An Epidemiological Modeling Take on Religion Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces an epidemiological model for religious dynamics, capturing how religions spread, compete, and evolve over time through mechanisms like missionary activity and denomination splitting.

Contribution

It presents a novel mechanistic framework that models religious change as a diffusion process, incorporating demographic turnover and endogenous denomination formation.

Findings

The model reproduces key qualitative regimes of religious change.

Calibration fits historical religious affiliation trajectories.

Sensitivity analysis reveals regime shifts with small parameter changes.

Abstract

Religions are among the most consequential social institutions, shaping collective identities, moral norms, and political organization across societies and historical periods. Nevertheless, despite extensive scholarship describing conversion, competition, and secularization, there is still no widely adopted formal model that captures religious dynamics over time within a unified, mechanistic framework. In this study, we propose an epidemiologically grounded model of religious change in which religions spread and compete analogously to co-circulating strains. The model extends multi-strain compartmental dynamics by distinguishing passive believers, active missionaries, and religious elites, and by incorporating demographic turnover and mutation-like splitting that endogenously generates new denominations. Using computer simulations, we show that the same mechanism reproduces canonical qualitative regimes, including emergence from rarity, rapid expansion, long-run coexistence, and transient rise-and-fall movements. A reduced calibration variant fits historical affiliation trajectories with parsimonious regime shifts in effective recruitment and disaffiliation, yielding interpretable signatures of changing social conditions. Finally, sensitivity analyses map sharp regime boundaries in parameter space, indicating that modest shifts in recruitment efficacy or retention among active spreaders can qualitatively alter long-run religious landscapes. These results establish a general, interpretable framework for studying religion as a dynamical diffusion process and provide a tool for comparative inference and counterfactual analysis in sociological research.