What effect does the Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire have on us today

Of course, the most fundamental effect today, of the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, is that most Westerners are Christians.

The political map of Europe has been drawn and redrawn as pagans were conquered in the name of Christianity and political changes resulted from long-ago alliances and emnities of religious origin. While the conquest of South America was primarily driven by greed, its division into a Spanish west and a Portuguese east was mediated by the Christian Pope.

A more subtle effect, not so much of the mere fact of the rise of Christianity, but of the manner of its rise and the culture of intolerance and persecution that arose with it in the fourth-century empire, is that even today we have an underlying culture of intolerance when compared to pagan times or to the Orient.