July 26, 2024 • 42 mins
In this episode, Matthew talks to Professor Paul Seabright about his book 'The divine economy' and how religions operate as successful businesses in order to make profit and demonstrate power. Paul explains why we must carefully consider the question of secularisation, how religions can gain power in both positive and negative ways and how the story of one young girls tells us a lot about the impact religion can have on an individual.
You can watch the video version here -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfvKRkCZoe0&t=134s
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You can watch the video version here -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfvKRkCZoe0&t=134s
You can book online lessons here - https://calendly.com/sociologyshowtutoring
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi, You're listening to The Sociology Show, a podcast about
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(00:25):
and anything else that sociology has to offer. My name
is Matthew Wilkin. In each episode, I will speak to
someone working in the field of sociology and let them
explain all about their own interests, their research, and their experiences.
So put your ear phones in, turn the volume up,
and let's be sociology geeks together. Ah Hello, and welcome
(00:49):
to the Sociology Show podcast, where my guest for this
episode is Professor Paul Sebright's talking about his book The
Define Economy. Before we get onto that, though, just a
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(01:56):
book your slot on the calendar website that is I'll
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to the messages. Without further ado, let's go over to
the interview with Professor Paul Sebright. Hello, and welcome to
the Sociology Show Podcast. Would you like to start by
(02:18):
telling us a little bit about who you are and
what you do.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Please, well, thank you for this invitation. It's great to
be here. So my name is Paul Seabright. I teach
economics at the Tulu School of Economics in to Lose Crants,
and I'm a member of the Institute for Advanced Study
in Toluse, which is an interdisciplinary research center. So I
actually spend a lot of my time hanging out with
people who are not economists like me. These are people
(02:44):
who will be sociologists, anthropologists, historians, lawyers, psychologists, and so
I'm very very comfortable in this interdisciplinary environment. And what
I study mainly is what you might think of was
at the intersection between behavioral economics and thes and institutions,
or in a simple way, it's where our prehistoric brain
(03:05):
meets the modern world.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Thank you very much, Thank you, And we're going to
talk about your book, which I've got here. I've read
the full title for everyone, The Divine Economy, How Religions
Compete for wealth, power and people. And the first thing
I wanted to ask you for is actually the first bit,
the first story, the story of Grace, I think sets
(03:26):
up the book for where it's going to go in
its direction. So I wondered if you could outline the
story of Grace to start with, because I think that
really sets up the narrative nicely.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Well, thank you. I mean, Grace was a woman who
made a lot of impression on me. I met her
when I was in Ghana with my team of researchers
doing playing economic games with a large number of people
who were all members of a Pentecostal church in Ghana.
And we played these games not in the church because
(03:58):
we didn't want that to bias there, he answers. We
chose a neutral setting in a secular university building, and
Grace was one of the people who came to our experiments.
And after the experiments there was also a detailed questionnaire
and debriefing and I did that with her, and she
was about twenty four years old, and I looking at her,
(04:20):
she was sort of simply but well dressed and spoke
carefully and thoughtfully, and looking at her, I thought I
could pretty much site her up. I thought she was
probably somebody with a reasonable at least high school education,
and that she probably worked as a blurk in a
government office or maybe a small business somewhere. But I
(04:41):
could not have been more six days a week, twelve
hours a day. She walks up and down between the
lines of cars coming in on one of the main
freeways into Akra, and they block up at the traffic lights,
and she goes up and down trying to sell them
ice water in little plastic sashes basket above her head.
And you just have to imagine what it's like doing that,
(05:03):
inhaling the exhaust fumes, being insulted and abused by the
people in the cars. And she does that twelve hours
a day. She goes home to this tiny little shack
that she's built with her aunt in a slum area.
But on Sundays she goes to church and she can
dress recentably well. She's an usher, so she shows people
to her seat and is quite visible to them. She
(05:27):
sings in the choir. She's a helper in a Sunday school.
And we worked out that she gives about one about
twelve percent of her income to the church. And when
I say to the church, I mean you have to
see what the church has. But important who it is.
I mean the boss of her church, who is the
beneficiary of a large amount of this income, is a
(05:49):
very charming man. I call him Astor William in the book,
and he wears a very fine suit, he drives the
fast mercedes. He's very happy that everybody should know that
he's rich. In fact, he has a buckle around his
belt with a dollar sign on it. And he doesn't
need her money, but she gives it to him, and
she gives it to him not only willingly, but I
(06:11):
would say lucidly. We had a long discussion of her finances,
and she can give you a better and more lucid
account of her finances and of mine. And she knows
perfectly well that she gives money to him, she can't
pay for health care for her aunt and so on,
and so a part of the book is based around
this question of why is she doing this? And the
answer you can't give is she's not stupid, she's not deceived.
(06:34):
She's not in an ordinary sense exploited. I mean, you
might have a complicated theory of how she's exploited, but
she's not a victim. On the contrary, she is a
real victim six days a week and her awful job,
but one day a week, she doesn't sound like a victim.
She doesn't talk like a victim. She doesn't walk like
a victim, and I wanted to tell her story in
(06:54):
a way that didn't just make her out to be
a victim.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah, as soon as I read that, my initial thought was,
I don't know if you can put any numbers on this,
But you know, if the eight billion people on Earth,
the vast majority are religious in some form, a large
number of those pay around ten percent of their salary
towards religions. I mean, could we even put an estimate
on what percentage of the world is paying some form
(07:19):
of money into their faith.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Well of the world as a whole. That would be hard.
But I did report in the book that a conservative
estimate of the financial revenues of faith based organizations in
the United States amounts to about two percent of personal income,
and I gave reasons for thinking that it's rather similar
(07:42):
in a number of countries where Pentecostal Christianity is a
very powerful force, like many countries in Africa and a
number of in Asia and Latin America. Now, to give
it some perspective, two percent of personal income in the
United States is about sixty percent of the income of
all of the media and public publishing industries. So you know,
(08:08):
video games, recorded music, movies, books, the lot sixty percent
of that, and it's about half of the income of
all the restaurant industry in the United States. So this
is quite big money. Now, there are not many countries
I would say with the total revenues are higher than that,
but there are quite a lot of countries where they're equivalent.
(08:30):
And that's a lot of money. That's enough to buy
quite a lot of very rich pastors some choice real
estate in the finest areas of the cities in which
they live. So that doesn't even include all of the
contributions in time and energy and in kind. So, whether
you like them, whether you don't, religious movements are economically
(08:54):
very powerful, and they're worth studying if only for that
reason alone. But of course in the book, I always
also talk about their power, about the good things they
do with their power and some of the bad things
they do with their power. And I think we are
all better off if we can understand where that power
comes from and how it's exercised.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Thank you. I could be completely out of touch here
as well, But is it still true that religion major
religions don't have to pay taxes.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
They are at charity.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
So is that still true?
Speaker 2 (09:23):
It varies from country to country. In the United States
in particular, on which I concentrate in the book, they
not only pay no taxes, as is the case in
the vast majority of countries in the world, but they
also don't have to publish any account or indeed to
give any account to anybody about what they do. So
(09:46):
you or I could set up a church together in
the United States. I mean, I don't know. If you
ever get bored making podcasts and I get bored of
what I do, maybe we can go into this together.
But we can literally open a storefront in a street
in the United States and we ask people to give
us money. And unlike in almost all other circumstances where
if we get money from the public, we have to
(10:08):
declare ourselves to be a business or a charity and
explain why we don't have to pay personal income tax
on that. You or I could do that. We would
have to pay no tax on it at all, unless
the IRS decides to investigate us, which they might of course,
if they've listened to the podcast and they know that
this is a scam and so on. But you know,
the IRS has a lot on its plate, and it's
not normally going to investigate it if we put a
(10:29):
little sign outside saying whether such and such church of
such and such and so that's a very unusual thing,
because most charities are exempt from paying tax. Again, I'm
talking about the US, provided that they publish accounts and
they you know, they in some sense declare themselves as
charities and are conformed to the rules on charities. Now
(10:52):
in other countries it's not always the same, but there
are even countries I think nine of them in Europe
where not only do they pay no tax, but the
government collects taxes on their behalf. So for example, if
you're a citizen of Germany, you have a space on
your tax return in which you can choose to pay
a proportion of your taxes to one of the designated churches.
