In early November, a study published in the journal Science claimed to trace the whole social course of modernity — the decline of clan and tribe, the turn to nuclear families, the rise of individualism — back to Roman Catholicism’s opposition to incest.
The medieval church’s sweeping ban on cousin-marriage, the researchers argued, broke up traditional kinship networks and gave rise to new family patterns and eventually a new psychology — a less conformist, more individualist, very clearly modern mindset that according to their research is much more common in regions that had sustained exposure to Catholicism before 1500.