Did Christianity make Europeans WEIRD?

WEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. It refers to people of northwest European descent... They are not necessarily the same as people elsewhere...

They diverge from other populations in many areas of life, including sensory ability, economic preferences, personality structure, morality and cognition..

Northwest Europeans are so distinct because they have adapted to an atypical environment of weak kinship, strong individualism and “impersonal pro-sociality,” i.e., social interactions that are less personal and less emotionally intense but extend much further than friends and family.

For at least a thousand years, this behavioral environment has prevailed north and west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg (known as the Hajnal line). It is characterized by certain longstanding patterns of behavior:

• Solitary living for at least part of adulthood...
• Departure from the home upon reaching adulthood...
• Less loyalty to kin and greater willingness to trust strangers...

... Early 9th century: the Western Church began to calculate degrees of kinship through the so-called “Germanic system,” thus doubling the number of forbidden marriage partners...

The last measure forced almost everyone to marry outside their clan, causing clans to disappear and making people more individualistic and less concerned about kinship ties...

Others, however, have argued that the cousin marriage ban was simply a Christianization of existing norms, specifically Germanic ones...

Mentally and behaviorally, northwest Europeans are an outlier. In comparison to other humans, they are more individualistic, have weaker kinship ties and are more impersonal in their social interactions. Apparently, this has long been the case.

As a result, they have been better at transcending the limitations of kinship and creating larger forms of social organization, notably the state and the market economy. They have also been more inclined to think in terms of a potentially universal morality, an inclination that perhaps made them more receptive to the Christian faith. In such a moral system:

• Rules are framed in universal and absolute terms, as opposed to the situational and relativistic framing of kinship.

• Help is willingly given to non-kin, as long as they belong to the same community of rule followers.

• Continual rule breaking leads to expulsion from the community. The line between insiders and outsiders is much more a line between the morally worthy and the morally worthless. Xenophobia is much more a moral judgment than a simple rejection of the “Other.”..