This article was published in the IAST magazine, 2024/2025 winter issue, exploring the power of belief, from ancient rituals to 21st-century politics. Discover the full PDF here or email us at com@tse-fr.eu for a printed copy.
Holy leaders can inspire us with poetic messages, colorful stories and otherworldly dreams but their power also rests on more earthly prose of economic incentives and political strategy. In a new book, former IAST director Paul Seabright argues that religions act as platforms that compete for consumers by offering a range of flexible services.
Why do religious platforms often outperform secular ones? Religions create a performative space where we can articulate our needs as social animals and find group solutions. Their communities are bonded by collective rituals and enchanting narratives that instill a sense of purpose in people’s lives, increasing trust in the platform’s services and members.
Will religions stay in business? Religion is alive and well in the non-Western world. Even in more skeptical countries, religious platforms have modified their services to address human needs. It's only when they are seen as partisan political actors that religions slowly lose the authority this gives them.
Is new technology a mixed blessing? Like the printing press which sparked the Reformation, today's digital advances have slashed the costs of sending plausible messages. This has intensified religious rivalry by facilitating comparison of different movements, forcing them to adapt and evolve. But the disruption is unlikely to change their focus on meeting demand for trusted communities.
Why do sects clash over obscure theology? Religious doctrines provide a distinctive marker of group belonging, but the theology becomes intensely important to insiders only after they have become members. Outsiders mostly couldn't care less, which is what marks them as outsiders.
Are women more pious than men? Greater religiosity is only found among Christian women, with roots in the way Christianity appeared to offer gender parity to the downtrodden of the Roman Empire. Elsewhere, religious platforms have found many ways to appeal to both men and women.
Why have ‘moral’ movements seen an epidemic of sexual abuse? Sexual abuse is rife in secular as well as religious institutions, but it is particularly common when figures of authority are uncritically revered, with a monopoly of access to vulnerable individuals. The way to rein in such abuse is to provide denser networks, external accountability, and an end to cultures of silence.
To study global trends, Paul Seabright compares the reported importance of religion before and after 2000. There is no clear tendency for countries to lie above the line that divides those with increasing religiosity from those where it is on the wane.
Countries at the high end are predominantly Muslim; otherwise, there are no clear clusters by religious category. Religion has lost 5.2 percentage points in Catholic countries, lost 8.7 percentage points in Protestant countries, and gained 17.7 percentage points in Orthodox countries.
The upshot? Religion is declining in some countries, advancing in others, with no overall trend toward increasing or decreasing importance.
Source: The Divine Economy, 2024
FIND OUT MORE Longlisted for the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2024, The Divine Economy is published by Princeton University Press. To explore what happens when our prehistoric brain meets the modern world, visit Paul’s personal website.
