Economic Sociology Seminars

Robert Braun, University of California, Berkeley

Religious Frontiers and Xenophobia: Evidence from a survey of villages in Weimar Germany

This paper argues that religious frontiers foster anxieties about strangers who exist between communities and blur established social boundaries. Spatial proximity to religious borders simultaneously intensifies local cohesion and perceptions of external threat, creating fertile conditions for collective fears directed at liminal outsiders. To develop this argument, the paper draws on a newly assembled database on folklore and religion covering roughly 20,000 towns and villages in religiously divided Germany during the 1930s. Spatial econometric analyses show that inhabitants of Protestant towns located near Catholic communities—and vice versa—were significantly more likely to tell children stories featuring xenophobic bogeymen, especially Jews and Roma. Instrumental-variable models using sixteenth-century religious boundaries, nearest-neighbor matching, panel analyses, sensitivity tests, and fine-grained fixed effects help address endogeneity concerns and strengthen causal inference. Consistent with the theory, frontier effects were strongest in areas where perceived religious threat was particularly acute. In such settings, frontier communities became unusually cohesive, disciplined, and organized around practices of collective protection. The findings illuminate how identity politics and state formation shape the emotional and moral worlds of citizens living at social frontiers, teaching them to view strangers through the lens of fear and suspicion. More broadly, the paper shows how collective anxieties emerge from systems of social classification: communities facing heightened uncertainty become especially fearful of ambiguous figures who blur the symbolic boundaries upon which local order and cohesion depend. In this way, efforts to secure integration and moral clarity at the seams of society can unintentionally generate new forms of exclusion and xenophobia.