The other day this interesting tweet popped into my feed and I think it encapsulates some of the thoughts I have with regard to the relationship with Protestantism, Christianity and modernity.
It's no mean feat to have achieved a literacy rate approaching 100% and an infant mortality rate roughly a third of a city--with all its institutions--that has been in place that two millennia. It's all the more the impressive considering the it was a wilderness sixty years prior.
I had a brief look today at the religious history of Toledo, Ohio and from what I could glean it would appears that Catholicism established the first roots there but it was displaced very early on by waves of Protestant immigrants who were hostile to it. Essentially Toledo was a Protestant dominated town.
Toledo Spain was one of the cultural centers of Catholicism and it's interesting to see that nearly two millenia of learning and culture did not confer upon it any advantage on the issue of infant mortality compared to some backwater in the New World. Now the metric of infant mortality is not simply about how many kids live past a certain age, it also is a metric of paternal misery and sorrow. No matter how you cut it, an improved infant mortality rate is a GOOD thing and less dead children usually means happier parents and siblings with all the subsequent second and third order benefits that accrue. Prosperity doesn't just mean wealth, but allows for better nutrition, housing which leads to less disease and misery.
The issue here is why wasn't Toledo, Spain--with its head-start in learning and culture--able to translate that into practical improvements with regard to the day to day life of its citizens.
It's this blog's contention that it was the Catholic/Protestant divide that explains a lot of the performance differential.
Since my blogging has been light over the past year I thought I would just use this post to recap some of the ideas I want to propose. Namely:
1) That the Catholic world while originating modernity was unable to implement it.
2) The Protestant world while initially rejecting modernity was able to harness it and control it till the sixties.
3) The theological changes within Protestantism, especially in the late 19th Century set into train events that would undermine it, so that by the Mid 20th C, mainline Protestantism--the Protestantism that was embraced by the senior managerial class who were the captains of modernity--had repudiated many of its original moral and theological beliefs.
4) The void left by this collapse was filled by a secular humanism unmoored from any fixed moral principle.
5) Catholicism has been peripheral to this turn of events.
6) The collapse of the faith in all of the West has come about from a "de-gracing" of it.
7) Since Grace is the foundation of Faith, any theological, philosophical, political or cultural movement that is not calibrated to the Will of the Christian God will fail.
14 comments:
Having lived briefly in Toledo, Ohio, I would say that your analysis ignores a very important difference between the two towns regarding it's religious history. Namely, Muslims have never run Toledo, OH for any length of time, ever. It's a lot easier to accomplish things when you don't have a dumb Muslim fraction causing generational problems due to their stupidity and backwardness.
Another thing worth pointing out is that while America is protestant, its also less populous. A lot of what you attribute to modernism in American is simply the result of a relative lack of resource scarcity. That's not to say that protestantism (and puritanism in particular) don't play any role in the differences between Europe and the new world, but the relative lack of resource competition in the US is very much an anomaly in the post-medieval age.
"The economic effects of the Protestant Reformation: Testing the Weber hypothesis in the German lands"
Davide Cantoni
University of Munich
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24539263
"Using population figures of 272 cities in the years 1300-1900, I find no effects of Protestantism on economic growth. The finding is precisely estimated, robust to the inclusion of various controls, and does not depend on data selection or small sample size."
One study perhaps does not a refutation make; but the ideas advanced in this post certainly does not account for Professor Cantoni's finding.
@Anonymous
Thanks for the link to the study. I had a look at it today and it's a poor one. He uses city size as proxy for economic activity because the data that he needs is simply not there. From the article.
The long time span considered allows to verify the presence of potential pre-existing trends and more generally to quantify the time-varying nature of the postulated treatment effects. The main dependent variable used is the size of cities,which arguably provides a good proxy for the level of economic development. Moreover, no other variable (real wages, body height, quality of housing. . . ) among those commonly used in the analysis of historical trends of well-being is available with a comparable cross-sectional breadth and temporal frequency
I mean the criticism of this approach is immediately obvious. Lagos has a population of 21 Million and Geneva 200K, no one with any common sense would argue that Lagos is wealthier than Geneva.
The conclusion of the article is basically that since there is no statistical difference between the size of Catholic and Protestant cities in Germany then there is no discrepancy of wealth and economic development. I wouldn't want to defend my PhD thesis on that premise.
@Andrew
The article that Anonymous linked to while poor has some good references.
Was Weber Wrong: A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History.
https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/1366/1/weberLMU.pdf
They had some fine granular data from Prussia looking at the disparity between Catholic and Protestant Germans. Not only do they find higher rates of literacy among Protestants
but also higher economic development.
Bonus.
A lot of what you attribute to modernism in American is simply the result of a relative lack of resource scarcity
That idea doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Comparing Buenos Aires and Chicago in the late 19th Century yeilds similar differences in economic development and literacy. Resource competition was not a limiting factor here.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228248155_Yet_Another_Tale_of_Two_Cities_Buenos_Aires_and_Chicago
Conservatives tend to think history, and specifically modernity, is the byproduct of elite discourse about ideas (antisemitism sometimes results from this way of thinking, because alot of elite intellectuals were Jewish). Bad ideas evolve and become fashionable among elites, who then spread these ideas to the wider society through mass media and social engineering. Leftists think "economic base" determines "superstructure", and ideas about religion, philosophy, and culture are just an "epiphenomena" of the "mode of production". The reality is obviously somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Leftists often err by discounting ideas. I think you are doing the common conservative thing and putting too much stock into "superstructure" and not enough into "base".