(11:13):
And in Iceland, which is ahead of the curve on
many things, they actually have the same thing, that you
can raise money for the churches. But of course it's
not just the traditional churches that are eligible. So there
is a church in Iceland whose name I've forgotten, but
which is a church that is open only to atheists
who disapprove of paying taxes, and so they have exploited
(11:35):
this particular feature of the tax code in Iceland, but
in the other eight countries in Europe you have to
be in some sense of registered established church to do that.
And so the church not only is making being obliged
to pay taxes to the government, but the government is
actually raising taxes on behalf of the church.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Interesting. You just really got me scratching my head then,
thinking you can atheists form a religion? I digress, I digress.
Does that mean then if you said there's no obligation
to declare that, we don't actually have any idea how
much money is in, for example, the Catholic Church, or
scientology or whatever it may be. We have no understanding
(12:15):
at all what the wealth is there.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Well, I mean a number of very professional and dedicated
researchers and journalists have tried to find this out, and
I think the economists published an estimate of the incomes
of the Catholic Church in the United States. I've forgotten
what it was. It's obviously some subset of that two
percent of personal income number I gave you. But they're
(12:38):
very difficult. I mean, there's the important point to bear
in mind is that if you study organized religion. There's
no central place you can go to get statistics in
the same way that you can go to, you know,
the official statistical agencies of each country to get statistics
on incorporated businesses, because it's part of the deal if
(12:58):
you're an incorporated business that you say, well, okay, in
order for the people who founded the business not to
have to take personal incometacts on every dollar of revenue
that they get, they which of course is great for
them if they don't have to pay income tax on that,
but they then have an obligation to follow certain rules,
and notably, these rules involve an important degree of transparency
(13:21):
about what they're earning. And you know, we all know
corporate accounting scandals and so on. They're a big deal.
But the point is the fact that there are corporate
accounting scandals show that there are rules that corporations have
to obey, whereas in the United States there essentially are
no rules that churches have to obey, providing they are
(13:42):
properly considered churches. And from time to time the IRS
does a swoop, but usually because they've had a tip off.
Without a tip off, it's very rare that they do swoops.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Thank you, Thank you. And the next part of the
book that I wanted to pick up on was for
students listening who are studying sociology. You know, a big,
a big part of the belief topic is this idea
of secularization, that secularization is occurring and it's sweeping across
not just the US and the UK, but other parts
of the world, and your research is just something quite different,
(14:13):
that we are not experiencing a worldwide secularization process at all,
that actually religion is alive, and well, is that is
that a fair point to make?
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Well, let me first of all say that secularization has
lots of different meanings. It's used in many different ways.
And I think that if you look at some of
the very early writers on secularization, people like Max Weber
and Emial Dirkheim, they were talking about the way in
which the arrival of modernity, which they described in various
different ways, would change the nature of religion, and it
(14:46):
might be seen as putting religion on the back foot,
But I think neither Dirkheim or wepor I ever really
thought that religion would be incapable of responding now over time,
the secularization hypothesis has become trans and there are lots
of very fine sociologists writing about it who don't do this,
but there are some who have transformed it into the
(15:07):
doctrine that religion was going to disappear in other ways.
It's not just that religions under pressure from all sorts
of things, including modern science, urbanization, and so forth, but
also that religion was incapable of responding and would therefore
wither away. Now my target in the book is the
people who think that it's just not true that religion
(15:29):
is withering in the way. It is declining in importance
in a number of parts of the world, which North
America is probably the most important example, and I discussed
in the books some reasons why, and parts of Western Europe,
but across the world as a whole, those regions are
outliers in the rest of the world. In large parts
of it, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, many parts of Latin America,
(15:54):
religion is thriving. The story is different. I mean, there
are parts of Latin America where it's declining. Chile is
a good example. There are many parts of Europe where
it's declining. I discussed the cases of Ireland and Spain
in a number of respects. But if you take the
world as a whole, essentially there's some upsets and downs,
(16:15):
but religion is not dying out, and I think that
we should assume that it's here to stay. But that
doesn't mean that it's unchanging. On the contrary, it's adapting.
It's adapting to those challenges in the modern world. And
what the book is about is how it's adapting and
precisely why, in the face of some challenges that some
people have thought would be fatal to religion, it's actually
(16:35):
able to reform, reshape and speak to the needs that many,
many people, billions of people in back across the world have,
which the other institutions of modern secular society are not
very good at meeting.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Yeah, and I suppose that kind of brings on to
the next question that was going to ask about part
two of your book is how do religions gain their power?
So I wondered if you'd woudn't mind saying a little
bit more about that, because it's interesting, you know, going
back to what you said about about Grace, she wasn't
being duped, you know, this was her giving her money
(17:10):
over through her own free will. So I wonder what
other examples you had of how religions gain their power
in that section that you write.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Okay, well, I mean there are lots. I draw lots
of cases. I draw them from India, I draw them
from Cameroon, in West Africa, I draw them from China.
I draw them from well, many many different places, and
also many historical examples as well. And so the central
organizing idea in the book is that we can understand
why religions have become powerful if we understand them as platforms. Now,
(17:40):
what are platforms. We're used to thinking of platforms as
these digital entities like Facebook and Google and so on,
and they are platforms. But what's interesting is that what
makes them platforms is nothing to do with being digital,
or being modern or even being huge. What a platform
is is an organization that brings people together to make
(18:02):
a community. Okay. Now, that's obviously what Facebook does, and
it's obviously what Google does, and it's obviously what you know,
many many digital platforms do. But the type of community varies,
and you don't have to have digital technology to do it.
So if you think of you know, in prehistoric times,
there were matchmakers in villages and towns that would bring
(18:25):
people together to make marriages. There were interpreters who help
people who spoke different languages to join together. There were
marketplaces which brought together sellers and buyers. All of these
are platforms. And what religions do is essentially they create communities,
and sometimes they're very transient, short term communities. So you
(18:46):
might have just a religious movement which is a shrine
by the side of the road, and for a while
it brings together people who maybe are united in their
reverence for the origin of the shrine. But sometimes it's
just a huge movement around the world, like the Catholic Church.
(19:06):
And sometimes it's intermediate. So you can have movements within
the Catholic Church, like the Jesuits, or you can have
movements within Protestantism, like say the Assemblies of God, which
was the Pentecostal movement, which is a kind of brand
of an American Pentecostal Church which has since spread out
(19:28):
across the world, and which creates communities. And the point
is that those because creating communities allows people to come
together in ways that they wouldn't have been able to
do so otherwise, that creates benefits, and the basic business
model of those platforms is that they appropriate a share
of the benefits that those relationships create.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Thank you. And it's really interesting that the language you
say that the business model. You know, do you think
many religions do see themselves as a business, You know
that in the same way that you'd have a business meeting,
business plan, looking at income, outgoings and selling it. If
you think they see themselves as a business in that respect.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Absolutely, And it's important to make it clear that I'm
not saying that people who found or peo, people who
run religious movements are necessarily motivated by profit or the
desire for money. I mean some are, let's be frank
about it. Some are absolutely motivated by the wish to
earn money. Pastor William and akra A is one such person.
(20:28):
He absolutely gloried there. But many, many people who run
religious movements are not motivated by that. They're motivated by
something else. They may be motivated by the genuine desire
to do good for the downtron or they may be
motivated by the desire to show off and be admired
in a community of people who all think that they
represent the word of God, or they may be motivated
(20:50):
because they have a hyperactive libido and they can indulge
it in these movements and their people who do the
way is I'm neutral about why they do it. There
are all sorts of motives. Important point that they all
share is that they have to command enough resources to
keep the show on the road, otherwise that movement will disappear.
