The early Catholic Church may have helped spark Western individualism

Very recommendable! 

I have read many things before how the Bible strengthened individualism and freedom in Western countries. Following article adds another important dimension to it that I was not aware of.

"Leaders of that branch [Catholic church] became obsessed with what they saw as incest, ... and launched a “marriage and family program” that eventually banned marriages between even distant cousins, step-relatives and in-laws. Church policies also encouraged marriage by choice instead of arranged marriages, and small, nuclear households, with couples living separately from extended family members. ... When the researchers zoomed in on rates of marriage between cousins, they found that for each 500 years a country spent under the influence of Western Church, this type of marriage dropped by 91 percent. "

"These societies are often described today as Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, or WEIRD for short ... (Henrich coined the acronym in a seminal 2010 study in Behavioral and Brain Sciences)." This acronym, in my opinion, is not much more than a publicity stunt!

The early Catholic Church may have helped spark Western individualism | Science News: Early Catholic Church decrees transformed families and may help explain why Western societies today tend to be individualistic and nonconformist.