Stylish? No, but something Christians have been doing since he came up with the unsupportable notion the Christianity weakened the Empire, causing it to fall. He was “trashed” in his own day for it. The notion is unsupportable precisely because the Empire lasted over a thousand years as a formally Christian Empire (from Theodosius’s formal adoption of Christianity as the Imperial religion in 380 until the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453).
I see what you are saying but I have not progressed far enough in reading Gibbons to reach a conclusion one way or the other. What I have read mostly concerned a church torn by disputes over heresy with the state falling on one side or the other as emperors and state officials would come and go.
Your point about the length of life of the empire is not lost on me. It fared very well compared to all others. But it did reach a turning point and regardless of how we view the east and west split, when the shrinkage of the empire started, it proved irreversible.
One question I ask is if Christianity did end the Roman Empire, and that empire was corrupt, it that not a good thing or must that judgment be based only upon what followed? If by what followed, how long do we give it before we make another judgment? Also, is there some common factor related to the collapse of other empires that were definitely not Christian? When the Soviet empire collapsed we cheered though I wrote a piece long ago saying there would be extreme danger because of the moral vacuum. That evil empire no conscience or soul. I mention this only for perspective. Imperial collapse is not always bad but what follows is not always predictable.
I’ll offer a parallel thought: Is it just that a pagan nation responsible for the murder of over 50 million innocent children collapse? By what hypocrisy can we applaud the collapse of one evil empire yet try to preserve a different evil empire? Obviously we seek change, but for how long before we acknowledge it may never happen without a cataclysmic collapse?