GREGORY ALLES
In the past the term “economy” has had a number of meanings in religious contexts that may seem odd today. For example, within English-speaking Christianity it has referred to the manner in which God governs the world, to a careful presentation of religious teachings or doctrines, and to presumed relations between the various persons of the Trinity.1 The word “economy” may also be used, however, in a sense that approximates its contemporary meaning within nonreligious contexts, namely, the organization and operation of interactions between different parties or agents, especially interactions that involve exchange. A religious economy in this sense may encompass interactions and exchanges between human beings and postulated religious agents, such as gods, ancestors, or spirits, as when one speaks of an economy of salvation linking devotees and saints. The term may also refer to specific interactions and exchanges among human beings or of humans with other universally perceived beings or objects, such as animals. One example of this second type of religious economy would be exchanges between laypersons and bhikkhus in Theravāda Buddhism.
At the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the study of religions in economic terms has attracted some attention. This interest may reflect contemporary developments. For example, after the end of the Cultural Revolution and then the reintegration of Hong Kong almost a quarter century later, the People’s Republic of China has emerged as a global economic powerhouse. During the same period, more books by Rodney Stark, a rational-choice sociologist, have been translated into Chinese than into any other language (as of December 2008). Roughly simultaneously but less directly, in the United States a general shift has taken place in the financing of retirement. Since the establishment of 401k tax shelters in 1980, defined-benefit retirement plans, in which a provider promises a fixed benefit upon retirement, have been disappearing in favor of defined-contribution plans, in which an individual receives a certain sum at regular intervals that she or he must manage in the hopes of having sufficient retirement savings. One wonders to what extent such a shift has stimulated interest in economics among professionals, including scholars of religions. Perhaps it is best to leave such questions to future historians.
One should also note that the economic study of religion is not without its detractors. Although as a matter of methodological principle scholars of religions do not particularly care about God or gods, they often care a great deal about Mammon, or, rather, about systems of economic organization and their distributional effects. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that most scholars who have chosen to study religions professionally have also rejected, at least in part, the values and aspirations of those who have chosen to study business and economics. The result may be a very deep chasm between humanistic values and materialistic ones, between orientations to communal interest and orientations to self-interest, evidenced, for example, in a divide between a celebration of altruistic activity and a denial that such activity is possible. Conflicting values also divide those who would engage in economic analysis. Although much attention has been paid to ways in which religious differences fracture the global human community, economic convictions are at least as divisive. For example, in October 2008, the former US secretary of state Colin Powell asserted publicly that it should make no difference whether a candidate for the US presidency was a Christian or a Muslim. It is difficult to imagine him expressing the same indifference about whether a candidate was a Marxist or a capitalist.2 Similarly within the academy, adherence to a particular kind of economic analysis may resemble commitment to a religious belief system.
In such a fractious environment economic theorizing about religion should be seen more as a general trend or tendency than as a unified approach to the study of religions, unless one is willing, as many are, to ignore movements and modes of analysis that violate one’s own chosen economic faith. What follows aspires to greater pluralism. It discusses the rather different contributions of three classical theorists, Adam Smith (1723–90), Karl Marx (1818–83), and Max Weber (1864–1920), then turns to more contemporary work.
THE CLASSICAL THEORISTS
Depending upon a scholar’s orientation, Smith, Marx, and Weber occupy different places in the genealogy of the economic study of religion. Those trained in the study of economics, along with economically inclined social scientists, tend to see themselves as standing in the tradition of Smith; they acknowledge Weber’s contributions but condemn Marx. Scholars trained in the humanistic study of religions see things quite differently. They tend to embrace Weber; many are also attracted to the younger Marx, but they are largely unaware of Smith’s ideas about religion.
Some of Smith’s most important comments on religion are found in The Wealth of Nations, book 5, chapter 1, part 3, article 3.3 This article’s topic is not religion per se but “institutions for the instruction of people of all ages.” Despite the title, Smith is thinking primarily of religious institutions, not vertically integrated schools. He makes several general points and then turns to a historical account of Western Christianity. Thus, what is presented as a general account of human behavior turns out to be a generalized preface to a limited range of data from European Christianity. Smith’s focus is on the compensation of religious professionals. His basic thesis is that religious institutions are healthiest when religious professionals are compensated poorly and by means of private, voluntary contributions.
