Person

Robert Woodberry

American sociologist and political scientist whose empirical work on the long-term effects of Protestant missionary activity has supplied one of the most-cited statistical anchors for the Christian Civilizational Impact argument. His 2012 paper The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy (American Political Science Review) reports a strong, robust correlation between the historical presence of "conversionary Protestant" missions and subsequent democratic stability, rule of law, literacy, and economic development in the global south.

Currently affiliated with Baylor University (Institute for Studies of Religion) and previously with the National University of Singapore. Holds his PhD in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2004; dissertation: The Shadow of Empire: Christian Missions, Colonial Policy, and Democracy in Postcolonial Societies).

The central empirical claim

From the 2012 APSR paper:

"The work of missionaries… turns out to be the single most important variable predicting the health of nations.", Christianity Today summary

More technically: the historical density and duration of conversionary-Protestant missionary activity (1815-1960) in a given non-Western polity is the strongest statistical predictor of that polity's subsequent

democratization (as measured by Polity IV scores and Freedom House metrics),
rule of law (World Bank governance indicators),
literacy and mass education (UNESCO data),
press freedom,
voluntary-association density,
newspaper circulation,
modern economic development.

The correlation is robust across multiple statistical specifications, including controls for colonialism, geography, natural resources, prevailing colonial regime, pre-mission literacy rates, climate, and disease burden. The effect is specifically associated with conversionary Protestants, missionaries who prioritized vernacular literacy (to read the Bible directly), founded schools, printed presses, and translated scripture into local languages. Catholic missions, state-sponsored ("comity") Protestant missions, and missions that did not emphasize lay literacy do not show the same effect.

The 2012 paper has been widely cited, won the American Political Science Association's Luebbert Article Award, and has been called by sociologist Andrea Palpant Dilley "the article you've never heard of that may shift the way you think about the world."

Mechanism, why conversionary Protestants specifically

Woodberry's proposed mechanism (developed across the 2012 paper and subsequent articles):

Mass vernacular literacy as a tool of Protestant theology. Sola scriptura entails that laity must read the Bible; missionaries built schools, printed presses, and translated scripture into hundreds of vernaculars. This produced mass literacy decades before colonial states or competing missions did.
The civil society spillover. Literate populations could form newspapers, voluntary associations, lay reading clubs, and political-mobilization networks, the substrate of liberal democracy.
Translation as cultural-political work. Translating scripture into vernaculars dignified those languages, codified grammars, and gave local intellectual elites tools to assert against colonial hierarchies.
A check on colonial abuses. Missionaries documented (and lobbied against) colonial abuses, slave-trade complicity, forced labor, land seizure. Their relative independence from colonial regimes made them counterweights, not merely enablers.
Institutional persistence. The schools, presses, hospitals, and associational networks they built outlasted the missionaries and continued shaping civil society generations later. Modern democratic outcomes correlate with mission density historically, not contemporaneously.

Apologetic deployment

Woodberry's work supplies a statistical anchor for the Christian-civilizational-impact rebuttal to the New Atheist "religion poisons everything" thesis (Religion Causes Violence Objection). The deployment is:

Modest claim: Protestant missionary activity is the strongest single statistical predictor of subsequent democratization, literacy, and economic development in the global south.
Implication: the New-Atheist counterfactual (the world would be more peaceful and prosperous without Christianity) is empirically embarrassed by the data.
Companion empirical materials: Rodney Stark (The Rise of Christianity; For the Glory of God); Tom Holland (Dominion); Vishal Mangalwadi (The Book That Made Your World); Niall Ferguson on Protestant work-ethic / institutional effects.

The deployment is empirical, not metaphysical, Woodberry is not arguing that Christianity is true, only that Christian missions produced the institutions of modernity in measurable ways. This makes the move admissible in conversations where deeper theological premises are not granted.

Cautions for live deployment

Cite the paper, not the slogan. "Single most important variable" is a Christianity-Today framing of the finding, not Woodberry's exact phrasing. Cite the 2012 APSR paper specifically.
The effect is for "conversionary Protestants" only. Don't generalize to "Christianity in general", the data Woodberry has is for evangelical-Protestant missions that prioritized vernacular literacy. Catholic missions and comity Protestants don't show the same effect at the same magnitude.
The mechanism matters. Critics may respond "this is about literacy and printing presses, not about Christianity." Woodberry's response is that those institutions were Protestant-theologically motivated, sola scriptura is what made vernacular literacy a missionary priority. The mechanism is theologically downstream even if the proximate cause is institutional.
Acknowledge counter-cases. Some missions were complicit in colonial violence (Belgian Congo missions, some Spanish missions in the Americas). Woodberry's claim is statistical-on-average, not "every mission was good."

Selected works

"The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy," American Political Science Review 106(2):244-274 (May 2012), the canonical paper.
(with Timothy Shah) "The Pioneering Protestants," Journal of Democracy 15(2):47-61 (2004), preview / methodology piece.
"Pentecostalism and Economic Development," in Markets, Morals & Religion, ed. Jonathan Imber (Transaction, 2008).
The Shadow of Empire: Christian Missions, Colonial Policy, and Democracy in Postcolonial Societies (2004 PhD dissertation, UNC-Chapel Hill).
Forthcoming book-length treatment expanding the APSR paper (announced; release date variable).