Photo by Tennessee Photographer via Getty Images
Faiths thrive when they demand more of their participants—and so do their broader societies.
When I was a postdoctoral student at the University of Chicago, Gary Becker was one of my mentors. He had a way of reducing complicated social institutions to simple economic questions. After a trip to Rome, he mentioned meeting Pope John Paul II. I asked what they talked about. Smiling, Becker said he’d asked the pope, “How’s business?”
As someone who spent Sundays in an African Methodist Episcopal church with my grandmother, this felt like blasphemy. Religion, as I joyfully taught my second-graders in Sunday school, was about faith and community—something beyond transactions. But Becker had a gift for finding the market inside any mystery.
Religion is one of the most successful enterprises in human history. Churches the U.S. alone collect well over $100 billion a year in donations. Billions of people globally are adherents to a religion. The institutions are durable. The customers are loyal. And the product—moral structure, meaning, answers to life’s hardest questions—serves an essentially universal demand.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
______________________
Roland G. Fryer, Jr., a John A. Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is Professor of Economics at Harvard University, an entrepreneur, and co-founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures.