Harvard Divinity Bulletin - Economics, Class, and Religion Symposium

METHODOLOGIES MEET, WARILY
A Symposium on Economics, Class, and Religion

On October 19, 2004, a forum entitled "Economics, Class, and Religion: Interdisciplinary Methodological Approaches" took place in the Sperry Room of Andover Hall at Harvard Divinity School. The event was sponsored by HDS and the Project on Religion, Political Economy and Society at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. The moderator was Rachel McCleary, director of the project. Participants were Robert Barro, Warburg Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Anne Monius, Professor of South Asian Religions at HDS; Robert Orsi, Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at HDS and chair of Harvard's Committee on the Study of Religion; Amartya Sen, Lamont University Professor; and Christopher Winship, Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. What follows are excerpts, with some editing, of the participants' comments, which were primarily replies to questions supplied beforehand by McCleary, and Dean William Graham, and posed by her at the event.

The event in its entirety can be viewed online here.

Rachel McCleary
In the development of the various social sciences over the last 75 to 150 years, the study of religion was generally viewed as a marginal topic of concern, except for anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Today, the study of religion is becoming a topic of intellectual inquiry for many disciplines, the domain of none. Please describe your methodological approach to the study of religion. How does your understanding of what religion is factor into your choice of analytical framework?

Robert Barro
I'm relatively new to considering religion in my research, but I have thought for some time that religion must be an important force in thinking about the economic outcomes that I've been interested in, such as economic development.

In the kind of analysis we [economists] have been doing, we've thought about religion mattering for economic results through two kinds of channels. One involves formal participation in religious activities. This could be group activities, such as formal religious services, or it could be individual activities, such as individual prayer. The main features we've been thinking about, however, are not time spent on services, church attendance, and so on, but rather forces with respect to individual beliefs and values—in particular about how those beliefs and values matter for traits and characteristics that would be important for economic productivity. I have in mind things like individual work ethic, thrift, honesty—the kind of forces that Max Weber focused on in his classic work about religion and political economy. The analysis we've been doing also considers what the role is of the state, in particular the nature of interaction between state and religion: whether or not there's an official state religion, whether the government is doing things to regulate, subsidize, or suppress religion.

The approach that we've been using is quantitative but also, and maybe more to the point, analytical—more specifically, in terms of thinking about what are the connections between religion and political economy, using various sources of data within an analytical framework. So, some of the data are across countries; some are across regions of countries such as the United States; and some would be across individuals. In the cross-country context, we would be particularly using survey data on individuals with respect to participation and religious beliefs.

Part of this analysis, empirically, is to try to estimate: What are the effects of religion, whether participation or beliefs, on political and economic outcomes? Specifically, what is the effect on economic growth? Can we separate the two-way causation that's important between religion and economic outcomes?

I should say that this kind of empirical work is what, in economics, one would call positive analysis—it's about if-then statements: If something happens with respect to the religion market or what the government is doing to religion, then what is the response in terms of religion outcomes and, ultimately, in terms of economic activity? It's positive analysis, in the economic sense.

Of course the results, if they turn out to be firmly established, may have some implications for policy, which is what economists would tend to call normative analysis. For example, there may be implications from the results about the interaction between state and religion. These would be policy implications in the form of questions such as: Is it a good idea to have freedom of religion? What is the nature of the interaction between the state and the religion market? What is the case for having some kind of regulations, subsidy suppression, etc.? The faith-based initiatives that President Bush once proposed, but seems to have forgotten about, would be an example.

The general approach is to do a positive analysis first, so that one has some serious basis for making policy—that is, for making normative judgments. The main analysis that we've been involved with is on the positive side.

Anne Monius
I don't know how to preface this, except perhaps with, "And now for something completely different." I have to tell you also, and confess, that I spent a long time figuring out, for my own field, what these questions were trying to get at, trying to locate where the questions were leading me as I stopped to recognize what I do in the study of religion. With the first question, the issue to me was very clear, in the phrasing of religion as the purview of the social sciences now opened up to wider fields of inquiry. In my own training, and certainly thinking about what I do, I do not locate myself in the social sciences. In the academy, the study of religion for the last century-plus has been thoroughly located institutionally in the humanities. That is very much where I see myself located.

