep raiding like an Odinist. On one occasion the English king Athelred demanded that two Vikings attacking him convert to Christianity as part of a peace deal, only for them to awkwardly admit they'd already converted a few years prior as part of a different peace deal.
The practical upshot of polytheism among the Germans (whether southern or in the form of the northern Scandis) was that the people felt if there could be many roughly equivalent gods there could also be many roughly equivalent kings. If you wanted to congeal into a monarchy, which all of Europe was trying to do at the time, you needed a metaphysics that supported the idea of a single absolute ruler who cannot be questioned, and Christianity does.