Smith analyzes religion within a two-tiered, class-based model of society that in many ways idealizes what he calls “the common people” as distinct from “people of fashion.” He contrasts relatively well-off clergymen (there were few if any clergywomen at the time), supported by steady incomes from benefices and the like, with members of the clergy who depend upon popular support and voluntary contributions. Religious professionals with a secure income tend, he says, to be comfortable, educated, and attracted to a sophisticated life of “loose” morality. As a result, they both lack religious fervor and are inattentive to the arts that inspire the “common people.” Commoners, by contrast, are always the main support of religion. They admire clergy who are persuasive and inspirational and who embody the strict morality that by necessity defines their lives. Smith’s economics of religion, then, theorizes competition among various groups for membership and support. New, independent churches always have a competitive advantage over traditional, state-supported rivals.
Although Smith assigns independent groups a competitive advantage in the religious marketplace, he does not see them as unequivocally beneficial to the community. They pose threats associated with fanaticism and overbearing zeal, for which Smith proposes remedies. On the one hand, the state should require that anyone who holds office should have an education in philosophy and science.4 On the other, the state should support religion as little as possible. Without state support one can expect to find within a state, Smith says, not two or three major religious bodies but a vast multiplicity of small sects, whose leaders will find it expedient to temper their zeal because they will need to coexist with many fellow religionists.
In addition to discussing religious institutions, Smith finds a lesson about educational institutions in his observations, specifically, a lesson about the university. He claims, perhaps correctly for his day, that the vast majority of “men of letters” belong to the clergy. In countries like France, where the clergy have access to permanent, generous livings, men of ability will prefer those posts and remain outside of the universities. In countries like England, in which the clergy must depend upon modest contributions, men of genuine intellectual ability will enter the universities as a way to better their lot. So far as I can see, he does not consider whether a comfortable life in the university would be any less conducive to indolence than one in an ecclesiastical office.
Like Smith, Marx thinks within the parameters of a rather simple, hierarchically tiered view of society, although one more complex than Smith’s division between “common people” and “people of fashion.” Unlike Smith, his concern is not with the competitive advantages of various religious groups within a religious marketplace. It is with the adverse economic consequences of religion among the urban industrial proletariat and the need to eliminate religion as a prerequisite to the elimination of poverty among urban laborers.
Marx actually gives religion relatively little attention. His general philosophical stance deliberately shifts attention away from heaven to earth: from ideas to reality, from human beings as disembodied, atomized intellects to human beings as social agents who need to work in order to live and who do so within a society characterized by severe economic disparity. Since Marx sees religion as a veil protecting idealized views of humanity, he is willing to embrace as a strategic move the left-wing Hegelian critique of religion developed, for example, by Ludwig Feuerbach as a prerequisite to the broader, more important shift that he sees as necessary. It is in this context that he makes his best-known comments about religion.
For Marx, religion is a misguided response to life’s miseries among the poor. This view resembles what Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge have called a “compensator.” Instead of working to improve their lives here on earth, religious people seek a resolution to their misery in the alienated forms of religion. They believe that, as sinners, they should accept their fate and thank God for whatever gifts God bestows upon them. They further believe that if they trust in God and act appropriately, they will receive rewards not here on earth but after death. Marx differs from Stark and Bainbridge, however, in thinking that religious compensators substitute for goods that are in fact available in this life. Religion becomes, then, both an analgesic and a distraction. Rather than pursuing religious rewards, people should abandon them and seek to improve their material lot in life. Émile Durkheim, standing in a long line of thinkers who critique Marx by detecting elements of religion in his thought, would later apply Marx’s view of religion more or less to Marxism itself. Socialism, he said, was the desperate cry of a trapped animal. By contrast, one might see in Smith a person of privilege viewing the lives of the less privileged through unrealistically positive lenses.
Max Weber is best known in the context of an economic study of religion not for work on the relation between religion and economic stratification in particular societies but for work on the varying relationships between religion and economic ethics and practices. These interests reflect his context: he wrote in the heyday of European colonialism and as a liberal member of the German cultured but nonaristocratic upper class (Bildungsbürgertum), which was wrestling at the time with historical and cultural plurality (for example, historicism, Ernst Troeltsch on the “absoluteness” of Christianity). His writings explored the extent to which religious ideals and values shaped economic practice in a variety of global contexts.