And you know, sometimes if you have very modest movement,
(21:11):
if all you want to do is to tender road
to side shrine, then you know, your costs aren't very high,
but your revenues aren't going to be very high either.
You maybe can persuade a few people to light a
candle at the shrine, and you don't need much revenue
to cover your costs. If, on the other hand, you
want to have a very big, modern church with a
(21:34):
whole team of pastors and the latest and audio visual technology,
and you know, visiting musicians from across the world and
a private jet and all of the things that some
religious movements leaders have wanted to do, then you've got
to have some pretty big revenues. And the point is
that however you pitch your ambitions, you've got to manage
(21:58):
the flow of revenues and the flow of out going
in such a way that you can keep that model going.
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Speaker 1 (22:31):
And I'd like to tap back into what we were
saying about that the Grace scenario, if you'd like to
start with, because that makes perfect sense, you know, if
people are paying almost like a subscription, a monthly subscription
or whatever you know, to be part of a community
makes perfect sense. But in particular tapping into those that
are really, really poor, you know, like you said that
(22:54):
the example of Grace, I find it amazing that someone
would pay ten percent of not a lot, you know,
when they could be using or they need that money
for something else. So I just wonder how that hook works,
you know, to tap into the poorest of markets.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
If you like. I wondered about that too, But you know,
you only have to talk to her for a while,
and you only have to try to imagine the sheer
awfulness of her daily work to understand why having one
day a week in which she can put on a
clean dress, she can go into a community that respects her,
(23:30):
that treats her well, that listens to her with respect
and honor, which gives her the opportunity to be responsible
for some younger people who are even more vulnerable than
she is. I mean, that's really important. And one of
the things I say in the book that one of
the things that I think many of these platforms have understood,
(23:51):
which people, particularly coming from my background as an economist,
often have difficulty getting, is that the ability to contribute
to community is something that people value. I quote Saint
Paul are saying it's better to give them to receive. Now,
I'm not in the habit of quoting Sin Paul a
lot in my everyday life, but I can tell you
(24:11):
that that particular thing is worth meditating on because economically
minded people often think that it's a kind of injunction.
It sort of says we're all selfish, but actually it
would be better for us all if we give something
to the community. I don't think that's what that means
at all. I think what it means is we are
more truly ourselves when we give than we will passively
(24:32):
receive others. And there's a wealth of evidence from sociology
and from anthropology it's exactly like that. What is it
about being unemployed that makes people so miserable? It's not
that they can't afford the latest iPhone. It's that they
can no longer make a contribution to their families, to
their friends, they can no longer be contributors to the
collective activities they engage with their friends, and that's deeply
(24:54):
hurtful to them. So what I think a lot of
these communities do is that they underst stand that allowing
people to contribute. Sure, I mean sometimes they can't contribute
very much money, but they do contribute money. But they
also contribute time and energy and effort. And that's, you know,
depending on how you tell it, is both a very
(25:14):
empathetic response to people's psychological makeup and a very good
business model. And I guess the uncomfortable truth that I'm
putting forward in the book is that it can be
both things at the same time.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Yeah, yeah, I was just thinking, like the optimist in me,
that makes perfect sense, you know, in terms of Grace's story,
the pessimist worries in me that is there an element
of fear, you know that, So if, for example, a
particular person feels that if they didn't pay it, they
might have less opportunity to get into heaven or to
(25:46):
please God or something like that, I just wonder if
it also hinges on the fear of the unknown as well.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Potentially, absolutely, yes. Now I think the first thing to say, though,
is that, you know, when I started working, it was
quite a many, quite a long time ago. I was
looking for the answer to what is religiosity, And the
answer to that is there is no such thing as religiosity.
Religiosity is an incredibly complex, multifaceted thing. We have a
(26:16):
very diverse and varied psychology and we apply it to
our interactions with religion and lots of ways. So if
you ask what's the religiosity of a medieval crusader, it's
a completely different thing than what's the religiosity of a say,
an Indian nun. And it doesn't you know, it's not
helpful to look for the answer to what religiosity is.
(26:38):
So if that's true, then it will certainly be true
that some people in their interaction with their religious communities,
have a strong element of fear, and that I think
is both unsurprising and not intrinsically worrying. After all, you know,
we're all of us in I mean, you know, I
don't want to make a full of myself on your podcast.
(27:00):
I don't want to be ridiculed by my colleagues a
certain amount. It's not a fear that I spend a
lot of time awake at night worrying about. But you know,
I'd be not human if I didn't have some fear
about some things. And so it's not necessarily bad that
that's present in religious communities. What it does do, though,
is it creates opportunities for abuse. If somebody knowing that
(27:22):
they can work on your fear to try to manipulate
you into doing something that's not in their interest but
is in yours, then you, as a religious leader to
carry an awesome responsibility and paradoxically you have that power
with people because you've earned their trust before and again
that I want to sort of raise the uncomfortable truth
(27:43):
that abusers who exist in religious communities, as they exist
in many other communities, are not just sort of bad
people who have unaccountably got our trust for no reason.
There are often people who earned our trust by things
that they did to earn it, and who as a
result have found themselves with an ability to exploit vulnerabilities
(28:06):
and others which they then are unable to resist the
temptation to exploit.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Thank you, thank you, And that kind of links to
their third part of your book, Religion and the Uses
of Power, there's a section in there that I thought
we could explore just a little bit more if you
don't mind the great religion gender gap. As I said,
students who study beliefs look quite a lot about the
link between religion and gender. So do you mind just
telling us a little bit about that part of the book.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Sure? Well. I mean, I start with the paradox that
if you try to look at sort of global statistics
on religiosity, you get this apparent finding that women are
more religious than men on average. Again, it's not massive
the difference, but I think at the global level it's
something like the difference between seventy nine percent of men
(28:54):
globally declare that they belong to religion and four percent
of women okay, So then there's been a whole lot
of inks built over what makes women more religious than men?
And to be honest, I don't think it's a terribly
interesting question, because, first of all, what we see is that,
(29:14):
as I mentioned, religiosity is a bunch of very different things.
So if we had been conducting surveys of religiosity in
say the thirteenth or the fourteenth century, when the crusade
against the Cathars was taking place in my region of
southwest France, then you would probably have said that being
(29:36):
religious includes being willing to engage in very violent acts
against people you considered to be heretics. And surprise, surprise,
that tends to skew rather masculine as a personality trade.
I won't speculate why, but it does. And we don't
ask questions like that anymore in surveys of religiosity. We
(29:58):
ask a bad things like you know, do you how
often do you pray? And things like that, And it
turns out that those questions that tend to be asked
in surveys of religiosity about religious behavior and so on
tend to skew somewhat female, but only really for the
(30:18):
Christian world. And I think there are a number of
reasons about for that which I discuss and which go
right back to the dawn of Christianity. So one of
the things to remember is that very unusually, the Christian
religion spread in the Roman world disproportionately among slaves and
women compared two men. And among the reasons for that
(30:42):
seems to be the fact that the adult male pre
Roman was pretty much the emperor of his own household.
So he might be rather low in the pecking order
in Roman society, but he was basically the emperor of
(31:02):
everything that went on behind closed thoughts with him, and
that meant that there was essentially nothing that either law
or ethics could do to constrain him from treating his wife,
his children, his mistresses, his slaves, of both genders in
any way he wanted. And the result was I mean,
massive abuse of all kinds of physical, sexual, psychological, financial
(31:24):
abuse of the vulnerable in the Roman world. And into
this world comes this at the time of very small
cult grown up around somebody who had been who had
been martyred, and who's supporters and disciples said, we are
(31:44):
preaching a message that is universal's for everybody. And guess what,
it constrains men as well as women. It says, sure,
there are some restrictions on personal behavior, including sexual behavior,
including treatment of the week, and they constrain the men.
