Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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churches as different brands of the same faith. This in fact may be the best strategy. By agreeing about many fundamentals, all these Christian churches support faith in each other, even as they compete with each other. The analogy from secular markets might be the New York Stock Exchange. All the stocks listed on “the big board” benefit from the confidence the investing public has in the stock exchange, even as the individual listed companies compete for investors.

There were a number of methodological problems with the statistical studies of monopoly and mobilization (Voas et al. 2002). But their chief drawback was that they did not start with an appropriate theoretical model of where variations in religious diversity came from, or how much would be optimal in a given community. Studies tended to measure the religious diversity of metropolitan areas or US states, on rare occasions of different nations, then correlate this statistic with the fraction of the population who were formal members of religious organizations. In the United States, much diversity comes from the immigration patterns of a century or two earlier, when ethnic groups brought their traditional faiths to wherever they settled. As H. Richard Niebuhr (1929) noted, it would have been rational for many of these ethnic denominations to merge as their customers assimilated into the wider society, but in order to compete with each other they had actually emphasized minor differences just as ordinary corporations struggle over niche markets, product differentiation, and any other competitive advantages they can find to help them stay in business.

The optimal number of firms in the religious market could be rather small, if socioeconomic differences among the customers were the only marketing factor. It is not surprising, therefore, that some studies would fail to find a correlation between the number of denominations and the total membership rate – because everywhere there might be a sufficient number of diverse firms to satisfy the customers. In secular industries, the number of firms can decline as successful firms buy up others, but this is less likely to happen among religious organizations. There certainly are cases in which denominations merge, and in some cases like the United Church of Canada the motivation may have been a conscious realization that there were too many similar competitors for the size of the market.

It is possible there is a degree of asymmetry in the speed with which a free religious market clears, depending upon whether it begins below or above the optimal number of firms. New firms may enter a free market quickly; many of these new firms take a generation or two to fail, and well-established firms leave the market very, very slowly. This would especially be the case when competing firms offer products of roughly equal customer value, and when large firms do not enjoy economies of scale. Stark (1996) has argued that Christianity triumphed over classical paganism because it offered a much more satisfactory product, but innovations that markedly increase customer satisfaction may be rare in religion. Thus, the number of denominations in the market may not be a proper measure of whether it has reached equilibrium in terms of prices and the value to customers.

Because local congregations are like household economies producing club goods, they may not be very dependent upon the denomination they belong to, and indeed some very successful denominations such as the Southern Baptists are relatively loose confederations with much local autonomy comparable to business franchises. Unlike local automobile dealers, they are not highly dependent upon the fortunes of the manufacturer, and it is even possible for a local congregation to survive without a denomination, as many community churches in fact do. The point is that in the religion business very large firms may not have the advantage of economies of scale anywhere near as much as an automobile company does, and therefore smaller denominations are not doomed to being out-competed quickly by the large ones.

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If a spectrum of faiths already exists in the society, then competition between religious organizations would rather quickly move toward equilibrium of costs and benefits with a high degree of mobilization of the public in religion, and a high level of customer satisfaction. As secular society changes, affected by such factors as new technology and political shifts, the segmentation of the market will change, but the religious market should adjust fairly smoothly. Widespread economic prosperity should move more people into mainstream churches, and economic decline or increased inequality would favor the sects, for example. Yet we know that some features of religion seem to change at a pace that rivals the glaciers for slowness.

The year 1776, in which Adam Smith essentially established the economics of religion, was notable also for the American Revolution and the first really practical steam engine developed by James Watt. In a loose sense, the modern era could be dated from that year, yet Judaism is something like fifteen times as old as The Wealth of Nations. Languages change only very slowly, but Christianity is about three times as old as the English language. The first thing to observe here is that religion is about the most powerful example of equilibrium we can discern in human affairs!