Weber’s groundbreaking and still controversial work was The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904).5 He began from observations about religious and economic differentiation in the Germany of his day: Protestants tended to be more involved in business and wealthier than Catholics; they also tended to work and save more. He used these observations as a lever with which to pry open the box of the historical origins of capitalism. What he found was that these origins lay in Calvinistic values. With its emphasis on the majesty of God and God’s election (in Calvinism, whether one is saved or damned is solely God’s choice, regardless of human action), Calvinism created anxiety about one’s eternal fate. It taught that human beings should acknowledge God’s majesty and conform to His will. In response, Calvinists adopted an ethic of “inner worldly asceticism.” They rejected extravagant expenditure as sinful, emphasized hard work, and saw in prosperity a possible sign of God’s favor. The result was a religiously motivated style of economic behavior that emphasized making money and reinvestment, the seeds from which capitalism grew. Weber did not claim that only Protestants are capitalists. He claimed that Calvinism was the catalyst that gave rise to capitalism. The latter has since broken free from its religious bonds and spread throughout the world. Having stated this thesis, Weber then set out to examine the economic ethics of other “world religions.”
Rationality figures prominently in economic analysis, and it does so in Weber’s thought as well. Unlike some views of economic rationality, however, Weber did not presuppose that rationality is universally identical. Instead, he identified in history a trend that he called rationalization. To describe the attraction of religious leaders like Jesus or the Buddha, he had introduced the notion of “charisma.” Upon the death of the charismatic founders, he noted, religious communities undergo a process of rationalization, at least if they are to survive. Furthermore, Weber saw rationalization in the spread of modern capitalism. With this spread, the world is becoming disenchanted; it is losing its “magic” and “mystery.” Now the dominant rationality is instrumental; attempts to maximize utility pervade all spheres of life. Like the German Romantics, Weber did not see this development as progress. Rather, it had created an iron cage of social organization in which we are now trapped. The less pessimistic form of the “secularization thesis,” the contention that, as rational modernity advances, religion inevitably declines, was until recently canonical within the sociology of religion.
One major objection to Weber’s view of the origin of capitalism has been empirical. Although committed Weberians may see medieval economic institutions as protocapitalistic at most, others find that capitalistic institutions predate the Protestant Reformation. Recently Rodney Stark has argued that it was not Calvinism that created capitalism but Christianity with its emphasis on rationality. He has also been among the staunchest critics of Weber’s claim that modernity necessarily leads to secularization.
RECENT TRENDS
As is true of the classical theorists, more recent thinkers have pursued various projects in the economics of religion. They have done so with very different orientations and with more or less attention to the classical thinkers.
Rational Choice Theorists
Those who identify with the social sciences have tended to develop Adam Smith’s concern with competition between groups in the religious marketplace. Many scholars have worked in this direction. They include Robert Ekelund and colleagues, who have analyzed the medieval Catholic Church as a multidimensional firm. This approach is, however, most closely associated today with the work of Rodney Stark, Roger Finke, and Laurence Iannaccone.
Stark began his career as a sociologist who studied conversion. Working in collaboration with John Lofland, he focused upon an early missionary effort of the Unification Church in the San Francisco bay area. What he and Lofland discovered is that (in Stark’s later formulation) converts are not attracted so much by a religious group’s teachings, which at first usually seem bizarre, as by personal connections with people already in the group. Religious conversion should be seen, then, as a process of maximizing benefits from interpersonal relationships, given one’s place within networks of such relationships. Later Iannaccone would theorize conversion in terms of the maximization of benefit from religious capital, such as knowledge of rituals and teachings acquired over time. Iannaccone postulated that those with less religious capital—the young, those with less attachment to religion—would have less to lose from conversion than those with more religious capital; therefore, they would be more likely to convert. He noted further that a person changing affiliation from one group to another similar group would preserve more religious capital than someone converting to a radically different group. Therefore, he suggested, reaffiliation, as the less costly option, should be more common than conversion.
As these examples show, Stark, Finke, and Iannaccone develop a “rational-choice” theory of religion. They are staunch spokespersons for the view that religion is neither irrational nor nonrational but rational. Although the word “rational” can have a number of meanings, in the context of rational-choice theories it means that people act to further their interests. They seek to gain what they desire—to maximize utility—and avoid what they do not desire. As Stark and Finke have put it, “Within the limits of their information and understanding, restricted by available options, guided by their preferences and tastes, humans attempt to make rational choices.” Although the mention of preferences and tastes allows room for social goals and thus for behavior that seems self-sacrificial and altruistic, the rational-choice theorists of religion, like most thinkers in the tradition of Adam Smith, have tended to focus on atomized agents and their individual wants and desires rather than social utility.
