Post by Mercy for All on Apr 6, 2024 20:36:13 GMT
Everywhere Protestant missionaries have gone, when they are not tied to a national church, societies have flourished. This goes against the grain of popular thought and cultural narrative, but the data is there, as demonstrated by this deep-dive sociological study:
www.academia.edu/2128659/The_Missionary_Roots_of_Liberal_Democracy
www.academia.edu/2128659/The_Missionary_Roots_of_Liberal_Democracy
A century ago Max Weber (1958; 1968) argued that Protestantism helped spur the rise of capitalism. Some of his causal mechanisms may be wrong, but his main intuition seems right: Religious beliefs and institutions matter. What we consider modernity was not the in-evitable result of economic development, urbanization, industrialization, secularization, or the Enlightenment, but a far more contingent process profoundly shaped by activist religion.