Smithian Perspective on the Markets of Beliefs: Public Policies and Religion (Critical Essay‪)‬

Introduction The interaction between economy and religion is clearly bidirectional. On the one hand, the economy and, particularly, economic policy affect religious expressions and, on the other hand, religion influences economic behavior as well as the political and legal systems. The emergent paradigm of the economics of religion (1) adopts the first perspective in order to study the religious behaviors from the optics of rational calculation and the satisfaction of necessities, as opposed to other social sciences that, traditionally, have analyzed them either as a subrational category or as immune to the rational choice and therefore in decline. Thus, for the sociology of religion, especially for the defenders of the secularization hypothesis, (2) religious practice is condemned to suffer a strong fall in demand and even to disappear with the generalization of socioeconomic development. Economics of religion, on the contrary, adopts a perspective of supply that questions the alleged decline of the demand; that is to say, it studies the markets of beliefs, putting forward an explanatory theory for the religious manifestations different from those of sociology, psychology, or anthropology.