Rationality has figured prominently in theories of modernity and, along with them, theories of secularization. The alleged irrationality of religion was one reason why the “secularization thesis” predicted that, with advancing modernity, religion would disappear. Stark, Finke, and Iannaccone have vehemently rejected this thesis. They contend that as modernity increases, religion may become privatized, but it does not diminish or disappear. Rather, they maintain, the demand for religion is constant and variations in religious practice must be explained from the supply side. One prominent advocate of the secularization thesis from the 1960s, Peter Berger, has conceded that it was wrong, but other scholars, notably Steve Bruce, whose primary location is in the United Kingdom rather than the United States, have strongly rejected both the antisecularization thesis and its rational-choice underpinnings. Since 2000 Robert Barrow and Rachel McLeary as well as Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have undertaken empirical surveys that were global in scope. Their results have not provided unqualified support for either the secularization or the antisecularization position.
In pursuing a supply-side approach to religion, Stark and Finke have theorized the competitive advantages enjoyed by various religious groups. Their basic example is the growth of conservative churches in the United States in the last third of the twentieth century, although they also invoke the spread of Pentecostalism during the same period in much of Africa and Latin America. They explain this growth by claiming that such groups provide more religious value. Specifically, conservative religious groups stand in greater tension with their environments, and so attract people who are looking for greater religious commitment and conviction than are represented in mainstream church groups. (This would seem a difficult proposition to maintain universally, since there have been times when conservative religiosity has been extremely dominant and liberals highly marginalized.) From this perspective Stark and Finke reformulate a standard developmental model that strongly reflects its origins in the study of US American Protestantism: movements begin as high-tension “sects” but as a result of attracting members eventually become low-tension “churches”; they then begin to lose members. Stark and Finke add that it is possible for low-tension churches to become vital once again by recovering their sectarian roots and becoming stricter.
Laurence Iannaccone, who is trained in economics per se, has developed complementary analyses of religion that Stark and Finke accept without reservation. Besides the notion of religious capital, Iannaccone has introduced the “free-rider problem” into the study of religion. According to this well-known economic problem, when rational agents participate in a group, they tend to perform suboptimally. They reason that regardless of the effort they expend, overall benefit will remain roughly the same; as a result, groups will seriously underperform. Iannaccone invokes these dynamics to account for the many onerous demands that religious groups make upon their members, such as costly moral strictures and door-to-door proselytizing. He suggests that people are willing to incur such costs because they have the effect of eliminating free riders and thus ensuring greater religious benefit. Invoking another well-known economic topic, the free market, Iannaccone explains the European trend toward secularization not in terms of the advancement of modernity but in terms of market dynamics. In Europe the establishment of religion has created a regulated religious market and, as in all regulated markets, put a damper on religious activity. In the United States, where disestablishment has created a free market in religion, religion thrives.
In many respects all of this work is a continuation of Adam Smith’s concern with religious marketplaces in which individual religious agents choose between religious providers. In the late 1980s, however, Stark was engaged in a more ambitious theoretical project in collaboration with William Sims Bainbridge. The two attempted to develop a hypothetical-nomological theory of religion in terms of rational choice that rested upon seven basic axioms about human thought and behavior. Their key move was the observation that the goods people desire are scarce (a commonplace in economic theory) and sometimes nonexistent. As a result, people acquire religious goods as “compensators,” a term Stark has since abandoned. In other words, religious people settle for goods allegedly received from divine beings that they would not otherwise enjoy. Although from this starting point analysis could go in a number of different directions, the theory quickly turns to the dynamics of the religious marketplace.