And that for Roman morality that was quite new, absolutely new.
Now you can ask a similar question about modern conditions.
(32:08):
So many people have said to me, you know, what
I can't really understand is why is it that, for example,
these very conservative ethics of you know, personal behavior, and
these very patriarchal notions of the family and so on,
seem to be so popular in evangelical churches, pentecostal churches
and so on in the United States and elsewhere. Why
(32:31):
is it that so many women are buying into this
very patriarchal set of values. And I don't think if
you look at the detail of it, it's that surprising.
Because although the Christian message for personal responsibility, for family
ethics and so on appears to be very much loaded
in favor of the privileges of the male, it comes
(32:54):
with a lot of talk about the duties of the male.
And you know, when you're in communities where many males
are absent dads or you know, they're not doing their
bit in the family, having somebody who's telling you, sure,
the female is subordinate, but she's subordinate to somebody who
(33:14):
has to earn her respect by, you know, contributing both money, energy, work,
and moral example to the family. You know, that's not
a message that all women are unhappy to hear. Many
of them are very pleased to hear that the ethics
(33:34):
of family responsibility work in both directions. They work for
for they constrain men as well as constraining women. Now, okay,
it's not that it's not the kind of perfectly symmetric
ideal that many secular people in the modern world would
like to hear, But compared to some of the alternatives
in some of the communities in which those religious movements
(33:57):
are popular, it's a big improvement. So I think we
need to understand what the communities do is speaking to
women and speaking to their needs, and in particular their
needs for a kind of contract between men and women
in families that very few secular institutions are providing for them.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Thank you. And it kind of links to what I
wanted to conclude with actually, because you know, Obviously, towards
the end of the book you start to think about
the future of religion and where it's going. And I
did wonder if there is kind of a movement back
towards more fundamental values, more conservative values in many parts
of the world. So where do you see it going, Paul.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Well, I talk in the book about how dangerous is
to project future, but I do say that understanding current
trends does help us a lot. And obviously one of
the reasons why religion remains very, very popular in the
world in spite of the advances of modern science doesn't
(34:59):
have anything to do with sort of people foolishly not
caring about modern science. I give an example in the
book in which I talk about how the anthropologist Raymond
first talked about the quite busy world of the gods
in the community of the Tikopian islanders in the Pacific,
(35:24):
and the idea there's a god for everything, so that
if you have a canoe and you want to repair it,
you have to get the god of the tool with
which you're going to repair the canoe to move into
the canoe. And in order to do that, the eel god,
who previously reside in the canoe has to leave. Now.
When I say that the traditional doctrine of secularization is
(35:45):
missing something important, I'm not denying that most people nowadays
would not go to somebody who can command the eel
God when they want to repair a piece of transport equipment.
I mean you go to an engineer or to a mechanic.
And in that sense, there's absolutely no question about the
fact that a scientific and in some ways mechanical view
(36:06):
of the world and of causality has displaced the view
of the world that was much more common in which
kind of everything happened because there was some God that
was making it happen. So nobody's disputing securization in that way.
What's mistaken, I think, is to conclude from that that
religions on the back foot and it has nothing better
to offer. And instead, what is happening is what you
(36:27):
alluded to in your question, I think, which is that
religions are offering a bundle of important services that people want,
and they want them in a package that helped them
to make sense of this bewildering mix of activities which
is the modern world. I mean, you know, in a
big city, you have to you have to find work,
(36:49):
you have to find a place to live, You have
somehow or other to if you have children, you have
to bring up your children. You have to protect them
from the risk. And you know, in the monologue, can
figure you're doing all of the stuff by a you're
having to reinvent the entire week of modern life over
and over again. And you do this, and your kids
invented over and over again. And the great appeal with
(37:10):
many of these religious movements is that they come with
the kind of package deal that says, Okay, we care
about the education of your kids, we care about your
ability to make music, we care about your sickness, we
care about your ability to engage in fund activities together
(37:30):
as a family at a weekend. And we also offer
you a narrative that tells you how this all fits together,
including you know, why is there so much suffering in
the world? Why does so many things go badly even
though we desperately and sincerely and honestly pray for them
to come right now? Some people are more convinced by
(37:51):
those narratives than others are. And I make no secret
with the fact early in the book that by and
large I'm not convinced by them. But the point is
somebody is making them many of the institutions of the
secular institutions the modern world and not even trying to
make them.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Yeah, it's kind of that you mentioned in about Pascal's wager,
don't you if you're hovering in your agnostic does it
make sense to be slightly more on the side of believing.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Than not now exact as I point out in the book,
you don't have one belief option. You have many belief doctrines,
and Pascal's wager is actually no help there. Encourage your
readers who are interested in belief to go to that
chatter on belief. But I think what's really important is
that most people don't join religious movements because they've become
(38:34):
convinced in advance of the truth of the religion's doctrines.
They become convinced of the truth of the religion's doctrines
typically after they've joined. It's a process, and I talk
about why that is and why that makes sense in
terms of what we know about human psychology, and for
some people believe in terms of the truth of the
doctrines is really really important. But for a lot of
people we have to accept it's not very important. And
(38:56):
what I think has been the strength, the economic strength
religious movements is that they can unite around a common project,
people who have amazingly sophisticated beliefs and people who have
really very few, and they can still feel they're part
of a project together.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Thank you, Thank you, Paul. At that point, I thought
this might be a good opportunity for you to say
a little bit more. You just mentioned if students want
to find out more about the book, do you want
to give us some details or how they could get
in contact with you as well?
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Well? I mean they can they can google me so
or I have a website which is policy right dot com.
The book itself is available through most of the outlets.
I don't think I'm allowed to.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
I would not wish to know which ones yet know
which outlets, and I'm very very happy to take comments
and discussions from anybody.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
You'll find out how to get on get in contact
with me from my personal web page, and I welcome
discussions from anybody, including people who dislike the book as
well as people who like it. As I said before,
I'd want to emphasize that it's not a book either
that defends or attacks religion. I'm just not into that game. Okay.
(40:10):
There are many books that are angrily attacking religion or
angrily defending it against the tacks. That's not what this
book is about. This book is about trying to understand
how it functions. And I believe there's a common language
that we can all use, whether we're Christians or Atheists
or Muslims or Buddhists or whoever. Sometimes people say to me, well,
(40:30):
I don't understand how you who's not a Christian could
possibly understand what religion is for me as a Christian,
And I understand where they're coming from. But it's also
true that by that logic, if you're a Christian, say
you're a Catholic, you would say, well, I can't understand
why I Protestant want understand my belief and so if
a Protestant can't understand them, I would say, well, maybe
(40:51):
the wrong kind of Catholic couldn't understand them. And so
once you start thinking that somebody who doesn't share your
particular beliefs can't understand you, then you're going down a
rabbit hole in which, in a sense, nobody can understand
you because your beliefs turn out to be very, very
particular to you. I want to tell a story about
religion in which we can all share some basic elements
of what is it that religious movements do, whatever set
(41:13):
of particular theological beliefs we may attached to that process.
Thank you, Paul.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
That sounds like a lovely way to wrap up the interviews.
I want to thank you for your time. I really
do appreciate it, and thank you for answering the question
so eloquently for me as well.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Thank you for inviting me to speak to your community
of listeners. And as I say, I really enjoy getting
feedback from listeners, and so i'd encourage anybody who wants
to do that to write to me. Sometimes I don't
reply instantly, so be patient, but I'd love to hear
from any of you who have any thoughts or questions
or comments to make perfect.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Thanks again, Paul, Thank you, thank you, thank you for
taking the time to listen to the podcast. If you
would like to contact the show or be interviewed, then
please email The Sociology Show Podcast at gmail dot com.
