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Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition

pnas.org

41–50 of 79 posts

Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition

#41

What does this have to do with religion? Secular ideologies killed about a two hundred million people in last century alone and nearly destroyed all of civilization. Secular Totalitarians were putting people in gas chambers and gulags by the 10s of millions 'In The Name Of Whatever' (and of course, about 1/2 of those secular ideologies were specifically anti-religious). If you look at a map of Europe, you can see the…

I think the finding of this study is suggesting religious persecution is bad for for a community, not religion itself. It would likely see all the persecution you mention as harmful, just not part of this study.

I think the study is erroneously attributing the term 'religion' especially in the context of the Spanish inquisition.

If the study was titled 'Long-Term Effects of the Spanish Inquisition' - that would be fine, but they are more broadly applying their conclusions without evidence.

Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition

#42
post #38

I can't read the article, but the Spanish Inquisition is generally misunderstood in the historical context and innumerable myths have been spun about the affair through later Protestant leaflets and the like (outrageous claims of the genocide of millions, for example, compared to the actual 3,000-5,000 executed over the course of close to four centuries; compare this to the 150,000 secular witch burnings during the s…

> the very notion of forced conversion is understood as not only evil by Catholics Funny you say that, given how one of the cornerstones of Catholicism is forced conversion of children.

As I understand it, conversion requires renouncing your previous faith. If you are referring to the practice of baptizing newborn babies, I don't think it can considered a conversion (much less a forced one) at all.

Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition

#43

I can't read the article, but the Spanish Inquisition is generally misunderstood in the historical context and innumerable myths have been spun about the affair through later Protestant leaflets and the like (outrageous claims of the genocide of millions, for example, compared to the actual 3,000-5,000 executed over the course of close to four centuries; compare this to the 150,000 secular witch burnings during the s…

"Secular witch burnings" is a term I haven't heard before.

Religiously motivated, but conducted by laypeople, yes?

Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition

#44
post #39

Legacy papers are very popular these days in econ, history, and political science. I don't have the time to dive deep into this one, but spatial identification of long-term causal effects is prone to errors. Specifically, the error terms in regression specifications capture unexplained variance that can be very persistent over long periods of time. These errors can also be spatially correlated across treated observat…

I can't dive deep either, just a quick note that the OP article reference list includes the (important) review you linked.

Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition

#45
Getting rid of the remnants of two foreign peoples who had not sort of familiarity or loyalty with the natives, and their faiths was the best thing that happened in Iberia.

When were the Portuguese and Spanish Golden Ages, again?

Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition

#47
post #39

Legacy papers are very popular these days in econ, history, and political science. I don't have the time to dive deep into this one, but spatial identification of long-term causal effects is prone to errors. Specifically, the error terms in regression specifications capture unexplained variance that can be very persistent over long periods of time. These errors can also be spatially correlated across treated observat…

I can't dive deep either, just a quick note that the OP article reference list includes the (important) review you linked.

That's great. Not all methodological insights get adopted by applied studies. Thanks for pointing this out!

Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition

#48

Apparently, there are many other major religious persecutions that are not well-known today. These include the Nguyen Lords persecutions and ethnic cleansing of Chams people that used to live and control more than half of modern Vietnam, for more than a thousand years [1],[2]. Interestingly, both of the Catholic Church of Spain and Nguyens Lords of Vietnam regimes employed Pig or Pork Policy as a control measures to…

Funny, but the first thing that came to my mind reading the study abstract was ham in Spain - particularly its ubiquity in Andalusia, where I lived for a few years. There are only two kinds of restaurants in Granada - those that serve ham, and those that are Halal. I developed a theory that it had to do with forcing pork onto Muslim and Jewish populations during the Reconquista. It still serves as a form of self-segr…

In Portugal, Jews invented an ingenious decoy sausage to evade pork surveillance:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170929-the-unlikely-sau...

Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition

#49
post #25

The causality might go the opposite way. Maybe areas with poorer economies were more prone to persecuting minorities. So it’s not the persecution that led to the poor economy, but the poor economy that led to the persecution. Or maybe a third factor drove both of these things.

The Spanish Inquisition was centrally ordered and to an extent managed, not spontaneous local events. Unless they specifically targeted poorer areas, which isn't impossible but is unlikely ( if they killed or expelled infidels, guess who got to keep the gold/money/property?), causality seems more probable to be in the way Spanish Inquisition -> poverty.

> Unless they specifically targeted poorer areas, which isn't impossible but is unlikely ( if they killed or expelled infidels, guess who got to keep the gold/money/property?)

Being rich tends to coincide with having some kind of power. The poor people are more likely to be targeted by oppressive campaigns of any sort, because rich people use their power to protect themselves.

There would be nothing exceptional about targeting poor rather then rich and powerful.

Re: Long-run effects of religious persecution: evidence from the Spanish Inquisition

#50

Makes sense at face value. Generally speaking, religious minorities tend to perform better economically than the majority religious group(s) since they have to work harder to overcome institutional and historical hurdles placed in their way. So when they are persecuted, their economic productivity is reduced. Quite simply, they are either killed, flee, or are reduced to poverty. All of these affect economic performan…

> religious minorities tend to perform better economically than the majority religious group(s) since they have to work harder to overcome institutional and historical hurdles placed in their way

They dont? Religious minorities tend to worst then majority. They do sometimes get accused to be too rich by propaganda.

Jew in Europe nor in Germany specifically before WWII were not actually richer, statistically. They were on average lower middle class. Many of them were poor and refugees from eastern europe. Where individuals have been more successful, majority resented that and wanted to punish all Jews for it.

Yazidi are not richer then average in Iraque. Kurds are not richer then majority.

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