Within the social-scientific study of religion, Stark’s, Finke’s, and Iannaccone’s work has exerted a great deal of influence, especially in the United States, the structures of whose religious situation their theorizing reflects closely. Indeed, in the first decade of the twenty-first century Stark has become an apologist for conservative, evangelical US American Christianity, endorsing such positions as intelligent design and identifying Islam as a retrograde movement. Whatever one’s attitudes to these moves, they should not necessarily stand as a criticism of the general theoretical position. It may be worth noting three weaknesses in the work to date. First, there is a problem with what Germans refer to as the Religionsbegriff, the way in which religion is conceptualized. It is not at all clear to what extent the terms in which the analysis is framed are appropriate to what we call religion outside the United States. For example, to speak of “churches” and “sects” in Islamic and Hindu contexts is problematic at best. To suggest that liberal Protestants like David Friedrich Strauss and his colleagues stood in low tension with their environments is to ignore history. They all lost their jobs, and when Strauss was hired at the University of Zurich, the citizens overthrew the government. Second, the rational-choice postulate is questionable in terms of actual human decision-making. In its most careful form, economics does not claim that human beings are rational agents but that economic activities measurable in monetary terms, such as the exchange of scarce goods and services, can be modeled with a fair degree of accuracy by presupposing that agents are rational. Even so, work done within the last few decades has revealed the limits of the rationality postulate in economic models by demonstrating the relevance of risk, uncertainty, framing effects, and incomplete information, among other factors. To date, rational-choice theorists of religion have resisted taking these developments into account. Third, the rational-choice theorists have adopted a rather heavy-handed approach toward empirical evidence. Stark in particular has been quick to reject as flawed studies that raise questions about his claims. In one notorious instance it was revealed only after ten years that he and his critics had obtained contradictory results because, despite Stark’s self-confident bluster in print, he and Iannaccone had made a basic mathematical mistake. Furthermore, in dealing with empirical evidence the rational-choice theorists have tended to embrace a verificationist fallacy, according to which the discovery of an instance, or a series of instances, in which their theoretical postulate works “confirms” the theory. Their use of sophisticated statistical analysis notwithstanding, this is not the way in which the best science determines which theories it will embrace.
Other Trends
To date, the rational-choice theorists present the most thorough and consistent attempt to develop explanatory accounts of religion in economic terms. Work in other traditions has been more diffuse. A brief overview such as this will necessarily be selective and superficial.
For decades Marcel Mauss’s The Gift was a must-read for aspiring scholars of religion as well as for those in various fields of anthropology.6 It treated the gift as a “total prestation,” one that must be understood not as an isolated act but in its full social context. The book had the effect of popularizing Franz Boas’s material on the potlatch among indigenous people of the northwest coast of North America. As a wanton act of the destruction of property, the potlatch might seem to present a major violation of rational-choice postulates; indeed, the French thinker Georges Bataille used it in advocating a “transcendence” of economic rationality. The rebuttal from the rational-choice side is, however, self-evident. Another influential example from the early twentieth century, although one that is not particularly religious, is the account of the kula exchange in the Trobriand Islands by the Polish-British anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. Malinowski described this exchange as a circular system in which two different kinds of ceremonial objects, armbands and necklaces, traveled in two different directions, clockwise and counterclockwise. The effect was to establish relationships between parties to the exchange.
One may find a continuation of Mauss’s and Malinowski’s approaches in analyses of religion from the perspective of neoinstitutional economics, represented by contemporary German scholars such as Ronald Brinitzer. Neoinstitutionalism is a variety of economic contextualism or holism that, instead of trying to develop universally applicable models on the basis of a common desiderative-ratiocinative mechanism, sees economic values and behavior as determined by the institutions within which they are found. Neoinstitutionalists are not alone in problematizing a universal rational-choice calculus. Some feminists have also rejected it, although not always on neoinstitutional grounds. They have seen cost-benefit calculation as an approach to life more characteristic of men than of women, women tending, perhaps by biological programming, to be more self-sacrificial, at least in regard to their children. To date, little actual work in the economics of religion has been done from this perspective, perhaps because it seems antithetic to the economic enterprise itself.
Until the rise of rational-choice theory, Max Weber’s influence dominated the sociology of religion. Indeed, rational-choice sociology of religion was in many respects a response to Weberianism. Weber’s influence tended, however, to shape work in sociology and anthropology (for example, Peter Berger, Clifford Geertz) rather than in an economics of religion per se. Weber continues to be influential, again apart from the economic focus, among contemporary scholars of religions such as the German Hans G. Kippenberg. A more ambivalent utilization of Weber, and one of greater interest here, has been the work of a French scholar who toward the beginning of his career sought to think “with Weber against Weber,” namely, Pierre Bourdieu. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, a book nominally devoted to a study of the Kabyle of Algeria, Bourdieu developed a complex model of social practice.7 Extending economic analysis well beyond the traditional domain of scarce goods and services, he aimed “to abandon the dichotomy of the economic and the non-economic which stands in the way of seeing the science of economic practices as a particular case of a general science of the economy of practices, capable of treating all practices … as economic practices directed towards the maximization of material or symbolic profit.” Symbolic profit and capital have emerged as major themes in Bourdieu’s work, as has the notion of the habitus, a traditional, internalized pattern for action that is less deterministic and thus provides more room for innovation than the notion of institution. At the same time, Bourdieu’s attention to social reality is much more class- and context-sensitive than the rational-choice approach. In his analysis, agents in any number of fields or areas of life are entrepreneurs who, given the habitus (in this case plural) that they share but also the consistent possibility of innovation, seek to maximize their positions, in particular, to maximize their symbolic capital. Unfortunately, Bourdieu developed these ideas after he had largely turned his attention away from religion. He has also been much less utilized in the study of religions than his French compatriots Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Although some work in the study of religions has been done from a Bourdieusian perspective, room remains for much more.
