Mass Media, the Catholic Church and Oligarchy

When I was a pre-teen geek the history topic that fascinated me the most was the migration period. There's a good collection of artifacts from that era in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the exhibit is arranged so you can easily see how the classical world went off a cliff and was replaced by something new and weird.

One of the great mysteries of that era is how and why christianity supplanted the religions of those peoples. I think the catholic church was really a crude version of the mass media of those times. The religions that it supplanted were shamanic and maybe radically local, that is, tied to local natural shrines and gods of places. By contrast Christianity is totally generic and otherworldly and not tied in any way, shape or form to Europe, and that's probably one of the reasons it actually spread.

The mass media, mass market corporate world of today is like a constricted everywhere locality. While for the people of pre-christian Europe, their tribe and town might be the only thing they would ever know. Ironically, the mass media, mass market world of today makes people care about sports teams and the goings on of world cities so they don't know the first thing about things in their immediate vicinity.

Possibly Christianity was a gateway to a world beyond that local one, maybe even literally. While today, shamanism seems appealing because it's a break with generic corporate pavement world.

Since the catholic church was a transnational entity at a time when tribes were the peak of organization, it could serve as an intermediary between them and serve as a notary of contracts and treaties and ratify deals among oligarchs of the day, and then also serve as the mass media of the time and propagandize the common people with the rightness and justice of those deals.