From Kin to Creed: Missions and the Reconfiguration of Social and Moral Order in Colonial Congo

This paper studies how colonial religious institutions reshaped traditional social structures in Africa. Focusing on the Congo, I examine the long-term effects of Christian missions that sought to replace kin-based authority with European-Christian notions of social and moral order. I combine newly digitized data on historical mission locations with an original survey of 975 respondents, measuring attitudes toward family and coethnics, social network composition, referral behavior in a job experiment, and moral values. To address concerns about endogenous mission placement, I construct two counterfactuals: missions that were initially established but later abandoned, and simulated locations that were historically suitable but never selected. I find that exposure to missions persistently reduced bias toward kin and coethnics and weakened the role of kinship ties in networks and referrals. It also eroded communal moral values, such as loyalty to one's group and deference to authority, without a corresponding rise in universal moral principles. Instead, these shifts reflect a redirection of identity and moral obligation from kinship and ethnicity toward religious affiliation. Historical records on mission personnel and infrastructure point to religious instruction and education as key transmission channels. Together, the findings suggest that colonial religious institutions profoundly reshaped the social and moral organization of colonized societies.