And given that, I would say that my overall methodology, or my intellectual pattern of inquiry, focuses on the question of meaning: What's the meaning of life? How do we recover it? How does meaning, and its appreciation, then manifest itself in certain cultural and religious activities? In terms of methodology, I'm indebted to my colleague Don Swearer, who last week suggested that a better term for us, rather than "methodology," was "research pattern." I like that idea very much.

In my own field, and in my own subdiscipline, and in my own research (I work on medieval South Indian texts and religious practices), basic questions—What did it actually mean to be Hindu? What did it mean to be Jain? What did it mean to be Buddhist?—remain unanswered. They haven't even been asked in very interesting ways. Take a text, take any piece of historical evidence. Why was it produced? What was the intention behind the production? How was it received? What is the worldview being expressed, in basic terms? How could this have made sense to anyone with a rational mind?

These are questions that occupy my time and that remain, astoundingly, unanswered. In my own subdiscipline, there are scores of texts. We could fill this room with historical material that has never seen the light of analytic day, in any way, shape, or form. And in my field right now, given the strong postcolonial critique of the way Indian religions have been studied, virtually every text we thought we understood has been questioned and re-read.

So, these are my central questions: Am I interested in what a text has to say in its own terms? Yes. Am I interested in the history of its reception, in commentary, in re-telling? Yes. Am I interested in what inscriptional evidence might suggest about patterns of economic exchange and patronage, which led to the flourishing of literary cultures? Yes. Am I interested in the role of textual production, literary culture in wider social formations such as the temple or the monastery? Yes.

All of these questions, in my mind, ultimately impinge on the issue of meaning I'm trying to figure out for human participants. After all, in the humanities, we're talking about, in religious studies, what human beings hold most near and dear, most intimately, and value most highly—and that ultimately demands a variety of methodologies, as I think the question, as asked, assumes.

McCleary
Can I just interject: This question was actually rewritten by Bill Graham, and I think that Anne's response is very appropriate, given the way in which Bill was trying to highlight the differences between a social-science approach and other approaches to the study of religion.

Robert Orsi
I also want to say something about the shape of this question.

The first assumption of the question is that somehow the study of religion has "nothing to do with the development of the social sciences." I think it has everything to do with the development of the social sciences. In fact, the religion problem, the problem of what to do with this domain of human existence, and this way of human being and knowing, was fundamental to the emergence of modern epistemologies. Every sort of major thinker had a theory of religion that was at the foundation of his or her broader social understanding. I think actually we would have to rephrase it to say that in the development of the social sciences over the last 75 to 150 years, the problematic of religion has been fundamental.

But it was this next sentence that caused me dismay: "Today, the study of religion is becoming a topic of intellectual inquiry for many disciplines, the domain of none." I think there are political questions that need to be asked about the state of the study of religion right now, today, post–9/11. And I think that the claim that the study of religion has broken free from its disciplinary moorings, that it is now quote "the domain of none," is a striking statement. I'm concerned, and this is my anxiety: There's a new set of agendas being driven precisely by policymakers, precisely by governments that are concerned with the social place of religion, and by political movements from economic entities that are concerned about religion. These agendas are creating a new domain of religious inquiry called "policy." I think that this is a very problematic development, one that scholars in the discipline of religious studies have reason to be concerned about, because I think that it's inviting us to put our knowledge at the service of these other agendas.

My own methodology is to study religion on the ground, in what I think of as the messy networks of everyday life, including kinship and friendship and social relationships. The problem with a Weberian analysis—and I don't think this is necessarily a problem with Weber—is the assumption that you can anatomize a religious tradition apart from its practices on the ground and in people's experience and in people's lives. And I would say, no. What's fundamental to my approach is the idea that there is no such thing as a Buddhism or a Hinduism that exists apart from the people practicing it at particular times and places.

A friend of mine, who is a political scientist, once asked me what I thought the cash value of my ideas were—by which he meant, in a world that is concerned about religious violence, how does the statement that religion exists in the world of friendship and kinship play? Friendship and kinship are very warm, fuzzy terms; actually, I am more interested in religion's potential for destruction, on political and intimate levels. Once you look at religion on these levels and you see its implication in the grittiness of everyday life, you can't so easily say it's a force for good or a force for bad in any simple way. But the answer to the question about the cash value of my ideas is that they should not have cash value. I want to resist that—and I really want to emphasize this, because I feel as if we're on the edge of something very important in the scholarship of religion in the United States right now. The ideas should not have cash value for policymakers. And policy should not be the agenda that drives our inquiry.

