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Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year AwardA novel economic interpretation of how religions have become so powerful in the modern worldReligion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements has led to their accumulating great power and wealth. Religions in many traditions have honed their competitive strategies over thousands of years. Today, they are big business; like businesses, they must recruit, raise funds, disburse budgets, manage facilities, organize transportation, motivate employees, and get their message out. In The Divine Economy, economist Paul Seabright argues that religious movements are a special kind of business: they are platforms, bringing together communities of members who seek many different things from one another—spiritual fulfilment, friendship and marriage networks, even business opportunities. Their function as platforms, he contends, is what has allowed religions to consolidate and wield power.This power can be used for good, especially when religious movements provide their members with insurance against the shocks of modern life, and a sense of worth in their communities. It can also be used for harm: political leaders often instrumentalize religious movements for authoritarian ends, and religious leaders can exploit the trust of members to inflict sexual, emotional, financial or physical abuse, or to provoke violence against outsiders. Writing in a nonpartisan spirit, Seabright uses insights from economics to show how religion and secular society can work together in a world where some people feel no need for religion, but many continue to respond with enthusiasm to its call.

Why is religion so widespread? Why do individuals donate large amounts of time, money, and effort to religious groups? What forms does the religious competition take? Why are individuals more religious in some countries than others? What is the future of religion?This book provides a non-technical introduction to how the economic approach answers these and other questions about religion. It defines the economic approach to religion and demonstrates how it is used to study a variety of religious decisions. It explains how religious groups confront credibility, free-rider, and coordination problems that challenge the collective production of religious goods and services. It also examines competition and regulation in religious markets around the world, how religious beliefs and preferences are transmitted and sustained, how religion likely emerged in humankind's distant past, and what the future of religion may hold. The book thus demonstrates how the tools and methods of economics provide fresh insight into a variety of religious behaviors.This book is intended for a wide audience in and out of economics. Though not a textbook per se, its discussion questions and suggested readings at the end of each chapter allow for easy incorporation into the classroom. The mathematics and statistics used by researchers are generally avoided. Both theory and evidence are presented, but the focus is on the ideas that provide a coherent conceptual framework that grounds a deeper exploration of the theoretical and empirical research in the economics of religion.

Adam Smith, one of the founding fathers of contemporary economics, observed that religiosity is influenced by the extent of regulation in the'market'for religion. In countries where there is a state-sponsored religion, one can expect less overall religiosity than if the market were competitive and religions had to compete to increase their membership. Religion, he claims, is like other goods and services supplied in a market economy.Max Weber, one of the founding fathers of contemporary sociology, similarly proposed that religiosity and economic principles are strongly interconnected phenomena. Weber famously thought that Protestant religious beliefs about the importance of work, savings and trustworthiness played an important role in sparking the Industrial Revolution and accelerating economic growth in the Western World.This edited volume contains original contributions by eminent scholars in the new and emerging field of the economics of religion. The contributions expand upon the ground-breaking ideas of Adam Smith and Max Weber. The chapters also illuminate new directions for research in this relatively young, intellectually exciting, and rapidly growing multidisciplinary field of scientific inquiry.

This book sheds new light on the evolution and transformation of polytheistic religions. By applying economic models to the study of religious history and by viewing religious events as the result of rational choices under given environmental constraints, it offers a political economy perspective for the study of Indo-European polytheism. The book formally models the rivalry or competition among multiple gods in a polytheistic system and the monotheistic solution to this competition. Presenting case studies on the transformation and demise of various polytheistic religions, it highlights the pivotal role of the priestly class in driving religious change and suggests a joint explanation for the demise of Greco-Roman religion and the resilience of Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. It will appeal to scholars of the economics of religion and religious history and to anyone seeking new insights into the birth and death of religions, and the birth of monotheism in particular.

Robert A. Russell of the Church of the Epiphany in Denver was an Episcopal minister who taught what would now be recognized as new thought philosophy. Chapters on: The Prosperity Idea, What is Prosperity?, The Source of Wealth, The Magic Box, God Loves a Prosperous Man, Tuning Out Tuning In, Mind Models, Meditations on prosperity.-Print ed.

In Pilgrimage and Economy in the Ancient Mediterranean, Anna Collar and Troels Myrup Kristensen bring together diverse scholarship to explore the socioeconomic dynamics of ancient Mediterranean pilgrimage from archaic Greece to Late Antiquity, the Greek mainland to Egypt and the Near East. This broad chronological and geographical canvas demonstrates how our modern concepts of religion and economy were entangled in the ancient world. By taking material culture as a starting point, the volume examines the ways that landscapes, architecture, and objects shaped the pilgrim's experiences, and the manifold ways in which economy, belief and ritual behaviour intertwined, specifically through the processes and practices that were part of ancient Mediterranean pilgrimage over the course of more than 1,500 years.

This open access book seeks to foster a multidisciplinary understanding of the ties between faith, financial intermediation, and economic progress by drawing on research across economics, finance, history, philosophy, ethics, theology, public policy, law, and other disciplines. Chapters in this edited volume examine themes as consequential as economic opportunities, real world outcomes and faith; values and consumerism; faith, financial intermediation and economic development in Western and Islamic societies; and the impact of faith issues on US workers, on the workplace and religion, and on the characteristics of good wealth. Though engaging with difficult questions, this book is written in an accessible style to be enjoyed by laypeople and scholars alike.

