Evaluating the Evidence: Religious Economies and Sacred Canopies

1989 ◽  
Vol 54 (6) ◽  
pp. 1054 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Finke ◽  
Rodney Stark
Keyword(s):  
Religious Economies

Immigrants, Migration, and Religious Economies

2011 ◽  
pp. 150-168
Author(s):  
Darren E. Sherkat
Keyword(s):  
Forced Migration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Economics Of Religion ◽  
Immigration Laws ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Religious Economies ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The Impact

Over the twentieth century, Western democracies began to adopt more inclusive immigration laws, which enabled people from diverse nations to move to Europe and North America. Not surprisingly, many of these immigrants carried with them religious traditions not commonly found in their new homelands. Yet immigration also has a more elemental relationship with religion, because religion often contributes to political conflicts that lead to forced migration, and religious oppression frequently motivates religious minorities to seek more accepting cultural environments. Research in the economics of religion often draws on the impact of immigrants on religious markets and the impact of religious markets on immigrants' religious practices. This article reviews studies on the connections between religion and migration, and discusses how these are related to economic theories of religious and cultural behaviors and institutions. It presents findings from the United States detailing how migration impacts religious markets, how religious factors structure migration, and some economic consequences of religious commitments among immigrants.

scholarly journals Porous Religious Economies and the Problem of Regulating Religious Marketplaces

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Orlando Woods
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Data ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Religious Influence ◽  
Religious Influences ◽  
Religious Networks ◽  
Religious Praxis ◽  
Religious Economies ◽  
Religious Economy

This paper reframes the theory of religious economy by developing an understanding of the effects of transnational religious influence on religious marketplaces. In doing so, it highlights the need to rethink the role of regulation in shaping the ways in which religious marketplaces operate. By reinterpreting regulation as the ability of the state to control the extent to which religious groups are able to access resources, it argues that transnational religious networks can enable access to extraneous resources, which, in turn, can enable religious groups to subvert the regulatory prescriptions of the state. Transnational religious influences therefore highlight the porosity of religious economies and the problem of regulating religious marketplaces. Qualitative data are used to demonstrate how Singapore-based churches create and strengthen transnational religious networks with their counterparts in China. These networks enable religious groups to operate with a degree of independence and to overcome regulatory restrictions on (and other limitations to) religious praxis.

Reconceptualizing Types of Religious Organization

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
David G. Bromley ◽  
J. Gordon Melton
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Organizational Forms ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Relational Approach ◽  
New Religions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religious Economies ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Over Time

One important theoretical task in the study of religion is distinguishing among the different organizational forms that religious groups assume. The most influential typology of religious organization has been based upon distinctions of church, denomination, sect, and cult. However, the various formulations of this typology have proved problematic, theoretically and empirically, and of little use to new religions scholars. We propose a relational approach to categorizing religious groups based on the social and cultural relationship of a group to established institutions (including religion). This approach yields four types of tradition groups: dominant, sectarian, alternative, and emergent. We argue that a relationally based typology is particularly useful in mapping religious economies, conducting comparative analysis, and tracking the changing status of religious groups over time.

Economy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Koch
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Allocation Of Resources ◽  
Exogenous Factor ◽  
Neoclassical Economic Theory ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Religious Economies

Religion is in many ways an economic phenomenon and can be analyzed as such. By economy most economists understand systems for the allocation of resources. In this light, this chapter notes various ways in which religious organizations are engaged in sectoral markets and produce private and public goods, entailing products and services. Religion and economy are interdependent and relate to each other in distinct ways across societal subsystems. Economy both permeates religious structures and is a co-system. This is generally studied by political economy: recent moves beyond neoclassical economic theory (which saw culture as an exogenous factor) emphasize the economy’s embeddedness in social relationships and its variation across cultures. The chapter considers ways in which religious phenomena reflect recent changes in capitalist systems and ways in which religious economies function as explicit economic systems.

Toward Better Measures of Supply and Demand for Testing Theories of Religious Participation

2011 ◽  
pp. 134-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Olson
Keyword(s):  
Census Data ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Religious Participation ◽  
Supply Side ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Participation Rates ◽  
Religious Congregations ◽  
Data Limitations ◽  
Religious Economies

The supply-side approach to understanding religious participation is perhaps one of the more influential ideas of the religious economies model. The term “supply side” was first applied by R. Stephen Warner to Roger Finke and Rodney Stark's analyses found in the Churching of America (1992). In that book, Finke and Stark suggest that most previous historical and sociological explanations of changing religious participation rates over time and across national and geographic settings had been based on notions of changing levels of demand for religion, theories which have since been labeled demand-side theories. This article describes some of the data limitations that make it difficult to distinguish the separate influences of supply and demand in real life analyses of religious participation rates. It then presents a method which, when applied to common geographically based data sets, can be used to construct measures of demand that are independent of measures of the supply of religion. The article summarizes the results of the 2000 Religious Congregations and Church Membership Study (RCMS) and presents U.S. county-level census data from 2000.

Religious Economies and Religious Mobility

2016 ◽  
pp. 292-327
Keyword(s):  
Market Economy ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
The State ◽  
The West ◽  
State Regulations ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Economies ◽  
Religious Economy

Religious economies are a novel idea with potential application in a free market economy. They bring the idea of the existence of the supernatural and concern with ultimate meanings, so ubiquitous to religions, in touch with the multiplicity of paths available to us. In Islamic Sufism, there are as many paths to God as there are individuals. A situation in which people could compare and evaluate religions, regarding them as a matter of choice, can best described as a religious economy. Just as commercial economies consist of a market in which different firms compete, religious economies consist of a market (the aggregate demand for religion) and firms (different religious organizations) seeking to attract and hold clienteles. Just as commercial economies must deal with state regulations, religious economies' key issue is the degree to which they are regulated by the state. From Stark's viewpoint, the natural state of a religious economy is religious pluralism, wherein many religious “firms” exist because of their special appeal to certain segments of the market or the population. However, just as there is incentive for a commercial organization to monopolize the market to maximize its profit, it is always in the interest of any particular religious organization to secure a monopoly, maintain its followers, and expand into new interest groups. This can be achieved, (and even then to a very limited extent) only if the state forcibly excludes competing faiths (Stark, 2001). The building blocks of Stark's ideas are the assumption of a free market, a market economy, and the key issue of rational choice theory, hand in hand with American Pragmatism. As with the history of religions, which are not and have not been free from contest and cooperation, similarities, and differences, so religious economies have not been and are not easily shaped without considering forces from within and among different economies. Religious actions, reactions, and interactions in monotheism, diversity of textual interpretations, the growth of intellectualism or counter-intellectualism, human perception of transcendence and the sacred, as well as the realities of everyday life, all imply that the idea of religious economies needs more exploration. Christianity and Islam, one dominating the West and the other the East and Africa, offer the instances of two massive markets. Each religion has more than a billion adherents and a history of sharing the monotheistic market. Both religions, in spite of Islamophobia in the West, have formed and will participate in the decline, incline, or stability of the market. This subject is timely in light of the political movements in the Middle East and monolithic misconception of Islam.

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