Abstract
Typically, when we juxtapose the terms religion and economics, people immediately begin to think about morality and ethics. Religions have a lot to say about economic pursuits, and most of it is critical. Perhaps there is something called “Christian Economics,” “Buddhist Economics,” and “Islamic Economics.” All major religions teach about the dangers of “materialism” and promote some concept of spiritual investment in eternal verities and otherworldly realities. More and more, religions also have a lot to say about environmental degradation and the obligations of responsible stewardship of the planet. In all the major religions, we find some formulation of the Golden Rule, that is, do unto others as you would have others do unto you. We might ask, as many have, what an economic system based on the utility function of the Golden Rule would actually look like and note that such systems have never been realized on any grand scale.
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Notes
These are 2008 estimates. See Central Intelligence Agency, “The World Factbook,” https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html. See also Eric D. Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2006), 9.
The question of limits of growth and sustainable development are real and serious. See J. Robert McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000);
J. Robert McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
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Robert Wright, Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Pantheon, 2000).
See, for instance, D. Stephen Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market (New York: Routledge, 2000).
The term social capital first appeared in 1916. The term human capital first appeared in a 1961 article by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Theodore W. Shultz. See also Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). For other citations and a review of the literature, see Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, “Social, Human, and Spiritual Capital in Economic Development,” Metanexus, http://www.metanexus.net/spiritual_capital/research_articles.asp.; and Laurence R. Iannaccone and Jonathan Klick, “Spiritual Capital: An Introduction and Literature Review,” Metanexus, http://www.metanexus.net/spiritual_capital/research_review.asp.
Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, [1905] 1958);
Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fisch off (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, [1922] 1963). See also Peter L Berger and Robert W. Hefner, “Spiritual Capital in Comparative Perspective,” Metanexus, http://www.metanexus.net/spiritual_capital/pdf/Berger.pdf.
Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2006).
Peter L. Berger et al., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (New York: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999).
Francis Fukuyama, “Social Capital,” in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, ed. Lawrence Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 106.
Timur Kuran, Islam & Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
United Nations Development Programme, “Arab Human Development Report,” http://www.arab-hdr.org., 2004, 2005, #940.
Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Korinna Horta, “Dateline Chad: Return of the ‘Resource Curse’?” The Globalist, August 25, 2006.
Notes from a lecture given by Timur Kuran, “The Role of Islamic Law in the Economic Evolution of the Middle East,” at the Association of the Study of Religion, Economics and Culture (ASREC), Rochester, NY, 2005.
Jen’nan Ghazal Read, “Muslims in America,” Contexts: Understanding People in their Social Worlds, Fall 2008, 37–41.
Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). See also McCloskey, “What Would Jesus Spend? Why Being a Good Christian Won’t Hurt the Economy,” John Templeton Foundation, http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=8.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1790 ed. (London: A. Millar, 1759).
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: Methuen and Co., 1776), book 1, ch. 1, p. 4.
The term sacred canopy is taken from Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967).
Gary Becker, “Keynote Address,” paper presented at the “Spiritual Capital Conference,” Cambridge, MA, October 9, 2003. Reprinted in Spiritual Capital (Philadelphia, PA: Metanexus Institute, 2003);
Laurence R. Iannaccone, “The Economics of Religion: A Survey of Recent Work,” Journal of Economic Literature 36 (September1998): 1465–1496.
Robert Woodbury, “Missionary Data (1813–1968) as a Resource for Testing Religious Economies and Secularization Theory,” paper presented at the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics and Culture, Rochester, NY, November 4, 2005.
Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 121, 123.
David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Robert H. Nelson, Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (State College: Penn State University Press, 2001).
Plato, The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant (New York: Penguin Classics, 1993), 53. Of course, Job would disagree! He was a righteous man who suffered of no fault of his own. Jesus and Buddha are also ambivalent on this point. Goodness, in their view, leads to voluntary poverty. A cross to bear!
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© 2010 William Grassie
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Grassie, W. (2010). The Economics of Religion. In: The New Sciences of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114746_4
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