Hi, You're listening to The Sociology Show, a podcast about
absolutely anything to do with the wonderful world of sociology.
Whether you're a teacher, a lecturer, a student, or just
taking a passing interest. This podcast will look at a
range of issues from social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, crime, education,
(00:25):
and anything else that sociology has to offer. My name
is Matthew Wilkin. In each episode, I will speak to
someone working in the field of sociology and let them
explain all about their own interests, their research, and their experiences.
So put your ear phones in, turn the volume up,
and let's be sociology geeks together. Ah Hello, and welcome
(00:49):
to the Sociology Show podcast, where my guest for this
episode is Professor Paul Sebright's talking about his book The
Define Economy. Before we get onto that, though, just a
couple of messages from me first. You can now book
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(01:12):
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(01:33):
if you are a student yourself about to start sociology
A level or GCSE, or perhaps you are a school
or college and you've got some new students coming through
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(01:56):
book your slot on the calendar website that is I'll
give you that address again, that's Calondle dot com forward
slash Sociology Show Tutoring. Thank you very much for listening
to the messages. Without further ado, let's go over to
the interview with Professor Paul Sebright. Hello, and welcome to
the Sociology Show Podcast. Would you like to start by
(02:18):
telling us a little bit about who you are and
what you do.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Please, well, thank you for this invitation. It's great to
be here. So my name is Paul Seabright. I teach
economics at the Tulu School of Economics in to Lose Crants,
and I'm a member of the Institute for Advanced Study
in Toluse, which is an interdisciplinary research center. So I
actually spend a lot of my time hanging out with
people who are not economists like me. These are people
(02:44):
who will be sociologists, anthropologists, historians, lawyers, psychologists, and so
I'm very very comfortable in this interdisciplinary environment. And what
I study mainly is what you might think of was
at the intersection between behavioral economics and thes and institutions,
or in a simple way, it's where our prehistoric brain
(03:05):
meets the modern world.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Thank you very much, Thank you, And we're going to
talk about your book, which I've got here. I've read
the full title for everyone, The Divine Economy, How Religions
Compete for wealth, power and people. And the first thing
I wanted to ask you for is actually the first bit,
the first story, the story of Grace, I think sets
(03:26):
up the book for where it's going to go in
its direction. So I wondered if you could outline the
story of Grace to start with, because I think that
really sets up the narrative nicely.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Well, thank you. I mean, Grace was a woman who
made a lot of impression on me. I met her
when I was in Ghana with my team of researchers
doing playing economic games with a large number of people
who were all members of a Pentecostal church in Ghana.
And we played these games not in the church because
(03:58):
we didn't want that to bias there, he answers. We
chose a neutral setting in a secular university building, and
Grace was one of the people who came to our experiments.
And after the experiments there was also a detailed questionnaire
and debriefing and I did that with her, and she
was about twenty four years old, and I looking at her,
(04:20):
she was sort of simply but well dressed and spoke
carefully and thoughtfully, and looking at her, I thought I
could pretty much site her up. I thought she was
probably somebody with a reasonable at least high school education,
and that she probably worked as a blurk in a
government office or maybe a small business somewhere. But I
(04:41):
could not have been more six days a week, twelve
hours a day. She walks up and down between the
lines of cars coming in on one of the main
freeways into Akra, and they block up at the traffic lights,
and she goes up and down trying to sell them
ice water in little plastic sashes basket above her head.
And you just have to imagine what it's like doing that,
(05:03):
inhaling the exhaust fumes, being insulted and abused by the
people in the cars. And she does that twelve hours
a day. She goes home to this tiny little shack
that she's built with her aunt in a slum area.
But on Sundays she goes to church and she can
dress recentably well. She's an usher, so she shows people
to her seat and is quite visible to them. She
(05:27):
sings in the choir. She's a helper in a Sunday school.
And we worked out that she gives about one about
twelve percent of her income to the church. And when
I say to the church, I mean you have to
see what the church has. But important who it is.
I mean the boss of her church, who is the
beneficiary of a large amount of this income, is a
(05:49):
very charming man. I call him Astor William in the book,
and he wears a very fine suit, he drives the
fast mercedes. He's very happy that everybody should know that
he's rich. In fact, he has a buckle around his
belt with a dollar sign on it. And he doesn't
need her money, but she gives it to him, and
she gives it to him not only willingly, but I
(06:11):
would say lucidly. We had a long discussion of her finances,
and she can give you a better and more lucid
account of her finances and of mine. And she knows
perfectly well that she gives money to him, she can't
pay for health care for her aunt and so on,
and so a part of the book is based around
this question of why is she doing this? And the
answer you can't give is she's not stupid, she's not deceived.
(06:34):
She's not in an ordinary sense exploited. I mean, you
might have a complicated theory of how she's exploited, but
she's not a victim. On the contrary, she is a
real victim six days a week and her awful job,
but one day a week, she doesn't sound like a victim.
She doesn't talk like a victim. She doesn't walk like
a victim, and I wanted to tell her story in
(06:54):
a way that didn't just make her out to be
a victim.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah, as soon as I read that, my initial thought was,
I don't know if you can put any numbers on this,
But you know, if the eight billion people on Earth,
the vast majority are religious in some form, a large
number of those pay around ten percent of their salary
towards religions. I mean, could we even put an estimate
on what percentage of the world is paying some form
(07:19):
of money into their faith.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Well of the world as a whole. That would be hard.
But I did report in the book that a conservative
estimate of the financial revenues of faith based organizations in
the United States amounts to about two percent of personal income,
and I gave reasons for thinking that it's rather similar
(07:42):
in a number of countries where Pentecostal Christianity is a
very powerful force, like many countries in Africa and a
number of in Asia and Latin America. Now, to give
it some perspective, two percent of personal income in the
United States is about sixty percent of the income of
all of the media and public publishing industries. So you know,
(08:08):
video games, recorded music, movies, books, the lot sixty percent
of that, and it's about half of the income of
all the restaurant industry in the United States. So this
is quite big money. Now, there are not many countries
I would say with the total revenues are higher than that,
but there are quite a lot of countries where they're equivalent.
(08:30):
And that's a lot of money. That's enough to buy
quite a lot of very rich pastors some choice real
estate in the finest areas of the cities in which
they live. So that doesn't even include all of the
contributions in time and energy and in kind. So, whether
you like them, whether you don't, religious movements are economically
(08:54):
very powerful, and they're worth studying if only for that
reason alone. But of course in the book, I always
also talk about their power, about the good things they
do with their power and some of the bad things
they do with their power. And I think we are
all better off if we can understand where that power
comes from and how it's exercised.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Thank you. I could be completely out of touch here
as well, But is it still true that religion major
religions don't have to pay taxes.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
They are at charity.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
So is that still true?
Speaker 2 (09:23):
It varies from country to country. In the United States
in particular, on which I concentrate in the book, they
not only pay no taxes, as is the case in
the vast majority of countries in the world, but they
also don't have to publish any account or indeed to
give any account to anybody about what they do. So
(09:46):
you or I could set up a church together in
the United States. I mean, I don't know. If you
ever get bored making podcasts and I get bored of
what I do, maybe we can go into this together.
But we can literally open a storefront in a street
in the United States and we ask people to give
us money. And unlike in almost all other circumstances where
if we get money from the public, we have to
(10:08):
declare ourselves to be a business or a charity and
explain why we don't have to pay personal income tax
on that. You or I could do that. We would
have to pay no tax on it at all, unless
the IRS decides to investigate us, which they might of course,
if they've listened to the podcast and they know that
this is a scam and so on. But you know,
the IRS has a lot on its plate, and it's
not normally going to investigate it if we put a
(10:29):
little sign outside saying whether such and such church of
such and such and so that's a very unusual thing,
because most charities are exempt from paying tax. Again, I'm
talking about the US, provided that they publish accounts and
they you know, they in some sense declare themselves as
charities and are conformed to the rules on charities. Now
(10:52):
in other countries it's not always the same, but there
are even countries I think nine of them in Europe
where not only do they pay no tax, but the
government collects taxes on their behalf. So for example, if
you're a citizen of Germany, you have a space on
your tax return in which you can choose to pay
a proportion of your taxes to one of the designated churches.
