ABSTRACT

The historical study of economics and religion has been approached in two directions. The first uses economic reasoning to understand religious behavior in the past, and the second seeks to understand how religious beliefs influence the performance of economies over time. This chapter incorporates both approaches in order to make sense of both economic and religious history. It first addresses the audacious notion that economic reasoning might inform the study of religion.

The most fundamental assumption in economics is that of rationality. It is axiomatic that people understand the choices before them and the costs and benefits of each particular option. This is not to say that people hold perfect information about all possible options; obtaining and assessing information is costly, and so people collect as much of it as will yield benefits greater than costs. And then they act on that cost-benefit assessment. The validity of such an approach to religious behavior may not be immediately apparent in the wake of nineteenth-century writers such as Marx, Freud, and Comte, who emphasized the utter irrationality of religion. But that is simply to say that before reaching any conclusions earlier analyses had committed themselves to, in the words of one sociologist, “the positivist view that religion in the modern world is merely a survival from man’s primitive past, and doomed to disappear in an era of science and general enlightenment” (Gerhard Lenski, quoted in Iannaccone 1998: 1468).