In a large and important research-based book, Harvard evolutionary biologist and anthropologist Joseph Henrich explains how Christianity helped shape the benefits of Western civilization by promoting and enforcing monogamous marriage.
This book carries a very curious title: The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). It answers the question: how did people who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic come to change the world so profoundly?
He could have added another R for Religious, which is, specially, Christian.
In his nearly 700-page tome, Professor Henrich explains how “Christianity drove the spread of a particular package of social norms and beliefs that dramatically altered marriage, family, inheritance, and ownership in parts of Europe over centuries.” These were all connected and set up a sociological system for how people lived their lives together, in family and society. This led to the betterment of society for most. It was literally world-changing and largely built on the social promotion of monogamous marriage. Henrich continues,
Essentially, this was the creation of a new form of society, one that led to and created the good life that multiple billions of people enjoy and benefit from today, and have down through several centuries.
Henrich states, “In many ways, marriage represents the keystone institution for most – though not all – societies and may be the most primeval of human institutions” as it “permits males and females to team up to rear offspring” which is the driver of all civilizational growth. He adds, “By anchoring on these pair-bonding instincts, marriage norms can dramatically expand family networks in a couple of interrelated ways.”
Years ago, Henrich wrote an important scholarly paper for the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society explaining how marriage through “normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses.”
In the book, he explains that “getting married cuts a man’s chances of committing a crime by half, both for property crimes like burglary, theft, and robbery and for violent crimes like assault and battery.” He adds, “Across all crime, marriage cuts the rate by 35 percent.” He continues, “If guys had a ‘good’ marriage, they were even less likely to commit a crime.” He reminds us that this means marriage itself has a positive influence on men because the comparisons were with the men themselves, pre- and post-wedding.
Marital monogamy provides essential social benefits by democratizing sexuality in uniting one man to one woman and vice versa through marriage. This clarifies paternity and paternal investment in children and the children’s mother. In WEIRD, Henrich asserts, “By firming up links between children and their fathers, as well as between spouses, marriage creates in-laws. …The effect of marriage bonds on kinship ties are big.”
Marriage builds stronger, longer-lasting social connections and efficient distributions of wealth and trade within communities and across generations.
Henrich goes onto help us appreciate that “marriage norms also regulate who can marriage and reproduce with whom, which subtly structures society in ways most people don’t realize.” He explains this happens predominantly by creating “sexual and marriage taboos” that have transformed society in very beneficial ways. These taboos and sexual norms settle men down and get them to focus on one woman and their common children, as well as the resultant extended kinship bonds that union creates. It also protects women from being collected and used as one of multiple wives. Afterall, the wife in a monogamous marriage is a much more powerful player and familial and community leader than her peers in polygamous harems. This fact again focuses paternal investment more sharply and beneficially toward the offspring the man has with her as his one wife.
All of this makes men, women, children and society better. And it stems from the Christian norm of sexuality and marriage.
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