(11:13):
And in Iceland, which is ahead of the curve on
many things, they actually have the same thing, that you
can raise money for the churches. But of course it's
not just the traditional churches that are eligible. So there
is a church in Iceland whose name I've forgotten, but
which is a church that is open only to atheists
who disapprove of paying taxes, and so they have exploited
(11:35):
this particular feature of the tax code in Iceland, but
in the other eight countries in Europe you have to
be in some sense of registered established church to do that.
And so the church not only is making being obliged
to pay taxes to the government, but the government is
actually raising taxes on behalf of the church.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Interesting. You just really got me scratching my head then,
thinking you can atheists form a religion? I digress, I digress.
Does that mean then if you said there's no obligation
to declare that, we don't actually have any idea how
much money is in, for example, the Catholic Church, or
scientology or whatever it may be. We have no understanding
(12:15):
at all what the wealth is there.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Well, I mean a number of very professional and dedicated
researchers and journalists have tried to find this out, and
I think the economists published an estimate of the incomes
of the Catholic Church in the United States. I've forgotten
what it was. It's obviously some subset of that two
percent of personal income number I gave you. But they're
(12:38):
very difficult. I mean, there's the important point to bear
in mind is that if you study organized religion. There's
no central place you can go to get statistics in
the same way that you can go to, you know,
the official statistical agencies of each country to get statistics
on incorporated businesses, because it's part of the deal if
(12:58):
you're an incorporated business that you say, well, okay, in
order for the people who founded the business not to
have to take personal incometacts on every dollar of revenue
that they get, they which of course is great for
them if they don't have to pay income tax on that,
but they then have an obligation to follow certain rules,
and notably, these rules involve an important degree of transparency
(13:21):
about what they're earning. And you know, we all know
corporate accounting scandals and so on. They're a big deal.
But the point is the fact that there are corporate
accounting scandals show that there are rules that corporations have
to obey, whereas in the United States there essentially are
no rules that churches have to obey, providing they are
(13:42):
properly considered churches. And from time to time the IRS
does a swoop, but usually because they've had a tip off.
Without a tip off, it's very rare that they do swoops.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Thank you, Thank you. And the next part of the
book that I wanted to pick up on was for
students listening who are studying sociology. You know, a big,
a big part of the belief topic is this idea
of secularization, that secularization is occurring and it's sweeping across
not just the US and the UK, but other parts
of the world, and your research is just something quite different,
(14:13):
that we are not experiencing a worldwide secularization process at all,
that actually religion is alive, and well, is that is
that a fair point to make?
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Well, let me first of all say that secularization has
lots of different meanings. It's used in many different ways.
And I think that if you look at some of
the very early writers on secularization, people like Max Weber
and Emial Dirkheim, they were talking about the way in
which the arrival of modernity, which they described in various
different ways, would change the nature of religion, and it
(14:46):
might be seen as putting religion on the back foot,
But I think neither Dirkheim or wepor I ever really
thought that religion would be incapable of responding now over time,
the secularization hypothesis has become trans and there are lots
of very fine sociologists writing about it who don't do this,
but there are some who have transformed it into the
(15:07):
doctrine that religion was going to disappear in other ways.
It's not just that religions under pressure from all sorts
of things, including modern science, urbanization, and so forth, but
also that religion was incapable of responding and would therefore
wither away. Now my target in the book is the
people who think that it's just not true that religion
(15:29):
is withering in the way. It is declining in importance
in a number of parts of the world, which North
America is probably the most important example, and I discussed
in the books some reasons why, and parts of Western Europe,
but across the world as a whole, those regions are
outliers in the rest of the world. In large parts
of it, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, many parts of Latin America,
(15:54):
religion is thriving. The story is different. I mean, there
are parts of Latin America where it's declining. Chile is
a good example. There are many parts of Europe where
it's declining. I discussed the cases of Ireland and Spain
in a number of respects. But if you take the
world as a whole, essentially there's some upsets and downs,
(16:15):
but religion is not dying out, and I think that
we should assume that it's here to stay. But that
doesn't mean that it's unchanging. On the contrary, it's adapting.
It's adapting to those challenges in the modern world. And
what the book is about is how it's adapting and
precisely why, in the face of some challenges that some
people have thought would be fatal to religion, it's actually
(16:35):
able to reform, reshape and speak to the needs that many,
many people, billions of people in back across the world have,
which the other institutions of modern secular society are not
very good at meeting.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Yeah, and I suppose that kind of brings on to
the next question that was going to ask about part
two of your book is how do religions gain their power?
So I wondered if you'd woudn't mind saying a little
bit more about that, because it's interesting, you know, going
back to what you said about about Grace, she wasn't
being duped, you know, this was her giving her money
(17:10):
over through her own free will. So I wonder what
other examples you had of how religions gain their power
in that section that you write.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Okay, well, I mean there are lots. I draw lots
of cases. I draw them from India, I draw them
from Cameroon, in West Africa, I draw them from China.
I draw them from well, many many different places, and
also many historical examples as well. And so the central
organizing idea in the book is that we can understand
why religions have become powerful if we understand them as platforms. Now,
(17:40):
what are platforms. We're used to thinking of platforms as
these digital entities like Facebook and Google and so on,
and they are platforms. But what's interesting is that what
makes them platforms is nothing to do with being digital,
or being modern or even being huge. What a platform
is is an organization that brings people together to make
(18:02):
a community. Okay. Now, that's obviously what Facebook does, and
it's obviously what Google does, and it's obviously what you know,
many many digital platforms do. But the type of community varies,
and you don't have to have digital technology to do it.
So if you think of you know, in prehistoric times,
there were matchmakers in villages and towns that would bring
(18:25):
people together to make marriages. There were interpreters who help
people who spoke different languages to join together. There were
marketplaces which brought together sellers and buyers. All of these
are platforms. And what religions do is essentially they create communities,
and sometimes they're very transient, short term communities. So you
(18:46):
might have just a religious movement which is a shrine
by the side of the road, and for a while
it brings together people who maybe are united in their
reverence for the origin of the shrine. But sometimes it's
just a huge movement around the world, like the Catholic Church.
(19:06):
And sometimes it's intermediate. So you can have movements within
the Catholic Church, like the Jesuits, or you can have
movements within Protestantism, like say the Assemblies of God, which
was the Pentecostal movement, which is a kind of brand
of an American Pentecostal Church which has since spread out
(19:28):
across the world, and which creates communities. And the point
is that those because creating communities allows people to come
together in ways that they wouldn't have been able to
do so otherwise, that creates benefits, and the basic business
model of those platforms is that they appropriate a share
of the benefits that those relationships create.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Thank you. And it's really interesting that the language you
say that the business model. You know, do you think
many religions do see themselves as a business, You know
that in the same way that you'd have a business meeting,
business plan, looking at income, outgoings and selling it. If
you think they see themselves as a business in that respect.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Absolutely, And it's important to make it clear that I'm
not saying that people who found or peo, people who
run religious movements are necessarily motivated by profit or the
desire for money. I mean some are, let's be frank
about it. Some are absolutely motivated by the wish to
earn money. Pastor William and akra A is one such person.
(20:28):
He absolutely gloried there. But many, many people who run
religious movements are not motivated by that. They're motivated by
something else. They may be motivated by the genuine desire
to do good for the downtron or they may be
motivated by the desire to show off and be admired
in a community of people who all think that they
represent the word of God, or they may be motivated
(20:50):
because they have a hyperactive libido and they can indulge
it in these movements and their people who do the
way is I'm neutral about why they do it. There
are all sorts of motives. Important point that they all
share is that they have to command enough resources to
keep the show on the road, otherwise that movement will disappear.
