Faiths thrive when they demand more of their participants—and so do their broader societies
By Roland Fryer. He is an economics professor at Harvard.
After the excerpts from Fryer's articles I have some from an article by Bryan Caplan. Fryer seems to focus on the cost of participation in a church while Caplan focuses on the cost of holding a belief in a super natural god and miraculous events (altho Fryer touches on belief as well). So they might not be talking about exactly the same thing. But they both make good points.
Fryer's excerpts:
"Why does religion persist despite asking so much—time, money, behavioral constraint, belief in claims that resist verification? Why does the market fragment rather than consolidate?"
"The church [Fryer grew up in] provided more than belief. It provided mutual insurance: a network of people who, in moments of need, would show up for one another."
"Such systems have a familiar problem: free-riding. If the benefits of membership are available at low cost, people have an incentive to take without contributing."
"religion . . . has converged on a remarkably consistent solution: make participation costly."
"The demands religion places on its members aren’t barriers to participation. They are the mechanism by which participation becomes valuable."
"When participation requires visible sacrifice . . . commitment becomes observable."
"Religious communities produce things—solidarity, insurance, belonging—that are valuable only if members contribute. High costs screen out free-riders and raise the quality of the group."
"The more a tradition demands, the more intensely its members participate."
"when the Catholic Church undertook sweeping reforms after Vatican II—moving Mass from Latin to the local language, softening centuries-old doctrinal positions, loosening practices—attendance fell substantially across Catholic countries, declining about 20 percentage points more than in Protestant countries between 1965 and 2015."
[a research paper found] "Belief in heaven and hell is positively associated with economic growth."
"Internalized belief shapes work ethic, honesty and willingness to cooperate with strangers."
"Sitting in the pew, on its own, does nothing. What drives the effect is conviction—belief internalized deeply enough to change behavior when no one is watching."
"participation is higher where there is more competition among denominations."
For an alternate view, see Why Religious Beliefs Are Irrational, and Why Economists Should Care by Bryan Caplan, a Professor of Economics at George Mason University. Excerpts:
"Larry Iannaccone and his co-author Rodney Stark once wrote that the belief that society is getting less religious says “less about empirical fact than it does about secularization faith — a faith that, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, sustains the conviction of many social scientists that religious institutions must soon decay...” In short, belief in secularization is just a religion.
Larry’s critics were, unsurprisingly, not pleased. To tell people that their non-religious beliefs are just a religion is an insult. Why is it an insult? There isn’t any nice way to answer, so I’ll be blunt. It is an insult because the way that people form religious beliefs is so intellectually irresponsible that their conclusions are almost guaranteed to be false. People:
accept their religious beliefs with little or no evidence
accept religious beliefs that are contrary to the evidence
accept religious beliefs without studying competing views
are certain about religious beliefs that are dubious at best, and
accept their religious beliefs not because they are intellectually compelling, but because they are emotionally comforting.
Forming non-religious beliefs in a religious way is irrational because forming any beliefs in a religious way is irrational."
"Larry has won a great deal of attention for his rational choice theory of religion. But if you look closely, he doesn’t really have a rational choice theory of religion; he has a rational choice theory of group membership. As Larry occasionally admits, virtually everything that he says about religion applies just as well to fraternities, chess clubs, and football teams. Yes, belonging to a fraternity has costs and benefits; yes, competition between fraternities leads to more efficient outcomes. And both religions and fraternities have been known to use what Larry calls “bizarre” rules — such as “You can’t drink any alcohol,” or “You can only drink alcohol,” to exclude half-hearted members.
What Larry’s research strangely neglects — or, to use his word, “sidesteps” — is the differences between religions and fraternities. The most obvious of these, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, is doctrine. Fraternities don’t have much of a doctrine; religions do. To ignore doctrine is to ignore the very thing that makes religion special — and the main reason why critics of religion consider it irrational. Furthermore, to ignore doctrine is to sidestep the deepest objection to Larry’s rational choice view of religion: How can you have a rational choice theory of irrational belief?
Larry’s neglect of irrational beliefs is glaring because in the last decade economists have started to take irrationality seriously. Behavioral economists emphasize, for example, that people overestimate the riskiness of air travel because plane crashes are vivid and memorable. But if that’s irrational, how much more irrational is it to believe that someone rose from the dead because one old book says so?"
"What would economists learn if they started paying attention to the doctrinal side of religion? Now is my time for shameless self-promotion. In a series of papers on what I call “rational irrationality,” I try to handle the deep objection that Larry sidesteps. I defend a rational choice theory of irrational belief. The gist of my theory is that people persistently hold wildly irrational religious beliefs because the material cost is usually very low. In terms of daily life, what difference does it make if the earth is 6000 years old or 6 billion? So it’s not surprising how readily people shut their eyes to the geological evidence. In contrast, when the cost of irrationality is high, believers conveniently forget the teachings of their religion. Lots of religions promise paradise to martyrs, but adherents eager to die for their beliefs are one-in-a-million.
Is religion rational? In an important sense, NO. The doctrines of every religion are at best extremely improbable, but adherents are still very certain about them. Religious beliefs and standard economic models don’t fit together. However, rather than ignoring or denying this incompatibility, economists should deal with it. If I’m right, it’s not hard. Yes, religious beliefs are irrational, but they are so divorced from reality that they are rarely costly. When they do become costly, a few fanatics lay down their lives, but the overwhelming majority of the faithful open their eyes and face the fact that it’s crazy to bet your life on fairy tales."
Related posts:
Religious advice on investing (2025)
Vatican Tells Catholics How to Make ‘Faith-Consistent’ Investments (2022)
Should you invest according to religious guidelines? (2017)
Can You Find Virtue by Investing in Vice? (2006)
Another Book Relates Religion to Economics (2007)
Can You Mix Economics With Religion? (2022)Does Economics Trump Religion (2022)
New Book Uses Economics to Analyze Religion (2006)
Religion and Growth (2024)
The Freaknomics blog has a good article about people donating more money to their churches if other people can see how much they are donating called “We Pretend We Are Christians”
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