The top down aspect you refer to had many executions attached to it. Good work on the timeline, and I'll even give you that many of the missionaries may not have intended the kings and local rulers do so much killing, but the idea it was voluntary is incorrect in far too many cases to be a coincidence.
> the idea it was voluntary is incorrect in far too many cases to be a coincidence.
Indeed. King Olaf Tryggvasson and St. Olaf, for instance, brutally tortured and killed many of the old faith in their quest to Christianize Norway. Iceland Christianized about the year 1000 as a way to stop the fighting between the pagans and the Christians... the means of conversion being that everybody voted on which religion the island should be, the Christians won the vote and the pagans converted. One wonders who well that woudl work in an area where Muslim population had suddenly exploded and equalled the local Christian population, and they had been causing lots of trouble...
Shall we descend into litanies of who killed who? I *know* you don't want us to be posting from the Roman martyrology. Or maybe snippets from the North American martyrs?
You will find
a) that it was the state and not the Church who was behind most of these persecutions of pagans (note that you mentioned King Olaf and the Emperor Charlemagne--not Pope, not bishop.) Blaming the Church for them makes about as much sense as blaming the Church for abortion today.
b) things like sorcery, atheism, and not participating in the state cult were capital crimes in many pagan cultures. Plato was killed as an atheist by pagans. The Christians were killed as atheists by pagans. The Jesuits were killed as sorcerors by pagans. Handsome Lake, the pagan Seneca prophet, killed witches.
The essential problem with paganism always has been and always will be that anyone can make it anything they want. There is no creed, there is only picking and choosing deities and aspects of deities that one likes.
It encompasses everything from lofty Platonism and Brahmanism to the wickedest, basest cults of sexual degeneracy and bloodlust. So you may very well not *like* the freakish sort of Asatruar, but what position are you to judge it? I find it somewhat odd that you are judging paganism by Christianity's moral standards.