As is true of the Weberian tradition, Marxian influence within the study of religions has been largely social and cultural. If one takes the distinctive Marxian contribution to the study of religions to be a correlation between economic organization and religious practice, with economic organization being the independent variable, then one might say that in the twentieth century a kind of Marxianism was quite common within the study of religions. It was customary to describe distinctive religious complexes for various modes of subsistence: hunters and gatherers, pastoralists, early agriculturalists, the early city dwellers, and so on. Similarly, it is possible to see Marxian overtones in Peter Berger’s contention that religion provides a “sacred canopy”; it misrepresents a reality that is socially constructed and thus contingent as if it were natural and necessary. In spirit, however, none of this work was Marxian in one important respect: none of it shared Marx’s distinctive emphasis on social critique.
More recent scholars have adopted a much more critical attitude toward social forms, including forms of economic organization, often under the label of cultural studies or critical theory. They have been inspired not only by Marx but by a host of Marxian thinkers, among them Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Antonio Gramsci. As the name “cultural studies” indicates, these thinkers have not been concerned so much with economic analysis as with cultural critique. Such critique, however, can and often does target forms of economic organization. One manifestation within religion rather than religious studies was the rise of liberation theology during the 1980s, especially Christian liberation theology in Latin America and Africa. Much of this thinking was done by priests, monks, and nuns within the Roman Catholic Church, and it was suppressed by Pope John Paul II, a Pole active in the resistance to Polish Communism. Within religious studies itself, a recent book by Richard King and Jeremy Carrette, Selling Spirituality, is more focused on economic issues than many cultural-critical studies. The authors criticize the commodification of religion, especially religions appropriated from Asia under the guise of “spirituality,” by Europeans and North Americans living within the structures of late capitalism or postmodernity.8 Clearly, there is a normative component to this argument. Some consider it inappropriate to the study of religions to distinguish genuine or proper religion from inauthentic, improper religion or, in this case, “spirituality.” It is also possible, however, to view a value-neutral approach to the study of religions as an essentially conservative undertaking.
FINAL REFLECTIONS
Elsewhere I have suggested that there is an important difference between classical and contemporary thought in the economics of religion. The classical theorists conceptualized “religion” and “economy” as two distinct domains that interacted; contemporary thinkers tend to treat “religion” and “economy” as two species of the same genus of human thought and behavior, species that we conventionally distinguish as religious and secular or symbolic and material but that are susceptible to analysis in parallel terms. This move is clearly seen in the passage from Bourdieu quoted above. Such a move, made in conjunction with Melford Spiro’s well-known definition of religion as “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings,” could lead to the interrogation of the extent to which interactions with culturally postulated superhuman beings manifest the same regularities that appear in interactions between human beings. Made in conjunction with a broader notion of religion that includes interaction between people, such as the Manichean elect or Buddhist bhikkhus and bhikkhunis and their supporters, in search of goods that are always only symbolic (karma, nirvāṇa, the purification of light from dross matter), such a move could lead to the interrogation of the extent to which interactions between people for such nonempirical goods follow patterns identified in the case of material goods. While such work, taking full account of the complexity of human economic thought and behavior, can be envisioned within current conceptualizations of religious studies and economics, it has at most only begun.
NOTES
1. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “economy.”
2. Powell’s remarks are rooted, of course, in a liberal concept of the state that sees religion as a private matter to which government should take a stance of principled indifference. Not all would agree.
3. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Random House, 1994 [1776]).
4. Smith does not advocate universal public education. He thinks people will find much better teachers privately on the open market, and he does not consider the adverse effects of disparities between parents’ resources and children’s intellectual aptitudes.
5. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ed. Talcott Parsons and Anthony Giddens (London: Unwin Hyman, 1930).
6. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen and West, 1966).
7. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
8. Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2005).