Logistic Modeling of a Religious Sect Features

TL;DR

This paper models the growth and decay of the Antoinist Cult community using logistic functions and analyzes historical financial and temple data to understand social dynamics in sect evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a logistic agent-based model to describe sect growth and decay, applying it to historical data of the Antoinist Cult community.

Findings

Logistic model fits temple number evolution well

Different regimes observed in financial reports

Social forces influence growth and decay phases

Abstract

The financial characteristics of sects are challenging topics. The present paper concerns the Antoinist Cult community (ACC), which has appeared at the end of the 19-th century in Belgium, have had quite an expansion, and is now decaying. The historical perspective is described in an Appendix. Although surely of marginal importance in religious history, the numerical and analytic description of the ACC growth AND decay evolution per se should hopefully permit generalizations toward behaviors of other sects, with either longer life time, i.e. so called religions or churches, or to others with shorter life time. Due to the specific aims and rules of the community, in particular the lack of proselytism, and strict acceptance of only anonymous financial gifts, an indirect measure of their member number evolution can only be studied. This is done here first through the time dependence of new temple inaugurations, between 1910 and 1940. Besides, the community yearly financial reports can be analyzed. They are legally known between 1920 and 2000. Interestingly, several regimes are seen, with different time spans. The agent based model chosen to describe both temple number and finance evolutions is the Verhulst logistic function taking into account the limited resources of the population. Such a function remarkably fits the number of temple evolution, taking into account a no construction time gap, historically explained. The empirical Gompertz law can also be used for fitting this number of temple evolution data, as shown in an Appendix. It is thereby concluded that strong social forces have been acting both in the growth and decay phases.