In 1913, the UK (very few Catholics) was more developed than Germany (large Catholic minority), which was more developed than Italy, Spain, and Portugal (all Catholic, at least "culturally"). In determining why these states differed so much, main question to ask is what economic policies did these states pursue in the years running up to 1913. How Catholic and Protestant religious ideas interacted with these policies is an interesting topic, but its not the main thing we should be looking at. Maybe all the Italians needed to do to catch up to the Germans was raise tariffs (or whatever), and their failure to do so was unrelated to Catholicism (the country was of course run by liberal freemasons at the time).
The article about Buenos Aires and Chicago notes that Chicago was far more industrialized. Was this because Protestantism leads to industrialization, or was it because the elites in Latin American countries, like those in the super-protestant US South, chose to remain underdeveloped and base their economies around exporting agricultural commodities to more developed areas rather than industrialize. And in the present day, there are plenty of very wealthy historically Catholic states. Northern Italy probably has a better outlook than the UK. If by some miracle there was a Catholic religious revival in Northern Italy, would their standard of living collapse? Does that high standard of living foreclose the possibility of such a revival?
@Anon
They're good points.
Maybe all the Italians needed to do to catch up to the Germans was raise tariffs (or whatever), and their failure to do so was unrelated to Catholicism (the country was of course run by liberal freemasons at the time).
I don't think that the case because in areas where the Catholics and Protestants lived together, within one state, Catholic economic performance was always inferior.
Northern Italy is a particularly interesting example as it was here that the ideas which underpin modernity arose. The problem is that it could not implement them. What's interesting that its only after the 1880's that Italy starts to industrialise and in term of real wages, peoples wages start to increase meaningfully after 1940, and mainly in those areas run by Freemasons. (I'm not an advocate of Freemasonry but I recognise the correlation) The galling thing for many Catholics in Italy is that Freemasonry may helped helped bring about economic development there, just as communism increased peasant literacy in Slavic Europe.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13545710903465507
I've got to head to work. Will reply more later.
Was this because Protestantism leads to industrialization, or was it because the elites in Latin American countries, like those in the super-protestant US South, chose to remain underdeveloped and base their economies around exporting agricultural commodities to more developed areas rather than industrialize
I think when you compare Protestant societies to Catholic ones you're comparing two societies that have different structures. Catholic societies are far more heirarchical than protestant ones with a stronger emphasis on the elite while Protestant ones are more bourgeois "weighted", the middle class being stronger in the latter. Note: Different Protestantisms produce different societies. Giving the middle class more freedom gives it the opportunity to develop new ideas outside elite conntrol and hence innovation becomes more prevalent. A lot of the push to industrialisation came from this element.
Catholic industrialisation is more a dirigisme rather than a bourgeoise phenomenon and seems imposed rather than organic to the societies being. Argentina tried to Industrialise during the 40's-70's and it was a disaster. France also had problems but was better managed and had a strong Huguenot base to draw from.
As for standard of living and religious collapse, faith is a product of Grace not economic circumstance.
To the this into the reformation itself, I had the thought that if you think the Reformation was a good thing, that means Catholicism had serious problems that led to the Reformation. Next if you think it was a bad thing, then Catholicism had serious problems that made it vulnerable to the Reformation. Either way things were not good in a massive and serious way.
I was listening to a homily on the fewness of the saved by St Leonard of Port Maurice where the priest made the same point basically “you think this was the good old days before Protestantism? St. Leonard didn’t think so”.
I think the thing that makes the difference is the Protestant focus on individual faith in Christ. Even today it seems that if you ask a real evangelical how to become a Christian he will share the gospel as he understands it, whereas even very good Catholics will recommend books and classes. One of these resembles what the Apostles did in Acts and the other does not.
I believe this individual faith is what God truly wants the most and from which other goods can flow. I’m not even saying it’s not what Catholics teach either, I have read Catholics that sound not at all foreign to my Protestant ears.
As a side note, in a way literacy was close to the heart of the reformation in a way. Monk Luther long beforehand established himself as one of the “weirdos” who prized study of the primary sources, the scriptures, at the time many priests and religious were shockingly ignorant. And I don’t really buy the excuse that literacy was impossible to achieve generally before the printing press, the Jews had similar limitations and much better literacy, and even literate Christians often busied themselves more with commentary than the scripture itself, one of Luther’s early complaints.
@Hoyos
Either way things were not good in a massive and serious way.
Agree. The more I look at this, as a Catholic, the more I am of the opinion that the Reformation, despite some of its faults, was a regrettable necessity. As I see it, though I disagree with some of the elements of the Reformation, it did have a kernel of goodness which I feel may have helped Christianity in the long run.
I have read Catholics that sound not at all foreign to my Protestant ears.
You know, the people who have strengthened my Catholicism, made it "deeper", were Protestants. Not by a "reaction" to Protestantism, but by approaching my faith in a Protestant way.
"It's a lot easier to accomplish things when you don't have a dumb Muslim fraction causing generational problems due to their stupidity and backwardness"
The only Muslims who remained in Spain for some time after the Reconquista were ethnic Spaniards who, like Jews, tended to be more numerate than Christians. They eventually converted to Christianity or left the country.
"Interestingly, Muslims who were caught by the Inquisition
also displayed higher numeracy than the average Spanish and
Portuguese population during the early modern period (by 10–16 per
cent)."
Source: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/revista-de-historia-economica-journal-of-iberian-and-latin-american-economic-history/article/abs/numeracy-of-religious-minorities-in-spain-and-portugal-during-the-inquisition-era/F0B49AE7BA5AFA17406F3A6C734EA949
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