Networks of Confessional Affiliation: Religious Choice and the Schism of Utrecht

This article demonstrates our methodology for studying the process of intra-Catholic confessional affiliation during the schism that occurred in the Catholic Church in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. The schism resulted in the remarkable fact that the Republic, a Protestant state, became home to two competing Catholic Churches, the Roman Catholic Church and the Roomsch-Katholieke Kerk der Oud-Bisschoppelijke Cleresie (​​OBC Church). In order to understand the choices made by laypeople for one of the two Catholic Churches, we created a dataset based on the baptisms and marriages taking place in two mission stations that were part of the OBC Church in the cities of Utrecht and Leiden. The data was ingested into a specifically designed graph database – connecting people, events (baptism and marriages), and places (churches and secular courts) – that enabled us to study the people who participated in events in the Catholic Churches as well as their roles at these events. In addition, we constructed two-mode networks, connecting people to events, and their projections, consisting only of links between people. Taken together, this approach allowed us to perform both detailed and structural analysis of the data. One insight revealed by our analysis is the existence of a group of lay Catholics who participated in events taking place in rival Catholic Churches. Moreover, network analysis has shown that the process of intra-confessional religious affiliation did not take place in the context of larger groups or collectives, but nor was it a strictly individual affair, as it mainly occurred at the level of couples or individual family nuclei. Our mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative analyses, has various advantages as it (1) enhances our understanding of the schism; (2) enables a more detailed analysis of religious choice than the quantitative methodology adopted in the older literature on the schism; and (3) spurs and gives focus to further archival research.