How Religions Compete for Money, Power, and People
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 October 2024
⏱️ 96 minutes
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Summary
Ask a question and participate in future episodes of the show.
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.
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 is what has allowed religions to consolidate and wield power, which can be used for good and for harm.
Paul Seabright is a Professor of Economics in the Industrial Economics Institute and Toulouse School of Economics at the University of Toulouse, France. His new book is The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. The Michael Sherber Show Hey everybody. We're adding a special new feature to the |
| 0:28.0 | podcast where you get to participate by asking a question of my guest. So here's what you're going to do. |
| 0:35.1 | Click on the link below and there you'll find a schedule of my upcoming podcast guests |
| 0:40.3 | and you can see who's coming up, what the topics topics are and if you'd like to ask a question |
| 0:45.0 | just fill it out fill out the forum there send that to us and I will read the question |
| 0:49.4 | and your name on air and ask the question of our guests and we'll see what they come up with. |
| 0:55.2 | So check it out, click on the link in the show notes. |
| 0:57.7 | All right, I've had on the show a bunch of episodes on religion. |
| 1:04.0 | Not just, you know, atheism and theism and theology and all that stuff, but really |
| 1:09.0 | more interest to me is why people believe religions what is the origin of religion |
| 1:14.6 | what's the sociology anthropology social psychology religion and so on and that's |
| 1:19.5 | really what you do you're not judgmental on you know religions in particular just what's the |
| 1:25.1 | explanation and I really like that's data-driven theory driven so maybe we'll just |
| 1:30.2 | start there what do you mean by religion? Okay so in the reviews of the book people are |
| 1:37.3 | sometimes a little bit puzzled because I say two things about religion and they're not |
| 1:42.0 | sure which of these things is necessary which is |
| 1:45.1 | sufficient how they relate to each other. So let me clarify what the two things are. |
| 1:49.2 | What I define religion is as all of those activities that turn around the |
| 1:57.5 | perception of interaction with invisible spirits which intervene in the world |
| 2:02.4 | that affect our welfare that are susceptible to our communications |
| 2:10.0 | and may affect our welfare in ways that make us better off if we engage with them in an appropriate way. |
| 2:19.0 | But the kinds of activities that can be involved is Legion. So religion in some sense doesn't have an essence because it involves just an enormous range of activities from silent individual meditation to waging war at a massive scale to singing hymns in a church to performing Bible study to engaging in |
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