How the early Christian church gave birth to today’s WEIRD Europeans

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the church’s prohibitions against marrying close relatives weakened Europe’s traditional kinship networks and inadvertently replaced them with something very close to modern Western civilization’s cultural customs and norms.
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An interesting proposal, that Catholic prohibition of incest is one of the sources of modern individualism, democracy, nuclear family orientations. Quite opposite to what many say.

WEIRD is an acronym for “Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.”
 
Very interesting article!
Although the model is “incredible in its scope,” says Michele Gelfand, a cultural psychologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, it still hasn’t shown that the church actually caused the development of WEIRD psychology. Other institutions also helped shape the Western world, she says. “There are a lot of open questions.”
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Couldn’t possibly let the Church have credit for anything good without a fight, eh?
 
Weird! @Dovekin you really are one of the more interesting posters here who posts many things I find strange… 🤔 This is usually a good thing!

I would wonder about Irish culture though. They are deeply Catholic and deeply clannish. They are also generally trusting of outsiders and deeply individualistic.

This is a genuinely interesting artcle!
 
Wow. Just… wow.

There’re more to critique here than I have strength to roll my eyes at:
  • “Roman Catholic” influence in the 6th century A.D.? (Ever hear of the “Christian Church”?)
  • Prescriptions against cousin marriage eroding the tradition of listening to one’s elders? (What – did non-cousin marriages imply that newlyweds no longer had parents, aunts, uncles, or grandparents?)
  • “Kinship intensity scores” as driving trends toward “individualism”? (Ever hear that “correlation doesn’t imply causation”?)
  • “This constellation of traits lines up with the dominant psychological profile of people living in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries”. (So, they decided that western Christians shared characteristics with western countries, and concluded that Western Christianity caused the West? Ever hear of the word “tautology”?)
  • “Although the model is “incredible in its scope,” … it still hasn’t shown that the church actually caused the development of WEIRD psychology.” (In other words, if you examine a population of “people with brown eyes”, you can’t really conclude that they’re people because they have brown eyes. That is to say: they wait till the last sentence to admit that there’s no real indication that there’s ‘causation’ here. Just correlation between ‘like’ and ‘like’. That’s the best that science has to offer today? Oh, for crying out loud… :roll_eyes:)
 
According to St Augustine, who lived in the 4th century, it was not the norm even among pagan nations, to marry close relatives. The Egyptians and Greeks did so, but not the pagan Romans. So this was not such an innovation by the Church.
 
Gorgias said:
“Roman Catholic” influence in the 6th century A.D.?
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The article begins with “In September 506 C.E., the fathers of what would later become the Roman Catholic Church…” So yes, they are aware of differences from the Roman Catholic Church.

I agree though, they do not have a strong connection to Roman Catholic. I am pretty sure they went up to 1500, so it is Western Church generated Western societies. I am not really sure what Roman Catholic adds to the discussion.
jack63 said:
I would wonder about Irish culture though. They are deeply Catholic and deeply clannish. They are also generally trusting of outsiders and deeply individualistic.
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The Irish were pretty much completely Catholic throughout the study period. Perhaps clans were a way to keep some extended family ties, sort of a replacement for the intimacy of cousin marriages, but not too intimate. From genealogy studies I know the Scots and the Irish still married cousins in the 1700s, though not terribly often.
 
I have to wonder if it doesn’t have more to do with taking long summer days and long winter nights and importing caffeine from the coffee belt.


You could make just about as good a case for it… For instance, if you’re going to survive a long northern winter, you had better have an eye to aquiring a lot of wealth to carry you through it–more different kinds of clothing, more food, a more substantial home. That isn’t greed; it is prudence. With those long winters and sheltered indoor space, there is a lot of time to idle around indoors and thinking up new things. Long summer days means developing projects that take up very long work days.

This kind of thinking can come up with a lot of plausible reasons for the way things are. Just because we can come up with possible reasons doesn’t mean we have even come up with the most important reasons among the many for why things are the way they are.
 
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Wow! The Catholic Church prohibited something 500 years before it was even formed! Same authors said USA banned slavery in 1300 , five hundred years before USA formed
 
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Dovekin said:
The article begins with “In September 506 C.E., the fathers of what would later become the Roman Catholic Church…” So yes, they are aware of differences from the Roman Catholic Church.
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Still…
the researchers compared psychological and kinship traits of modern populations with the time their ancestors spent under Roman Catholic rule. The researchers built a vast database from historical records of church exposure in every nation on Earth, beginning in the first century
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Dovekin said:
it is Western Church generated Western societies. I am not really sure what Roman Catholic adds to the discussion.
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Right. That’s why it seems not terribly helpful.
 
While I do think that the Church had a huge influence on why Europe developed how it did, I am not so sure that it was banning incest that did it.

More probable influence are the Church’s emphasis on such things as human dignity, objective laws, equality of men and women, opposition to slavery, strong moral code, etc.
 
Very interesting thesis.

We often said that Europeans and Western people are individualistics and Muslins societies value more extended families links and clans inside a society.

And we marry outside of extended family links the vast majority of time nowdays. Much more than previousely. On the contrary, Muslins countries have many marriage between cousins.

In the past, people lived mostly in villages and not mooved a lot. As a consequence, a lot of marriage, is not the majority needed a dispensation from the Church because of close family bound (Modern times). I have learnt, as a historian, that it was a way for the Church to have a control over marriages. The possible current consequences of this offer a new perspective!
 
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repentant2 said:
Catholicism is exactly why Western Europe became the most advanced and had the highest level of culture and is superior to others throughout history and the world. Religion births culture. The religion closest to God naturally led to the best culture and societies. As we’ve drifted further from that base our societies have sunk lower.
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You’d have to define what makes a culture the “best” in order to analyze whether or not that statement is true. Personally, I’m not buying it. There is nothing in the plain meaning of the Gospels that implies what you’re saying: that is, Our Lord did not promise the best culture and society in this life to believers. Well, if “the religion closest to God” naturally leads to the best culture and society, why wouldn’t He have said that? Why wouldn’t the Church teach that? Yet that is not part of the Deposit of Faith. If anything, we are warned about not allowing the vanities of this world to become distractions.
 
I would take @repentant2’s remarks as a statement of faith, not as an impartial description. It is the best not because of objective standards, but because it comes from God by way of Catholicism. Your questions are important, but the article generates a LOT of questions.

@Dan_Defender’s remark suggests that it was a Roman value that the Church taught by prohibiting the marriage of cousins. The imposition of marital restrictions puts a different light on Henry VIII.

Just a lot of interesting ways to think about old questions.
 
repentant2 said:
The gospels, and the Bible/revelations from God to man as a whole are about what man was created for and how were supposed to interact with God, his creation, and each other. It logically follows the society built using that framework would be functioning closest to as God intended, and therefore would be superior to other, non Christian/pagan societies.
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Are societies so homogenous in the functioning of the individuals in them that you can draw logical conclusions like that?
As an example: would you say that in a predoninantly-Christian society that there has ever been a bit of sorting by which those who are “functioning closest to God” sometimes choose living arrangements that set them quite apart from those others in “society” who determine what is and is not “culture”?
Do you see the problem with making this into a simple cause-and-effect?
 
EndTimes said:
Sounds like the rantings of a rabid anti-Christian?
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I’d say more like a sociologist looking for a connection to make a name.
It’s not like it is totally implausible, but that is a long ways from being proof. I wouldn’t start teaching this as part of Church history or something.
 
I would say the WEIRD mostly is the result of Protestantism or Enlightenment thinking and not the early Church.
Industrialisation is practically a protestant invention and Democracy is definitely not a Catholic notion.
 
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