This book allows the reader to have an overview of the relations between religion and economics throughout history. It starts with the beginnings of early modern humans, when dreams (of dead ancestors), animism, synchronous movements and a propensity to exchange, led to the emergence of religion, which then contributed to the coordination and pooling of labor and to the definition of groups. This book surveys the various roles played by religion in economic life through the ages, which include the justification of the exploitation of nature, the expansion of trade, the emergence of inequality and of charity, the definition, enhancement and attenuation of hierarchies of dominance, the provision of various services and of the impact religion has had on economic performance at the micro and macro levels.

This book proves that each religious dogma, in any of their components, contain in an encoded manner a specific ranking of human comprehensive mega-objectives, implicitly, a specific preference for absolute wealth or, in a more common parlance, for the objective of economic performance. In turn, that specific preference, under ceteris paribus condition, determines the share of believer's general resources which is channeled to economic performance. An in-depth or correct understanding of a religious dogma, which makes sense for terrestrial social realities, is impossible without a specific model of decoding. Additionally, such a model is simply impossible within an orthodox Western, that is, non-transcultural perspective. There is no accident that all Western efforts to decode religions, economic or non-economic, have failed. Understanding religion based on its face story is very precarious, if not even dangerous.

The book intervenes into the contemporary debate on religion, politics, and economy, focusing on the field of formation which emerges as these seemingly autonomous spheres encounter one another. Empirically, it concentrates on examples from literature, theatre, and cinema as well as a case study of the recent revolts in Turkey where a ‘moderate'Islamic government is in power. Theoretically, its focus is on the contemporary ‘return'of religion in the horizon of the critique of religion, seeking to articulate an affirmative politics that can re-evaluate the value of dominant values in religious governance and governance of religion.

'The Economics of Religion'explores the new paradigms of'religious economics'and'economies of religion'under the scope of transdisciplinary and international perspectives. It examines and appraises some of the recent theoretical developments and methodological innovations in religious and social sciences. This volume offers the chance to extend the analysis of religious behaviours by means of conceptual and methodological models of economics. It goes far beyond the classical'economy and religion'debate, and suggests not only theoretical but also epistemological changes in the study of religion: individual rationality and rational choice, market theory, demand and supply theory, branding and commodification of religion, believers''consumer'habits, churches'competitive strategies, for example. Of course, these are not exempt from criticism, which this volume also addresses. These detailed and localized case-studies range from experimental to ethnographic methods, psychological to cultural aspects of believing and practising cults in the scope of economics of religion. Geographical areas covered include Nigeria, Bolivia, Italy, Mexico, France, Korea, Nepal and Tonga.

Development and Religion explores how the world's five major religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam - understand and practice'development'through an examination of their sacred texts, social teaching and basic beliefs. Religious belief is a common human characteristic with eighty percent of the world's population professing religious faith. Observable in all societies, religious belief is pervasive, profound, persuasive and persistent. The premise of this book is that despite this, religion has long been ignored within mainstream development paradigms and by development practitioners (both locally and at the international level) resulting in sub-optimal development outcomes. Matthew Clarke argues that each religion offers useful insights into various issues concerning development that should be considered by donors, NGOs, and others seeking to improve the lives of the poor. Undergraduates and postgraduate students of development studies, religious studies and theology will gratefully welcome this highly regarded book.Contents: Foreword by Katherine Marshall; Preface; 1. The Religion - Development Nexus; 2. Hinduism - Dharma and Active Citizenship; 3. Buddhism - A Middle Way for Development; 4. Judaism - A Cry for Justice; 5. Christianity - Development as an Option for the Poor; 6. Islam: Equality and Action; 7. Conclusion; References; Index

Two centuries after Adam Smith illuminated the workings of the marketplace, a new movement among economists and social scientists is expanding his insights into a groundbreaking “economics of religion.” Using cutting edge ideas from the behavioral sciences, and a deep knowledge of religious history, this new approach is making sense not only of past beliefs, but of religion today. In Marketplace of the Gods, award-winning journalist Larry Witham tells the inside story of this expanding'economic approach'to religion, the puzzles it tries to solve, the controversies it has stirred, and the people who are making it happen. He shows that the economic approach, while evoking images of stock markets or accounting ledgers, actually begins with a simple idea about human beings as rational actors, judging costs and benefits in life. Every life has limits, so human experience is a series of trade-offs, balancing resources to make choices for the best possible benefits. As the economics of religion shows, this model can be applied to the rich story of the human race and its gods. Beginning with the individual, the choices in religion shape households, groups, movements, and entire'religious economies'of nations. On the one hand, this mixing of the profane and the sacred, the economic and the religious, is an exciting exchange of ideas between economics, sociology, psychology, history, and theology. On the other, it has spurred a lively protest. Indeed, for some, the economic approach seems to transform our good angels into grubby consumers. As Witham shows, however, the economic approach to religion has insights for everyone, believers and skeptics alike. He illuminates this approach in a volume rich with ideas, history, contemporary events, and the insights of some of our sharpest modern-day thinkers.