Christopher Winship
I think of myself as a methodological pluralist. I'm best known for the work I've done in high-tech statistical methods—at least high tech by sociology standards if not by the standards of economics—and in the application of those methods in the study of social inequality and race. Most of my work has nothing to do with religion. But for a number of years now I have been involved in a very large qualitative study involving the examination of a partnership between 10 black ministers here in Boston, the Ten Point Coalition, and the Boston Police Department.

I think my position, as a methodological pluralist, is that, first, I believe different methods are useful for answering different kinds of questions. I would make the claim—and perhaps some of my colleagues here would dispute me—that I'm not sure we could understand the specific nature of religion in the United States, and particularly how it differs from religion in Western Europe, if we didn't have basic numbers on church attendance and belief, to really show that the United States doesn't look like France, it doesn't look like England, it looks quite different. That said, certainly one of the things that I've learned in my research on Ten Point is that qualitative research can be enormously useful in helping us understand how complicated the world is, what the underlying mechanisms are that are going on.

When Rachel introduced me, she didn't mention the fact that I'm also a member of the faculty at the Kennedy School. And I certainly agree with Bob that we don't necessarily want to have our research driven by policy questions. On the other hand, I think, as scholars, we need to be enormously concerned about how policymakers use our research, and I think there is no possibility of us preventing them from using our research. So, the real question is: How do we create the right kinds of institutional structures, the right normative structures, so that research is used in appropriate ways?

I think that the situation in this country now—and this is not just about religion; it's about all research—is that it's in pretty disastrous shape. I'm sure many people here realize that there's a large group of scientists that have protested the White House's use of science and believe that they're making it up as they go, making it up for whatever policies they want. I suspect one of the big challenges for the academy in the next 20 years or so is going to be developing a healthy, productive relationship with policymakers.

Orsi
I would agree that the issue of how our work is used is a very pressing moral and political question. Can you help me understand what you mean by normative structures that might facilitate conversation between academic inquiry and policymakers?

Winship
I'll give you a good example. I've been involved, as an expert witness, in a number of cases having nothing to do with religion—class-action lawsuits involving gender and racial discrimination. The liability runs from about $100 million to $2 billion. It seems to me that one of the principal norms of science, of scholarship more generally, is a notion of neutrality and balance—you might say "objectivity," although it's a complicated word. If you look at what's going on these days in the courts, both sides are going out and hiring experts who will say what they want. There is zero sense of "objectivity" in what's happening. To me, that's an example where society is undermining very core normative values of the academy. I think as scholars we need to have conferences, write papers, and have discussions with our neighbors and say, "What in the world can we do to keep the courts from essentially undermining this core set of principles?"

Barro
I wanted to react to a couple of things that I have heard. I was surprised that Anne seemed to be suggesting that we [social scientists] think that religion could be located in the social sciences. What I think that I'm more about—or some of my work is about—is actually convincing social scientists that religion is important and that religion is something that social scientists ought to try to incorporate in their own work, because it's likely to be important for outcomes in terms of economics, politics, and so on. And I hope that the work of religion scholars helps as input to that. But that doesn't mean I think of the work of religion scholars per se as being part of social science. It may or may not be, depending on the case.

I should say also that I think it used to be true a long time ago that economists particularly said that religion was central to their thinking about economics. That's certainly true if you read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. But it has not been so true for a long time. So, again, part of what we're trying to do is, I think, convince more economists and other social scientists that Smith was right in that perspective and that religion should be central.

I can't resist reacting to Bob's use of the term "cash value"—and his saying that his work has no cash value. I think what this means is something about predictive value. But it's absolutely central in economics that a theory and results have predictive value. And, if that's not the case, it's

generally thought that there's something wrong with the analysis. That's what I think about as positive analysis. Where you can make statements like, if something happens, something is going to result from that or respond to that. It may or may not have immediate or corrective implications for policy; that would be a further step, which I was trying to describe as normative. But the first part of it—the analytical approach, the if-then thing, the positive analysis, the predictive value—it certainly is absolutely central.

