Astral Codex Ten

Protestantism

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Protestantism

Article

Protestantism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between April 21, 2021 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “almost a fifth of Latin Americans have converted to Protestantism”; “Protestantism heavy on the plainness”; “Catholicism/Orthodoxy and most Protestantism”. It most often appears alongside Catholicism, Africa, China.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: April 21, 2021
  • Last seen: August 01, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

No, Really, Why Are So Many Christians In Colombia Converting To Orthodox Judaism?
April 21, 2021 · Original source
And if we’re going to include Judaism and Eastern Orthodoxy, we might as well talk about the five million Mormons in Latin America, or the thing where almost a fifth of Latin Americans have converted to Protestantism in the past fifty years.
Inline links: the five million Mormons in Latin America, almost a fifth of Latin Americans have converted to Protestantism in the past fifty years
Still, Orthodox Judaism? The articles linked above talk about why Mormonism and Pentecostalism are winning converts in Latin America. Both put lots of effort into missionary work (Judaism actively discourages conversion). Pentecostalism in particular is hip and willing to adapt itself to Latin American culture in a way that Catholicism isn’t - “The music that you hear in Pentecostal churches has the same rhythms that people enjoy outside of church” (Orthodox Judaism is about the least-hip and least Latin-American-culture-compatible religion imaginable). The number one reason cited by new Latin American converts to Protestantism is that they are “seeking a personal connection with God” (Orthodox Judaism almost aggressively avoids providing this). And converting to Orthodoxy is not a small step:
Inline links: actively discourages conversion, willing to adapt, number one reason
Whither Tartaria?
September 23, 2021 · Original source
Catholicism traditionally goes heavy on the ornateness, Protestantism heavy on the plainness. Something to do with a Protestant rejection of wealth as too linked to the powers of this world, and trying to get back to the poverty and humility of the original Church. If Protestant aesthetics "won" in a way that affected even people who weren't thinking in religious terms, that could explain some of the shift.
Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day
October 10, 2022 · Original source
The implications of Arianism for Mariology, which provides a sharp distinction between Catholicism/Orthodoxy and most Protestantism, are huge. If you're debating Mary's role in salvation, which we Catholics/Orthodox think is major and most Protestants don't (and which we fight about on the internet the way you fight about buying mosquito nets) you eventually run into the Christological answer given by Arius. If Jesus isn't fully God, then Mary can't be the mother of God, which we think is an important title, with a corresponding entitlement to special reverence.
Links For May 2023
June 01, 2023 · Original source
I would instead put this in the context of the centuries-long advance of Protestantism. Martin Luther said that instead of asking priests what they thought a holy book said, you should study it yourself. But this still left a potential weak point - institutions can convince you to interpret the book in the way they prefer. Now we’ve finally brought the Lutherian project to its ultimate conclusion, where you can cut out the personal interpretation and just ask the sacred text directly. Of course no one likes how it answers!
Your Book Review: The Weirdest People in the World
August 11, 2023 · Original source
Y is correlated with X today Indeed this does seem to skip all the interesting, contingent bits: On the other hand, if you want to explain an all-important outcome like the take-off into modern economic growth, then you can't just mumble “one damn thing after another” or “irony and contingency”. That a hundred things randomly conspired to make the West Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic is not a satisfying story. Why would the die rolls keep favouring this one place? (And you can't invoke the law of large numbers. There are only five continents in the world, and modern economic growth did not have to happen anywhere at all.) To get from Europe 1 AD to modernity, while paying reasonable attention to the many accidents along the way, there are really only two possible narrative genres. The first is the rock falling down a mountain. It starts with one big, random event. This then triggers other events, and they trigger others, and now you have an unstoppable landslide. But the chance is at the start. The second is the cyclist pushing his bike up a mountain. It takes an actor who deliberately over time overcomes one obstacle and dodges another, until eventually they get to the top, and from there it's a downhill ride. WEIRD belongs firmly in the landslide genre. The big event is the Marriage and Family Program of the Western Church. This sets off a landslide, which the later chapters detail: the decline of kin institutions, the rise of Italian communes and city-states in the middle ages, the idea of individual rights in the European law merchant, the development of Protestantism, and finally the trifecta of science, commerce and democracy. WEIRD psychology is there, as an unobserved helper, for each stage of this journey, but each stage also builds on the previous ones. It's not by chance that WEIRD tells the West's story as a landslide. First, this is part of cultural evolution's baggage of intellectual commitments. Homo culturalis doesn't figure out solutions to his problems by abstract thought; he's not a natural optimizer. Instead he feels his way towards solutions. In a now famous example from The Secret Of Our Success, nobody just sat down and worked out how to detoxify manioc. Cultures which did this job better just had an evolutionary advantage. Second, the “bicycle push uphill” story would threaten the clean causality of the natural experiment. Suppose the Western Church promulgated the MFP with the deliberate plan of creating WEIRD psychology and causing the take-off into modern economic growth. Okay, that's unlikely, but suppose it promulgated the MFP with a plan that was somewhat related to increasing human welfare (in this world, not the next). Then we might suspect two things: Maybe in doing so the Church was reacting to existing conditions: reading the human situation and responding “hey, what we need here is less intensive kinship”.
Inline links: detoxify manioc
There’s the research programme of the psychology of religion, most famously exemplified in Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods, with its human-like agents, divine monitoring, and Credibility Enhancing Displays. There’s the WEIRD kinship complex of bilateral descent, little to no cousin marriage, monogamy and nuclear families. There’s the history of the medieval church and its Marriage and Family Program, including the historical linguistics of words for relatives. There’s a big set of cross-country or cross-region regressions on “kinship intensity” – how clannish a society is – WEIRD pychology, the genetics of inbreeding and diplomats’ unpaid parking tickets. There’s the story of monogamy, how it affects testosterone, and how that might affect trust and conflict. There’s historical economic studies, usually with some clever natural experiment, on the medieval growth of institutions like fraternities, monasteries, universities, charter towns and the Law Merchant; and the plausible role of WEIRD psychology in each of these. Then the history of clocks, work hours, Cistercians, interest rates and apprenticeships. Last of all the development of law, science and Protestantism, again always with WEIRD psychology as a possible contributor, especially in building the networks – the collective brain – underpinning innovation. Across all of these areas, Henrich is always ready to jump sideways, to use a modern psychology experiment or a tribal ethnography to cast light on European history.
Against The Cultural Christianity Argument
October 04, 2024 · Original source
But the Christian cultural package also fell apart and became the current post-Christian world. This wasn't just a one-time coincidence either. Protestantism gave way to modernism in Scandinavia, Germany, and the US. Catholicism gave way to modernism in Spain, Italy, and Latin America. Orthodoxy gave way to modernism in Greece, Eastern Europe, and Russia (with a slight Putinist resurrection-in-name-only which hardly seems to have produced a flourishing liberal society). Meanwhile in China, the local mix of Buddhism/Confucianism/Taoism gave way to modernism. In South East Asia, Buddhism gave way to modernism. Only 10% of Israeli Jews are ultra-Orthodox, and it would be lower if they didn't breed so fast. India is moderately Hindu but still noticeably modern. Even the Middle East is gradually becoming less Muslim.
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
Obviously, if you're a Catholic, you can be content with the first model, and indeed can be very smug that is exactly what your religion would predict. Non-Catholic Christians might want to consider switching sects, or just might want to say that Joan is before Protestantism and we don't know what she would have thought of it.92
Inline links: 92