And you know, sometimes if you have very modest movement,
(21:11):
if all you want to do is to tender road
to side shrine, then you know, your costs aren't very high,
but your revenues aren't going to be very high either.
You maybe can persuade a few people to light a
candle at the shrine, and you don't need much revenue
to cover your costs. If, on the other hand, you
want to have a very big, modern church with a
(21:34):
whole team of pastors and the latest and audio visual technology,
and you know, visiting musicians from across the world and
a private jet and all of the things that some
religious movements leaders have wanted to do, then you've got
to have some pretty big revenues. And the point is
that however you pitch your ambitions, you've got to manage
(21:58):
the flow of revenues and the flow of out going
in such a way that you can keep that model going.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
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Speaker 1 (22:31):
And I'd like to tap back into what we were
saying about that the Grace scenario, if you'd like to
start with, because that makes perfect sense, you know, if
people are paying almost like a subscription, a monthly subscription
or whatever you know, to be part of a community
makes perfect sense. But in particular tapping into those that
are really, really poor, you know, like you said that
(22:54):
the example of Grace, I find it amazing that someone
would pay ten percent of not a lot, you know,
when they could be using or they need that money
for something else. So I just wonder how that hook works,
you know, to tap into the poorest of markets.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
If you like. I wondered about that too, But you know,
you only have to talk to her for a while,
and you only have to try to imagine the sheer
awfulness of her daily work to understand why having one
day a week in which she can put on a
clean dress, she can go into a community that respects her,
(23:30):
that treats her well, that listens to her with respect
and honor, which gives her the opportunity to be responsible
for some younger people who are even more vulnerable than
she is. I mean, that's really important. And one of
the things I say in the book that one of
the things that I think many of these platforms have understood,
(23:51):
which people, particularly coming from my background as an economist,
often have difficulty getting, is that the ability to contribute
to community is something that people value. I quote Saint
Paul are saying it's better to give them to receive. Now,
I'm not in the habit of quoting Sin Paul a
lot in my everyday life, but I can tell you
(24:11):
that that particular thing is worth meditating on because economically
minded people often think that it's a kind of injunction.
It sort of says we're all selfish, but actually it
would be better for us all if we give something
to the community. I don't think that's what that means
at all. I think what it means is we are
more truly ourselves when we give than we will passively
(24:32):
receive others. And there's a wealth of evidence from sociology
and from anthropology it's exactly like that. What is it
about being unemployed that makes people so miserable? It's not
that they can't afford the latest iPhone. It's that they
can no longer make a contribution to their families, to
their friends, they can no longer be contributors to the
collective activities they engage with their friends, and that's deeply
(24:54):
hurtful to them. So what I think a lot of
these communities do is that they underst stand that allowing
people to contribute. Sure, I mean sometimes they can't contribute
very much money, but they do contribute money. But they
also contribute time and energy and effort. And that's, you know,
depending on how you tell it, is both a very
(25:14):
empathetic response to people's psychological makeup and a very good
business model. And I guess the uncomfortable truth that I'm
putting forward in the book is that it can be
both things at the same time.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Yeah, yeah, I was just thinking, like the optimist in me,
that makes perfect sense, you know, in terms of Grace's story,
the pessimist worries in me that is there an element
of fear, you know that, So if, for example, a
particular person feels that if they didn't pay it, they
might have less opportunity to get into heaven or to
(25:46):
please God or something like that, I just wonder if
it also hinges on the fear of the unknown as well.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Potentially, absolutely, yes. Now I think the first thing to say, though,
is that, you know, when I started working, it was
quite a many, quite a long time ago. I was
looking for the answer to what is religiosity, And the
answer to that is there is no such thing as religiosity.
Religiosity is an incredibly complex, multifaceted thing. We have a
(26:16):
very diverse and varied psychology and we apply it to
our interactions with religion and lots of ways. So if
you ask what's the religiosity of a medieval crusader, it's
a completely different thing than what's the religiosity of a say,
an Indian nun. And it doesn't you know, it's not
helpful to look for the answer to what religiosity is.
(26:38):
So if that's true, then it will certainly be true
that some people in their interaction with their religious communities,
have a strong element of fear, and that I think
is both unsurprising and not intrinsically worrying. After all, you know,
we're all of us in I mean, you know, I
don't want to make a full of myself on your podcast.
(27:00):
I don't want to be ridiculed by my colleagues a
certain amount. It's not a fear that I spend a
lot of time awake at night worrying about. But you know,
I'd be not human if I didn't have some fear
about some things. And so it's not necessarily bad that
that's present in religious communities. What it does do, though,
is it creates opportunities for abuse. If somebody knowing that
(27:22):
they can work on your fear to try to manipulate
you into doing something that's not in their interest but
is in yours, then you, as a religious leader to
carry an awesome responsibility and paradoxically you have that power
with people because you've earned their trust before and again
that I want to sort of raise the uncomfortable truth
(27:43):
that abusers who exist in religious communities, as they exist
in many other communities, are not just sort of bad
people who have unaccountably got our trust for no reason.
There are often people who earned our trust by things
that they did to earn it, and who as a
result have found themselves with an ability to exploit vulnerabilities
(28:06):
and others which they then are unable to resist the
temptation to exploit.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
Thank you, thank you, And that kind of links to
their third part of your book, Religion and the Uses
of Power, there's a section in there that I thought
we could explore just a little bit more if you
don't mind the great religion gender gap. As I said,
students who study beliefs look quite a lot about the
link between religion and gender. So do you mind just
telling us a little bit about that part of the book.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Sure? Well. I mean, I start with the paradox that
if you try to look at sort of global statistics
on religiosity, you get this apparent finding that women are
more religious than men on average. Again, it's not massive
the difference, but I think at the global level it's
something like the difference between seventy nine percent of men
(28:54):
globally declare that they belong to religion and four percent
of women okay, So then there's been a whole lot
of inks built over what makes women more religious than men?
And to be honest, I don't think it's a terribly
interesting question, because, first of all, what we see is that,
(29:14):
as I mentioned, religiosity is a bunch of very different things.
So if we had been conducting surveys of religiosity in
say the thirteenth or the fourteenth century, when the crusade
against the Cathars was taking place in my region of
southwest France, then you would probably have said that being
(29:36):
religious includes being willing to engage in very violent acts
against people you considered to be heretics. And surprise, surprise,
that tends to skew rather masculine as a personality trade.
I won't speculate why, but it does. And we don't
ask questions like that anymore in surveys of religiosity. We
(29:58):
ask a bad things like you know, do you how
often do you pray? And things like that, And it
turns out that those questions that tend to be asked
in surveys of religiosity about religious behavior and so on
tend to skew somewhat female, but only really for the
(30:18):
Christian world. And I think there are a number of
reasons about for that which I discuss and which go
right back to the dawn of Christianity. So one of
the things to remember is that very unusually, the Christian
religion spread in the Roman world disproportionately among slaves and
women compared two men. And among the reasons for that
(30:42):
seems to be the fact that the adult male pre
Roman was pretty much the emperor of his own household.
So he might be rather low in the pecking order
in Roman society, but he was basically the emperor of
(31:02):
everything that went on behind closed thoughts with him, and
that meant that there was essentially nothing that either law
or ethics could do to constrain him from treating his wife,
his children, his mistresses, his slaves, of both genders in
any way he wanted. And the result was I mean,
massive abuse of all kinds of physical, sexual, psychological, financial
(31:24):
abuse of the vulnerable in the Roman world. And into
this world comes this at the time of very small
cult grown up around somebody who had been who had
been martyred, and who's supporters and disciples said, we are
(31:44):
preaching a message that is universal's for everybody. And guess what,
it constrains men as well as women. It says, sure,
there are some restrictions on personal behavior, including sexual behavior,
including treatment of the week, and they constrain the men.
