You said persecutions were “largely fictional.” Notably, Wikipedia gives this impression of Moss’s work (and so AI does too). The phrase appears nowhere in her work though. The word “fictional” appears twice and applies to elements of Saint Lucy’s story alone. The only reason I downloaded the book is because it seems like an absurd claim for a professional to make, which is perhaps why she doesn’t make it.
There are multiple prior persecutions coming from the emperors on down attested in pagan sources like Tacitus and Livy. This is perhaps a far cry from the extreme “Church of the Catacombs” narratives, but it’s also far from “largely fictional.” Moss actually discusses these.
Her point seems to be more about:
A. Popular later receptions of persecutions narratives that made them seem far more widespread, systematic,and violent than they were.
B. The complaints of ancient Christian authors.
This might be fair on both counts, but it’s a little ironic to call Justin Martyr’s account “shrill” when there is no debate that he was executed for refusing to perform Pagan sacrifices. It’s a bit like complaining about how charges of anti-Semitism are overblown in a Jewish author and then including in a footnote that they died in a concentration camp.
Moss mentioned other top-down persecutions.
As to persecutions having to be both “empire-wide” and top down to be relevant, Diocletian is famously the first emperor in a century to actually exercise administrative control across the empire. It’s sort of an absurd standard given how the Empire actually functioned. Few Jewish pogroms in Russia or elsewhere in Europe tended to be “empire/kingdom-wide” either. I suppose it’s a useful corrective to a certain sort of overblown understanding, but then it seems to lurch in the other direction.
At any rate, the main claims, that the body count wasn’t high enough or that persecution was often more limited, involving removals from public office or property seizures due to refusal to participate in the state religion show that Rome was more tolerant than some narratives might suggest, not more secular.
You take them as historical documents, as evidence of what apologists were focused on, not uncritically, and not with blanket dismissals. Otherwise you get takes like:
“Christian sources of Pagan culture cannot be trusted because they are biased. But also Christian sources on their own experience cannot be trusted;” which, if applied evenly, would mean no one can be trusted about anything.
You do so evenly. So, with arguments against the Polycarp narrative, you don’t stop at: “this story contradicts period Roman legal norms (themselves a matter of open debate), so it is likely false.” On grounds like that, the Rodney King beating is likely fictional because it wasn’t LAPD policy to beat defenseless suspects. Likewise, Jim Crow was essentially all “mere” legal disability and sporadic, local violence or perversion of the justice system. The standards for “shrill” complaints are a bit much, especially since a similar work on the treatment of Muslims in the West since 1900 would almost certainly be panned as far-right apologia. Indeed, if you wrote her conclusion with the same standards she applies from that framing it would include sentences like: “while surely events like the Christchurch massacre happened sporadically, we must not allow a shrill, mythological narrative to cloud dialogue.”
It would be rather absurd, even bigoted, for the first to be claimed by any one tradition. “Only my tradition uses evidence,” would be a little much, no? (Isn’t that what Christian presuppositionlists are raked over the coals for?) But if that’s the case, then some modern tradition claiming all rational argument and use of evidence as a precursor for itself it ridiculous as well.
Separation of church and state in a strong form is a specifically Western, Christian development. It’s not even unique to Christianity per se. It’s a contingent outgrowth of the power of the Papacy to ward off attempts at state control.
Pluralism is hardly unique to secularism. It’s not like the Ottoman Millet system was secular. More to the point, the emergence of pluralism in Western states, which has given it it’s uniquely individualist framing, was bound up in theology. It’s also not common to secularism (just look at China’s current treatment of religious minorities).
The latter two certainly come out of a Christian context historically, but there are precursors elsewhere. Of course the recovery of the Stoics, Epicureans, etc. played a role too. These are in many ways a reintroduction, rather than something Christianity had absorbed, which is precisely why the Renaissance and Reformation are such large breaks with the past.
I would say the only element that is uniquely secular is the framing of the human good in “exclusive humanist” terms entirely within an immanent frame.