Abstract
State and religion, two of the oldest institutions known to mankind, have historically had a complex relationship with each other. At times rulers have suppressed religion altogether, at others they have treated religion as independent of the state, and at still others they have preferred one religion over others or even endorsed one as the official religion. A survey of 177 countries in the year 2008 reveals a similar diversity of attitudes. There were 16 countries in the survey (9%) which exhibited a hostile attitude toward religion; 43 countries (24%) had a neutral attitude; 77 countries (44%) clearly favored certain religions; and 41 countries (23%) endorsed one or more religions as the official state religion.
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Notes
- 1.
The data come from Round 2 of the Religion and State dataset (http://www.religionandstate.org), collected under the supervision of Jonathan Fox. The original data uses 15 categories to measure the formal relationship between religion and the state. To simplify, we have aggregated these categories as hostility (coded as categories 0–3 in the original data), neutrality (4–5), favoritism (6–9), and state religion (10–14). See Fox (2008) for a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between state and religion based on the Round 1 of the dataset.
- 2.
We do not specify the exact nature of this good. Generally, it is meant to reflect those goods and services that a church provides to its followers, whether material (worship, charity) or non-material (forgiveness of sins, promise of salvation).
- 3.
In a more general setting, we would allow the citizen to engage in production.
- 4.
We assume that W > \( \overline{U} \), for otherwise, the citizen’s endowment would not be sufficient to cover subsistence.
- 5.
The specific centers are Lumbini, Nepal (Buddhism); Wittenberg, Germany (Protestantism); Istanbul, Turkey (Orthodox Christianity); Karbala, Iraq (Shia Islam); Mecca, Saudi Arabia (Sunni Islam); and Vatican City (Roman Catholicism). These are the centers of universal religions, or their sub-branches, that have historically expanded out from their birthplaces, eventually becoming main religions in other territories.
- 6.
The same proposition, stated conversely by Adam Smith, is that “When the authorized teachers of religion propagate … doctrines subversive of the authority of the sovereign, it is by violence only, or by the force of a standing army, that he can maintain authority” (Smith [1776] 1965, 749).
- 7.
- 8.
Specifically, we assumed that payment to the church in that case was voluntary, as in a market exchange.
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Coşgel, M.M., Miceli, T.J. (2019). State and Religion: An Economic Approach. In: Carvalho, JP., Iyer, S., Rubin, J. (eds) Advances in the Economics of Religion. International Economic Association Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98848-1_22
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