Coerced religious uniformity can revive the faith it aims to extinguish

Evidence

For the Mudejar communities of Castile, socially already well assimilated by 1500, forcing them to become in religious matters superficially identical with their Christian neighbors was in some cases counterproductive. At least some of the ex-Mudejars who had elicited little interest in religious matters were spurred on to recover in secret the religion that they had seemed likely to lose as a result of slow and insensible erosion. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 392

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A paradox with wide explanatory reach: forced assimilation produced the very religious revival it was designed to prevent — an inversion of the intended causal arrow that generalizes far beyond sixteenth-century Spain.
• XREF: connects to: Attempted reversal of IDF religionization institutionalized it rather than weakening it — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 899