Cultural inheritance or cultural diffusion of religious violence? A quantitative case study of the Radical Reformation

Abstract

Abstract Religion throughout the historical record is consistently associated with large-scale cooperative activities. These cooperative activities sometimes involve coordinated acts of violence, particularly against religious out-groups. Using phylogenetic and social network analyses, we investigated whether religious violence is inherited from parent congregations or is acquired from contemporaneous purveyors of violent ideologies. We examined these questions among sixteenth-century Anabaptists, who constitute a prominent historical system with both violent and pacifist congregations. We found that ideology advocating violence was typically inherited from parent congregations, while the majority of other theological traits spread among contemporaneous groups. Violent ideology may be learned independently from most other characteristics of an overall belief system, and/or it may be determined more by congregationally inherited economic and political factors than by theology.