McCleary
Here's the second question: Poverty, income distribution, civil society, and economic development are concerns of religion scholars and economists. From your intellectual vantage point, how do religion and religiosity help to elucidate these issues?

Amartya Sen
I think the basic issue is this. I think it would be amazing if poverty, income distribution, civil society, and economic development were not affected by religion. But there are so many different forces that come into the story. I think it's also a question ultimately of our identity. This comes up in all types of ways, even in the context of security discussions. I have a problem with religious studies in that I am not, and never have been, a religious person. Religion does not speak to me in an inner way; it speaks to me in an outer way—like I watch baseball, as I sometimes do, without knowing how it's played or why. From empirical analysis, I can tell it would be interesting for me to know.

The real difficulty here, it seems to me, is that a person has so many different identities. The same person could be Muslim, could be Shi'a, could be politically liberal or a socialist, could be professionally a sociologist, could be heterosexual, could think that gay and lesbian rights are very important—without any contradiction between each of them. And each of these will define the person, including maybe his belief that there are intelligent beings in outer space. Each of these characterizes him in all kinds of ways, each of which has relevance.

So, I would have thought the real question would be not what religion does, but what its additional contribution, one way or the other, might be. This should be an important issue. For example, we have had this terrible Islam-ophobia recently—Islamic religion can produce that—and then you get a peculiar reaction: No, no, no, Islam is a religion of peace, and anyone who doesn't believe in peace isn't a true Muslim. Now, the fact is that Islam is just one identity; there are many other identities that can go with it.

The empirical studies that I have seen so far don't lead me to any kind of confidence that religion is a factor that has been properly isolated, taking into account the influence of other variables that would come into the story. So, here, I remain an agnostic. I would like to see such studies. It would be amazing if religion would be a dominant influence over everything else that makes a difference. My concern here is really to make the project more ambitious rather than less so.

Orsi
Speaking on behalf of religious studies here, I do want to say that it would be a caricature of religious studies to say a couple of things about it. No scholar of religion that I know, for example, would claim that religion is a sufficient variable for making sense of the social, political, and economic world.

That may have been a view that was held 25 years ago, but today that is simply not on the table. In fact, this is one of the reasons why the flattening out of the theoretical discourses of religion under the pressure of political agendas right now is so problematic. It's problematic for many reasons, but one of the reasons is that it misrepresents where we are right now in understanding religion as completely implicated in the world with law, medicine, politics, class, demography—and that's what we do. That's what religious studies does; it tracks those relationships. And, frankly, there is a genre emerging that thinks that you can, for example, derive sources of, quote, "Islamic terrorism." There is no such thing as "Islamic terrorism"— any scholar of religion that I know would say that. You can't derive out of a phenomenology of the Qur'an an account of a political movement. No scholar of religion today would say that you could.

Monius
I would agree with what Bob says, and I would add, along a slightly different line, the following: One of the things that has also become very apparent, even to august economic institutions such as the World Bank, is that religious organizations are some of the most successful at organizing grassroots, on-the-ground resistance campaigns to World Bank projects the world over, including India, which is the case I'm most familiar with. So, there's a new interest in certain wings of the World Bank in figuring out what this is all about. And what it's all about is essential. And this is the question I have for Professor Sen: Do you think taking religious discursive practice and ideas seriously can in any way, or should in any way, change the discourse of economy and development?

For example, is development always to mean simply economic growth? Are there other means of development? Many religious groups in India would suggest that there are other ways of considering development. And that, in my mind, is one place where productive work needs to take place.

Sen
I entirely agree that development and growth are not the same things. But that thought has occurred to nonreligious people as well. It is not the special thought of religious people only. So, I think we are on the same side, even though it may be that one of us is religious and the other is not.

Monius
But, let me say, this is another major misconstrual. I am a card-carrying member of the happy atheists club myself.

