Expressing Christianness in Carthage in the Second and Third Centuries

Second and third-century Christians in Carthage seem to have expressed their Christianness in contexts in which they were with other Christians and in which they were already identified as such. There is little evidence of other, public, contexts in which they gave salience to their Christianness over other category memberships such as those attached to their social group or to their trade. The fact that they did not live in a separate Christian world, and that fear could not account for their behaviour, confirms that a number of Christians adopted a lateral arrangement of their category memberships, in which situational selection is the key to the activation or not of a given category.