Laudator Temporis Acti

E.A. Judge, The Conversion of Rome: Ancient Sources of Modern Social Tensions (North Ryde: Macquarie Ancient History Association, 1980), p. 10:

When I once told A.H.M. Jones that I wanted to find out what difference it made to Rome to have been converted, he said he already knew the answer: None. Indeed, as his great work on the Later Roman Empire subsequently made clear, he thought that Christian belief, if anything, led to a lowering of moral standards in the community.

I don't have access to Judge's book, but I verified the quotation through Google Books' snippet view.

A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284-602: A Social Economic and Administrative Survey, Vol. II (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964), pp. 978-979:

It is difficult to assess whether in these matters the general level of morals was lower than it had been under the pagan empire, but it seems to have been no higher. Pliny the younger reveals himself in his letters as a more considerate landlord than were the rectors of the patrimony of St. Peter under Gregory the Great.

In some aspects of morals it is possible to trace a decline. The Codes give a very strong impression that brutality increased. In dealing with slaves, and from the middle of the second century onward the lower orders generally, the Roman administration had always been brutal. Torture was freely used to obtain evidence and extract confessions, flogging was arbitrarily inflicted, and the penalties for crime were often savage. Under the Christian emperors flogging and torture seem to have been used more and more as a matter of course, and were extended to classes hitherto exempt from them. Savage penalties, such as burning alive, were applied to a wider range of offences by successive emperors.

Official extortion and oppression and judicial corruption seem also to have increased. The Roman administration had never been free of these evils, but there was certainly a marked decline, which appears to be progressive, from the relatively high standards attained in the second and early third centuries. A definite decline in public morality can be traced in the sale of offices, which from being an exceptional abuse became a standard practice. It lay at the root of extortion and corruption, which concurrently became accepted as normal.

It is strange that during a period when Christianity, from being the religion of a small minority, came to embrace practically all the citizens of the empire, the general standards of conduct should have remained in general static and in some respects have sunk.

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Thanks to Jim O'Donnell for drawing my attention to Ramsay MacMullen, "What Difference Did Christianity Make?" Historia 35.3 (1986) 322-343, rpt. in his Changes in the Roman Empire: Essays in the Ordinary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 142-155, who examined the extent of Christianity's impact on sexual norms, slavery, gladitorial shows, judicial penalties, and corruption.