Tertullian, Apology 35

Christians are public enemies for one reason: we refuse to offer emperors honors that are empty, false, or reckless. As people of true religion, we mark their festivals with conscience, not debauchery. What a 'great duty' the world calls it—dragging hearths and marriage beds into the street, feasting block by block, turning the city into a tavern, churning wine into mud, and sending crowds racing toward insult, shamelessness, and lust. Is public joy really expressed through public shame? Do these princely festivals deserve the name when they would disgrace any other day? Those who keep discipline only out of respect for Caesar will abandon it for Caesar; license will be renamed piety, and luxury rebranded as religion. Oh, we are rightly condemned! Why do we—chaste, sober, upright—erase the vows and joys of the Caesars? Why, on a day of rejoicing, do we not shade our doorposts with laurel or turn night into day with lamps? It is counted an honor, when the public festival demands it, to dress your house in the livery of a new brothel. Yet even in this second-tier religion—this 'religion of secondary majesty' for which we Christians are charged with a second sacrilege—I want to make a point by not celebrating the Caesars' festivals with you. The way you celebrate them violates modesty, reverence, and chastity; pleasure, not worthy reason, drives the show. Let your own faith and truth be proven by this; otherwise, you may be found worse than the Christians you refuse to call Romans, branding us instead as enemies of the Roman princes.

I call the Quirites themselves to account—the native plebeians of the seven hills: does the Roman tongue spare a single one of their Caesars? The Tiber testifies, and the beast-schools. If nature had given hearts a transparent window, whose inner chambers would not show the scene of a new Caesar presiding over a donative, freshly inscribed? Even in the hour they cry, 'Jupiter, add the years of our years to yours,' a Christian no more knows how to utter that prayer than to wish for a new Caesar. 'But the mob,' you say. The mob, yes—but Roman. And no one demands Christian blood more loudly than the mob. The other orders, by their authority, are religious from faith; the senate, the knights, the camps, the palaces themselves breathe nothing hostile. Where did the Cassii, the Nigri, the Albini come from? Who besieged Caesar between the two laurels? Who practiced the wrestler's art on his throat? Who, armed, stormed the palace, bolder than all the Sigerii and Parthenii? From Romans, if I am not mistaken—that is, from non-Christians. And yet, even at the very eruption of impiety, all those men performed sacrifices for the Emperor's salvation and worshipped his genius, some outside, some in, while pinning the label 'public enemies' on Christians.

Even now, those exposed as allies or cheerleaders of murderous factions—the surviving cluster after the vintage of parricides—with what fresh, branching laurels did they shade their doorposts? With what lofty, blazing lamps did they smoke their vestibules? With what plush, proud couches did they carve up the forum for themselves? Not to celebrate public joy, but to declare their private vows early and, in another's festival, inaugurate the image of their own hope, swapping the prince's name in their hearts. The same complicity clings to those who consult astrologers, soothsayers, augurs, and magicians about the Caesars' heads—arts betrayed by deserting angels and forbidden by God, which Christians will not use even for their own causes. Who needs to investigate the Emperor's safety except someone plotting against it, wishing it harm, or hoping to profit from his fall? You do not consult about loved ones the way you consult about masters; the anxiety of blood is one thing, the anxiety of slaves another.