Competing for Souls: Paul Seabright Explores Religion’s Economic Power

The Michael Shermer Show Archives

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Religion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements has led to their accumulating great power and wealth. Religions in many traditions have honed their competitive strategies over thousands of years. Today, they are big business; like businesses, they must recruit, raise funds, disburse budgets, manage facilities, organize transportation, motivate employees, and get their message out. In The Divine Economy, economist Paul Seabright argues that religious movements are a special kind of business: they are platforms, bringing together communities of members who seek many different things from one another—spiritual fulfilment, friendship and marriage networks, even business opportunities. Their function as platforms, he contends, is what has allowed religions to consolidate and wield power.

This power can be used for good, especially when religious movements provide their members with insurance against the shocks of modern life, and a sense of worth in their communities. It can also be used for harm: political leaders often instrumentalize religious movements for authoritarian ends, and religious leaders can exploit the trust of members to inflict sexual, emotional, financial or physical abuse, or to provoke violence against outsiders. Writing in a nonpartisan spirit, Seabright uses insights from economics to show how religion and secular society can work together in a world where some people feel no need for religion, but many continue to respond with enthusiasm to its call.

Paul Seabright is a Professor of Economics in the Industrial Economics Institute and Toulouse School of Economics and the University of Toulouse, France. He earned his graduate degrees in economics from the University of Oxford. He was Assistant Director of Research and a Reader in Economics at the University of Cambridge until 2001. He has also been a consultant to private sector firms, governments and international organizations including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank, the European Commission and the United Nations. He is the author of The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, and his new book The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People.

Shermer and Seabright discuss:

• What is religion?
• The landscape of religious numbers: going up or down, when and where?
• Why Americans are so much more religious than Europeans
• What motivates people to be religious despite (or perhaps because of) its costs?
• Religion provides people with meaning, purpose and community, which secularism alone often fails to deliver
• Religions as platforms, “organisations that facilitate relationships that could not [otherwise] form”
• Other “platforms” in history (markets, marriage broking, international trade)
• Popular explanations for religion pp. 180–181.
• Role(s) of religion in history and society today
• Enlightenment Humanism, Secular Humanism, and other alternatives
• Is religion and belief in God(s) adaptive or a byproduct?
• Big Gods vs. animism, polytheism, supernaturalism
• Why some religions are so much more successful than others
• Rituals
• Social Gospel vs. Prosperity Gospel
• Taxes vs. Tithing
• Group selection vs. cultural selection
• Cults and New Religious Movements
• Why most religions fail but why some succeed
• Christianity and violence
• Islam and violence
• When we colonize Mars will far future humans on other planets be religious?

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