However, the example of Christianity does remind us there can be something new under the sun. Religious innovation does sometimes occur. Although based in the entire heritage of an ethnic group, Judaism emerged through entrepreneurial acts by individual leaders, notably Abraham leading his people into Egypt, and Moses leading them out again. Christianity began with the proverbial dozen disciples and remained small for a century or two. Islam entered the picture later, founded by Mohammad and his immediate successors. Thus one important topic relevant to religious equilibrium is the relative ease or difficulty with which new firms may enter the market.

Industries differ greatly, from one to another and over time, in terms of how easy or difficult it is to enter the market. Starting a new automobile company from scratch today is prohibitively costly, but that was not the case in 1900. Apple and Microsoft began as small groups of friends with few resources in the 1970s, but you would need a huge infusion of investment capital to launch a computer company to compete with them today. (We should not stretch our metaphors too far, but we might need to recognize that the open-source Linux operating system is analogous to a religious sect competing with the Microsoft church, relying as it does upon volunteer efforts in an intense but disorganized community not unlike a sect congregation.) What are the costs of successful entry into the religious market? How does a new firm enter the religious market?

In post-industrial society, as in the ancient world, there are few impediments to entry into the religious market, so cults abound. If the modern experience is any guide, much religious innovation is generated by small firms, as is the case in many other industries. Only a handful of people with a place to meet and the beginnings of a new faith are required. The low cost of entry into a free religious market is offset by the high likelihood of failure, however. One explanation is that cults are clubs, and religious club goods that are initially designed to serve the original members in their possibly unique circumstances may not market well to other people in the neighborhood, many of whom are already satisfied with the religion they have. Another explanation is that most tiny new religions cannot reach their market effectively, because potential customers may be strewn thinly over a wide area and can be reached only by extreme marketing exertions. Thus, any chance of success depends upon an unusual degree of entrepreneurship, which we already noted is required to start the novel religion in the first place. The main reason, however, is simply that over time innovation and

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entrepreneurship tends to fill all the profitable niches in a stable and open religious market. After more than two centuries of religious laissez faire, the U.S. market is not likely to see much major religious change absent equally major changes in technology, demography, or government.

Conclusion: consequences

The most famous social-scientific theory about the economic impact of religion is probably Max Weber’s (1904–1905) century-old thesis that Protestantism stimulated the birth of capitalism by encouraging thrift and thus investment, and perhaps by encouraging rationalism as well. Many subsequent economic historians have disagreed with Weber, pointing out that capitalist institutions had already been established prior to the Reformation and thrived in Catholic areas (Samuelsson 1993; Delacroix 1995). Weber himself actually stated his thesis rather tentatively, writing about an elective affinity between the Protestant ethic and capitalism, rather than asserting that the former caused the latter, and specifically saying that Protestantism probably lost this function once capitalism was well launched. However, subsequent Weberians seem determined to be more Weberian than Weber himself, and introductory sociology students get the impression that capitalism could not exist without the continuing support of a particular kind of religion.

This conceivably could be true if a given religion enjoyed a monopoly through an alliance with the political elite of the society and exerted pressures on the secular economy for the benefit of the elite, but it would do so at the risk of losing many of its non-elite customers. However, in a free religious market, it is hard to see how a major religion could push the secular economy in any direction that its customers did not want to go. During historical dislocations, like the Reformation, religion might operate for a time as an independent force in society, but it would lose this power as equilibrium was reestablished. This is not to say that religion is unimportant in a free society, merely that it tends to operate like other free institutions. The pressure to survive constrains it to maximize the satisfactions of its customers and thus limits its power to force them toward goals they do not desire.

A free market of religion harmonizes with the free market of material goods and secular services, with the free market of ideas that is science and scholarship, and the free market of public decision-making that is democracy. Religion may contribute to the functionality of the entire society, by supporting interpersonal trust and suppressing criminal behavior, by compensating deprived populations for that portion of their deprivations that is unavoidable, and by supporting the production of the most important product of household labor, namely children (Bainbridge 2007). These are benefits that people want, rather than impositions upon them. Religion thus helps people achieve their valued goals on Earth, whatever rewards it may also provide in Heaven.

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