This essay examines the transformation of the original Jesus movement — from a decentralized, regenerative community of radical love and embodied coherence — into an imperial institution that mirrored and reinforced the very structures it once subverted. Drawing on Peter Turchin’s cliodynamic framework and a regenerative coherence lens, we trace the symbolic recursion and systemic pressures that enabled Christianity’s capture by empire. We analyze the mechanisms of symbolic inversion, institutional codification, and theological repurposing that fractured the original coherence of the movement while embedding its regenerative DNA into ritual, story, and myth. This latent symbolic grammar, we argue, is now reactivating amid today’s meta-crises. The essay concludes with a vision of regenerative Christianity as a civilizational attractor grounded not in dogma, but in relational wholeness, ecological solidarity, and the living grammar of coherence.
