Celtic Christianity
Roman Christianity, like Roman culture, was a city-based culture. All of the letters of Saint Paul that made it into the official Roman canon of the New Testament were written to new churches in various Roman cities. The Latin word for Celt was Galli. Paul's letter to the Galatians was written to a Celtic settlement, uncharacteristically urban, in what is now Turkey. For most of its early history, the Roman church paid little attention to the country dwellers they called the "Paganus," which is equivalent to the contemporary "redneck" or "country bumpkin." Consequently, it was not the Roman missionaries who Christianized the vast majority of the European land mass. It was the monks from Ireland who were comfortable with the nature-loving ways of the Paganus. They traveled to mainland Europe and taught the countryfolk Celtic Christianity.