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The people who were Christian the longest would be various tiny middle eastern ethnicities. I think the largest and best continuity are the Maronites, who’ve been an endogamous Christian group since well before the Islamic conquests and who are doing quite well by the standards of ‘minority group living in a shithole country ruled by terrorists’. Ditto for Palestinian Christians(Arab Christians actually outcompete Jews in the Israeli education system) and copts.
The longest continually Christian ruled territory is probably northern Italy, although plausibly some other part of the carolingian empire(maybe the Ile de Paris) has it beat. And northern Italy, unlike the south, has outcomes similar to germany.
‘Christianity is mildly eugenic, but not enough to overcome most confounders’ fits the data we have. There’s plausible explanations; monogamy, reduction of cousin marriage, monasteries as a dumping ground for autists. I wouldn’t say there’s strong evidence but it seems to lean in that direction.
And these people are typical Middle Easterners, not "pro-social" at all outside their family and clan.
Why you exclude Central (with Rome) and Southern Italy? Excepting small and short lived emirate of Bari it was in solid Christian hands since Constantine.
Your picture of Christian history seems too rosy. Autists and other mentally ill were seen as possessed by devil and treated accordingly. Monasteries were, for most of Christian history exclusive institutions, serving as dumping ground for excess unmarried sons and daughters of aristocracy (mostly daughters), and were tiny, not enough to influence general genetic composition of population.
So what caused European specific high IQ genetic development? More plausible is theory of Peter Frost it was work from home.
More technically, cottage industry and distributed manufacturing.
In other civilizations, succesful craftsmen (presumably with high IQ and conscientiousness scores) moved to cities where they thrived and prospered until they died of disease. In Europe, guild system specific in European civilization prevented it, and distributed manufacturing evolved as workaround.
Under this system, craftsmen stayed in their villages, worked with material brought to them by merchant and sold him the finished goods. It was miserable existence combining drawbacks of city and country, life at complete mercy of the trader.
Still, succesful craftsmen had large families, who, unlike children born in plague pits that were premodern cities, survived. This way, by series of historical accidents, high IQ and conscientiousness genes spread in the population. Until end of guild system and development of capitalism put end to this process.
Yes, at least on this issue, Elon Musk is full of shit.
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