It would be extraordinarily time-consuming, if not impossible, to even attempt to list all of the ways that Christianity is responsible for the creation and development of Western civilization as we know it. Christianity is why the West is literate. It’s why we had the Industrial Revolution. It’s why we have a functioning legal system. All of these achievements, of course, trace to many different individual causes — the contributions of many individual Christian nations, leaders, monasteries, universities, the Crusades, and so on.
But there was one Christian innovation that, all by itself, had a direct, observable, and enduring impact on the trajectory of Western civilization. And while this particular innovation isn’t discussed very much — or at least, it hasn’t been discussed very much in recent history — that’s about to change.
I’m talking about the Catholic Church’s decision, around the sixth century, to ban marriages between first cousins. Once the Church banned first-cousin marriages in the Middle Ages, along with marriages among step-relatives, in-laws, and godparents, the West began rapidly pulling ahead of the rest of the world.
And make no mistake about it, the Church’s influence was indeed the primary reason why Europeans stopped marrying their relatives. The other major religions were expressly endorsing all kinds of incestuous relationships. And the statistics bear this out.
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