And that for Roman morality that was quite new, absolutely new.
Now you can ask a similar question about modern conditions.
(32:08):
So many people have said to me, you know, what
I can't really understand is why is it that, for example,
these very conservative ethics of you know, personal behavior, and
these very patriarchal notions of the family and so on,
seem to be so popular in evangelical churches, pentecostal churches
and so on in the United States and elsewhere. Why
(32:31):
is it that so many women are buying into this
very patriarchal set of values. And I don't think if
you look at the detail of it, it's that surprising.
Because although the Christian message for personal responsibility, for family
ethics and so on appears to be very much loaded
in favor of the privileges of the male, it comes
(32:54):
with a lot of talk about the duties of the male.
And you know, when you're in communities where many males
are absent dads or you know, they're not doing their
bit in the family, having somebody who's telling you, sure,
the female is subordinate, but she's subordinate to somebody who
(33:14):
has to earn her respect by, you know, contributing both money, energy, work,
and moral example to the family. You know, that's not
a message that all women are unhappy to hear. Many
of them are very pleased to hear that the ethics
(33:34):
of family responsibility work in both directions. They work for
for they constrain men as well as constraining women. Now, okay,
it's not that it's not the kind of perfectly symmetric
ideal that many secular people in the modern world would
like to hear, But compared to some of the alternatives
in some of the communities in which those religious movements
(33:57):
are popular, it's a big improvement. So I think we
need to understand what the communities do is speaking to
women and speaking to their needs, and in particular their
needs for a kind of contract between men and women
in families that very few secular institutions are providing for them.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Thank you. And it kind of links to what I
wanted to conclude with actually, because you know, Obviously, towards
the end of the book you start to think about
the future of religion and where it's going. And I
did wonder if there is kind of a movement back
towards more fundamental values, more conservative values in many parts
of the world. So where do you see it going, Paul.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Well, I talk in the book about how dangerous is
to project future, but I do say that understanding current
trends does help us a lot. And obviously one of
the reasons why religion remains very, very popular in the
world in spite of the advances of modern science doesn't
(34:59):
have anything to do with sort of people foolishly not
caring about modern science. I give an example in the
book in which I talk about how the anthropologist Raymond
first talked about the quite busy world of the gods
in the community of the Tikopian islanders in the Pacific,
(35:24):
and the idea there's a god for everything, so that
if you have a canoe and you want to repair it,
you have to get the god of the tool with
which you're going to repair the canoe to move into
the canoe. And in order to do that, the eel god,
who previously reside in the canoe has to leave. Now.
When I say that the traditional doctrine of secularization is
(35:45):
missing something important, I'm not denying that most people nowadays
would not go to somebody who can command the eel
God when they want to repair a piece of transport equipment.
I mean you go to an engineer or to a mechanic.
And in that sense, there's absolutely no question about the
fact that a scientific and in some ways mechanical view
(36:06):
of the world and of causality has displaced the view
of the world that was much more common in which
kind of everything happened because there was some God that
was making it happen. So nobody's disputing securization in that way.
What's mistaken, I think, is to conclude from that that
religions on the back foot and it has nothing better
to offer. And instead, what is happening is what you
(36:27):
alluded to in your question, I think, which is that
religions are offering a bundle of important services that people want,
and they want them in a package that helped them
to make sense of this bewildering mix of activities which
is the modern world. I mean, you know, in a
big city, you have to you have to find work,
(36:49):
you have to find a place to live, You have
somehow or other to if you have children, you have
to bring up your children. You have to protect them
from the risk. And you know, in the monologue, can
figure you're doing all of the stuff by a you're
having to reinvent the entire week of modern life over
and over again. And you do this, and your kids
invented over and over again. And the great appeal with
(37:10):
many of these religious movements is that they come with
the kind of package deal that says, Okay, we care
about the education of your kids, we care about your
ability to make music, we care about your sickness, we
care about your ability to engage in fund activities together
(37:30):
as a family at a weekend. And we also offer
you a narrative that tells you how this all fits together,
including you know, why is there so much suffering in
the world? Why does so many things go badly even
though we desperately and sincerely and honestly pray for them
to come right now? Some people are more convinced by
(37:51):
those narratives than others are. And I make no secret
with the fact early in the book that by and
large I'm not convinced by them. But the point is
somebody is making them many of the institutions of the
secular institutions the modern world and not even trying to
make them.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Yeah, it's kind of that you mentioned in about Pascal's wager,
don't you if you're hovering in your agnostic does it
make sense to be slightly more on the side of believing.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Than not now exact as I point out in the book,
you don't have one belief option. You have many belief doctrines,
and Pascal's wager is actually no help there. Encourage your
readers who are interested in belief to go to that
chatter on belief. But I think what's really important is
that most people don't join religious movements because they've become
(38:34):
convinced in advance of the truth of the religion's doctrines.
They become convinced of the truth of the religion's doctrines
typically after they've joined. It's a process, and I talk
about why that is and why that makes sense in
terms of what we know about human psychology, and for
some people believe in terms of the truth of the
doctrines is really really important. But for a lot of
people we have to accept it's not very important. And
(38:56):
what I think has been the strength, the economic strength
religious movements is that they can unite around a common project,
people who have amazingly sophisticated beliefs and people who have
really very few, and they can still feel they're part
of a project together.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Thank you, Thank you, Paul. At that point, I thought
this might be a good opportunity for you to say
a little bit more. You just mentioned if students want
to find out more about the book, do you want
to give us some details or how they could get
in contact with you as well?
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Well? I mean they can they can google me so
or I have a website which is policy right dot com.
The book itself is available through most of the outlets.
I don't think I'm allowed to.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
I would not wish to know which ones yet know
which outlets, and I'm very very happy to take comments
and discussions from anybody.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
You'll find out how to get on get in contact
with me from my personal web page, and I welcome
discussions from anybody, including people who dislike the book as
well as people who like it. As I said before,
I'd want to emphasize that it's not a book either
that defends or attacks religion. I'm just not into that game. Okay.
(40:10):
There are many books that are angrily attacking religion or
angrily defending it against the tacks. That's not what this
book is about. This book is about trying to understand
how it functions. And I believe there's a common language
that we can all use, whether we're Christians or Atheists
or Muslims or Buddhists or whoever. Sometimes people say to me, well,
(40:30):
I don't understand how you who's not a Christian could
possibly understand what religion is for me as a Christian,
And I understand where they're coming from. But it's also
true that by that logic, if you're a Christian, say
you're a Catholic, you would say, well, I can't understand
why I Protestant want understand my belief and so if
a Protestant can't understand them, I would say, well, maybe
(40:51):
the wrong kind of Catholic couldn't understand them. And so
once you start thinking that somebody who doesn't share your
particular beliefs can't understand you, then you're going down a
rabbit hole in which, in a sense, nobody can understand
you because your beliefs turn out to be very, very
particular to you. I want to tell a story about
religion in which we can all share some basic elements
of what is it that religious movements do, whatever set
(41:13):
of particular theological beliefs we may attached to that process.
Thank you, Paul.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
That sounds like a lovely way to wrap up the interviews.
I want to thank you for your time. I really
do appreciate it, and thank you for answering the question
so eloquently for me as well.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Thank you for inviting me to speak to your community
of listeners. And as I say, I really enjoy getting
feedback from listeners, and so i'd encourage anybody who wants
to do that to write to me. Sometimes I don't
reply instantly, so be patient, but I'd love to hear
from any of you who have any thoughts or questions
or comments to make perfect.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Thanks again, Paul, Thank you, thank you, thank you for
taking the time to listen to the podcast. If you
would like to contact the show or be interviewed, then
please email The Sociology Show Podcast at gmail dot com.
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