Indeed
Wow, Carlien, thank you for sharing this. I had never thought of backtracking to the religion wars period in Europe to look for the sources of our own ways of life! This might be because religion was always a non-issue in my native Italy: people are Catholic, full stop.
Now, Catholics come in all sizes and shapes, but that was always assumed to be OK (-ish): just like William of Orange’s contemporaries, the Catholic church wants people to observe certain formalities and pay lip service to religion, but it does not actually demand that they really spend their time communing with God and all that. Catholics have a pretty sophisticated way to deal with wayward sheep in the flock: it consists of administering God’s forgiveness for one’s sins. The price you pay for that, of course, is abiding the formality of the administering: only priests can get God to grant forgiveness, you can’t get it on your own. It is very hard to argue seriously with people like that! No, “three strikes, you are out”, it’s almost impossible to get kicked out of the religion. Whatever criticism you come up with, very smart priests will happily agree with you and then tell you that your very critique proves that you are engaged with religion, and therefore, to some extent, religious. Being anything other than superficial Catholics in Italy is so hard that most people don’t even make the effort. Consequence: to this day, most weddings happen between (nominal) Catholics.
But you are absolutely right: if we tell people they are selfish, they will behave selfishly. Online community managers like to say “if you design your system for trolls, your users will be trolls” (though to be fair they think troll-designed systems attract trolls, they don’t turn non-troll users into trolls).