Sen
I wasn't referring to you. My point was that two persons—one religious and one not—could get to the same result. We do know how much religious commitments have been associated with good work being done in the polity, even through a very secular organization. I used to be the president of Oxfam, and I was struck by how many of the volunteers were moved by religious concerns. And then there were others who were not. What I'm saying is that it's quite possible that this same position—that mere growth is not what you are looking for, even though growth will be correlated with development in a very big way, but the fact that they're not the same thing could make a big difference—this position is one that you could allow on the basis of reasoning which is religious, or which is not. I think in the Indian context the value of that distinction, between development and growth—which I was very keen on 30 years ago, but I would say that under the present circumstances, the world has changed—doesn't carry that much weight, because it seems increasingly clear that, in order to reach relatively very poor people, you do need a high growth rate. Not need it, perhaps, but it would make things much, much easier. After all, development is about human life, how well you live, how well you're educated, whether you have gender equity—these are not the same things as economic growth. But it's not clear to me that the big contributions here will come from religious thought. I would be very surprised if that were the case.

Monius
I think it's possible. I think that what we have in the largely secular West is a dearth of understanding about the way issues like human flourishing are perceived in religious contexts in the communities we seek to help. I think that work needs to be done. I don't think we have enough research on it.

Sen
And why is it that the West is so deficient in that?

Monius
Because the language of the global economy, although rooted deeply in the Protestant Christian values of the post-Enlightenment period, nonetheless proceeds as if it does not function on certain commitments to what human subjectivity means: the construction of self, what choice means, what agency means.

Audience Member
(Professor William R. Hutchison)
I'll address this most specifically to Robert Barro. It seems to me the starting point here is what I, as a historian, would call a very importantly historical situation—a situation in the history and sociology of knowledge—in which what is meant by "religion" is, initially anyway, kind of irrelevant. This is because the era of social science, and positivism or positivistic social science and economics and so forth that is being referred to, has a history—and a very important history—of saying that religion is unimportant no matter what your definition is. That it's all nonsense. That may sound like an exaggeration. But look back at the experience of Partisan Review, in the end of the 1930s, which tried to get scholars together to comment on religion: they couldn't get any. Ten or 15 years after the war, there were, I think, two issues of Partisan Review that did—there'd been some change in the tide. But I think we're talking primarily about a situation that has lasted, and that many of us have been acquainted with, and maybe even somewhat a part of, in our academic institutions and in our scholarship, into very recent periods.

Barro
Well, I think what Bill says is fair in many ways. Particularly until recently, I think many economists and other social scientists would basically regard as not respectable trying to incorporate religion into an economics study. It was something that, I think, would be regarded as suspicious. Certainly this wasn't always true in economics, but the fact that one has to go back more than 200 years, to Adam Smith, suggests that there's a long period where religion certainly wasn't viewed as important. On the other side, I think it's also true that religion scholars more recently have had a tendency to regard economists, and other social scientists, interested in religion as trespassers on what they do. That means, if you tend to study economics in relation to religion, you get it from both sides, because a lot of the economists also don't think it's a great idea. That has changed a good deal, particularly in the last five years or so. There are really many more economists who are interested in the topic and trying to study religion in particular contexts, even in regard to financial markets, economic growth, and labor behavior.

Audience Member
My question is about the topic of class in the study of religion. The title of this symposium is "Economics, Class, and Religion," but no one has really mentioned class.

Monius
Certainly within my own realm of religious studies, it is a woefully understudied, under-researched area of inquiry that needs better attention than it has ever gotten. We simply don't have access to that kind of material. As I was suggesting earlier, particularly in the case of South Asia, there are very complex identities—social location includes religious identity, gender identity, caste identity, class identity—and this is increasingly changing traditional caste identities in various ways. There is simply no good anthropological or sociological research from South Asia, right now, that focuses on the way in which the particular kinds of identities merge and manifest themselves in human behaviors. We just don't have the research. I think it desperately needs to be done.

Winship
We actually have had a long tradition in sociology looking at the relationship between religion and class—I'd start by pointing out all the work that's been done on the WASP elite in this country. I think the interesting question, at least for sociologists, is not just noticing at various points in time that religion and class tend to come together, but trying to understand when that occurs and why and what are the consequences. What does it mean to live in a society in which class is, in part, coded through religion? In the United States you can certainly argue that one of the reasons class has never been an important category of research is precisely that so much of the intergroup stuff has been coded and done through the categories of religion, as opposed to the categories of class.