Taking the entertainment industry

As Young notes ( In Procession Before the World: Martyrdom As Public Liturgy in Early Christianity (The Pere Marquette Lecture in Theology, 2001) , p. 12), the early Christians had their own way of taking over the Roman entertainment industry: Martyrs “invaded those spectacles and turned them to their own purposes, as athletes in games they did not invent, and as officiants in sacrifices they set up against the sacrificial civic religion of the Romans.”