On the surface, Facebook is about as far removed from the Catholic Church as physically possible. But, perhaps by thinking of religions like platform businesses, we can get to the heart of how religions work, why they do what they do, and that the adage ‘if the product is free, you’re the product’ is just as applicable to religions as it is to YouTube. Paul Seabright argues that thinking of religions like an economist can discover valuable new insights into The Divine Economy.
Religion seems like an odd subject for the economist. After all, religion deals with gods and demons, the passage of the mortal soul and the moral laws that construct our reality. But why is any one religion the way it is? Why do they have rituals? And how do they inspire loyalty? One way to approach these questions is to investigate how religions respond to the social and material environment they share with other institutions.
When I began studying religion as a social scientist one of my motivations was to understand what kind of psychological phenomenon religiosity might be. I once envisaged studying religion from the inside out, beginning with religiosity and concluding with the different institutions that allow it to be expressed, thereby answering questions like “Why would religiosity lead one to do this or believe that?" Now I find it more instructive to begin from the outside, documenting the richness of religious institutions and then zooming in to understand the many ways in which they solicit the psychology of those who take part in them.
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An advantage of being an economist is that one needn’t be ideologically inclined to see businesses as boring, soul-destroying, or run by people who are only interested in profit
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