The evangelical and Pentecostal movements sweeping developing countries have to be one of the most fascinating and important, and equally understudied, social movements of the decade.
Dean Karlan and I toy with the idea of the RCT, but (among other practical and ethical constraints) I’m not sure I want the reputation.
The industrial organization theory is a nice addition though:
In this paper we build a model of market competition among religious denominations, using a framework that involves incomplete contracts and the production of club goods. We treat denominations akin to multinational enterprises, which decide which countries to enter based on local market conditions and their own “productivity.”
…we find that (1) denominations with stricter religious doctrine attract more adherents in countries in which the risk of natural disaster or disease outbreak is greater and in which government provision of health services is weaker, and (2) denominations with a decentralized governance structure attract more adherents in countries in which the productivity of pastor effort is higher.
That’s a new paper by Gordon Hanson and Chong Xiang.
Somewhat unrelated, another economics and religion paper released this week from Daniel Hungerman:
For over a century, social scientists have debated how educational attainment impacts religious belief. In this paper, I use Canadian compulsory schooling laws to identify the relationship between completed schooling and later religiosity. I find that higher levels of education lead to lower levels of religious participation later in life.
An additional year of education leads to a 4-percentage-point decline in the likelihood that an individual identifies with any religious tradition; the estimates suggest that increases in schooling can explain most of the large rise in non-affiliation in Canada in recent decades.
3 Responses
I wonder if the economists have ever BEEN to 2+ such churches in the developing world. They would see that these “clubs” are so different as to be entirely incomparable. Fine, they may have the same doctrinal roots, but do you think that binds the followers together? Do you think that Baptists worship services in Senegal and Guatemala have more in common than do Baptist and Pentecostal services in Guatemala?
My experience: Not at all.
Index this one in the “Economists should get out more, and stop tooling around with datasets” folder.
There has been a lot of great anthropological work on the rise of Pentecostal and Evangelical churches — maybe start with Birgit Meyer and see where that takes you…
While I agree with your premise that the spread of Christianity through developing nations is important, I would also assert that the spread of Islam in developing countries is equally important. The spread of these two religions is fascinating, but what really strikes me is when the two come into conflict — in Africa, for instance. Many African countries have become battlegrounds for the two competing ideologies and I believe this is something sorely underdiscussed. For instance, with the Nigerian elections, many mainstream media discussions of the “North” and “South” only mention religion in as an afterthought, when it is arguably the most important cleavage in the country. 58% of Nigerians and Rwandans say that religious conflict is a “very big problem” in their own country, compared to problems of corruption and poverty. So in short, I agree that the role of religion in developing nations is understudied, but I wouldn’t limit the focus simply to Christianity and would pay particular attention to where religions in these countries come into conflict.