(Image source: Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast/Getty)

Back in the pre-pandemic days of 2018-2019 when I lived in Lusaka, Zambia — a country that was declared a “Christian nation” by Zambia’s then-President, Frederick Chiluba, in 1991 — it was evident that evangelical (particularly Pentecostal) Christianity made such a dent on the country’s culture that the lines between “religious” and secular” were nearly blurred out of existence. Shacks-for-businesses lined streets with signs like “God Knows Hair Salon” or “Jehovah Jirah (roughly meaning, “The Lord is My Provider”) Mechanics” that catered to a deeply Christian clientele. One moment in the mall while sipping coffee at a café, I could hear Ariana Grande’s “One Last Time” and the next hear Contemporary Christian Music’s titan Michael W. Smith’s “Place in This World.” In Zambia’s pop-culture, American televangelists like Joyce Mayer had as much clout as Beyoncé.

The prevalence of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity in Zambia is not unique. Throughout many parts of the Global South – Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America – the pervasiveness of Christianity is on the rise, making religion an especially relevant factor in the world today – something Paul Seabright argues in his latest book, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People from Princeton University Press.

The book opens with Seabright’s encounter with a twenty-four-year-old woman whom he refers to as “Grace,” who lives and works for substandard wages in Accra, Ghana. He questions why someone as poor as Grace continues to donate 12% of her income to her local church and her wealthy minister who pastors a “Prosperity-Gospel” church, teaching that truly faithful Christians will be monetarily blessed.

Seabright, an economics professor at the Toulouse School of Economics, contends that religious institutions and movements can be best understood as business platforms. In these religious platforms, people offer their time and finances to their religious institutions, while the religious institutions, in return, provide personal and professional networking, community, and meta-narratives about humanity’s purpose and origins that meet their members’ existential needs. In simple terms, it can be helpful to look at religion’s role in people’s lives as a “supply and demand” dynamic.

This isn’t exactly a novel argument, per se. Several studies exist on the “economics of religion” that examine the role of religion in exactly these terms. But what Seabright does with this book is examine how religions behave like business platforms — the ways that they have garnered “wealth, power, and people” — for better and for worse, and what that means for the United States and the world at large today.

***

Seabright asserts that religious movements are a type of business – a platform. He defines platforms as:

“Organizations that facilitate relationships that could not form, or could not function as effectively, in the platforms’ absence. Platforms reward those who create and manage them by appropriating some of the benefits those relationships make possible.”

Think of social-media sites like Facebook and X. These sites have facilitated personal and professional relationships in ways that wouldn’t have occurred in the pre-internet days. Seabright cites the quintessential “matchmaker” who connects two potential romantic mates, or the “market trader” who connects farmers and artisans with buyers, as platforms. Religious movements, according to Seabright, operate in the same way. They foster communities through a combination of organization and thoughtful strategizing that creates “enchantment” for their adherents. This “platform” aspect of religious movements, for Seabright, has become essential in our modern age, and an aspect of religion that Seabright explores throughout the book.

In defining “religion,” Seabright first describes two types of religion: “immanent religion” — religion that deals with correct procedures for interacting with invisible spirits here-and-now (like “animism,” a worldview that attributes a higher consciousness to animals, inanimate objects and weather patterns, as an example), and “transcendent religion” — religion that involves both a “hope of salvation from the human condition” and a more distant spiritual world (which presumably describes traditions like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism). What immanent and transcendental religion have in common, according to Seabright, is that “they all appeal to the presence of spirits.”

Since “spirit” is a significant definitional word for the book’s argument, it’s worth pointing out that he defines “spirit” in broad strokes. His definition includes both “spirit” in the traditional sense—gods, angels, ghosts—as well as a more secular understanding (Seabright cites secular politicians, as an example, who refer to “destiny” or “the nation” as if those things are spirits themselves). This mingling of secular and spiritual definitions of religion allows for the book’s arguments to apply to not only religions as already aforementioned, but also “secular religions,” like American civil religion, or even “ideologies” — fascism, communism, or perhaps one that includes elements of both the secular and religious: Christian nationalism.

Quite a few pundits have suggested a “global decline of religion,” and there are certainly voices, especially from the more populist-conservative side, that bemoan a “decline of Christianity” in the United States and the Western world. Based on available census data and surveys (included in the book’s appendix), Seabright offers several conclusions about the state of religion in the modern world — a few of them worth dissecting further: one, both Christianity and Islam are actually growing in most regions in the world; and two, that while traditionally “mainstream” Christianity (mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity) is declining, evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity are increasing their share of the global Christian population.

South American Christianity is already shifting its demographics from the traditional-majority Roman Catholicism to a rapidly increasing Pentecostalism, which has ramifications for the continent’s political landscape  in years to come. Similar situations are taking place in Africa and Southeast Asia. Part of the explanation for evangelicalism and Pentecostalism’s rise, according to Seabright, can be better explained if one examines religion as business platforms. Seabright writes:

“Religious movements create communities, and communities function best when they operate as platforms. The platforms that Christian and Muslim communities have been able to construct help their members to navigate the challenges of the modern world, with its increased migration from the country to the city, its loosening of family ties, and its hazards of sickness, unemployment, and loneliness against which the traditional institutions of family, village, and folk religion can no longer help to protect them.”

The ramifications of globalization, along with the rise of technology have undoubtedly fueled the rise of religion, especially Christianity and Islam, in various parts of the Global South. For evangelicals, and particularly Pentecostals, technology has never been a threat. In fact, one feature of Pentecostals’ engagement with those outside the fold is their knack for utilizing the latest  social-media platforms and practices. Along with using recent technological trends, many of these churches serve as safety-nets for communities where the state either can’t or won’t serve, making evangelicalism and Pentecostalism competitive platforms vis-á-vis other forms of Christianity. In other words, these movements are winning in the marketplace of worldviews.

***

One of the key ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic, besides the illnesses and deaths from the virus itself, was the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Some theories, like QAnon (the group promoting the idea that satanic pedophile elites — those who work in the media, entertainment and in politics, especially in the Democratic Party) are controlling a “deep state” government) have implicit and sometimes explicit religious themes and connections. In some ways, conspiracy theories share a similarity to religious movements in that a major driving force behind their followers is also one of the quintessential characteristics of human beings: the desire for narratives that bring order to a chaotic world.

For Seabright, what forms a crucial part in the draw toward religious movements, and thus is key to understanding, is “a willingness to tell grand and ambitious stories.” And a good narrative, according to Seabright, has two ingredients: one, that it conforms to notions of “commonsense causality” — a clear line between “cause” and “effect” that makes complete sense to the listener, especially as it relates to relatable motives of the characters within the narrative (Seabright offers the example of Macbeth – it’s much easier to believe Macbeth’s reason for killing Duncan is because of a desire to take over the crown, as opposed to simply dealing with “boredom”). And two, it contains what Seabright describes as “counterintuitive elements” — parts of the story that seem unusual or highly implausible or improbable to occur in daily life.

Of course, most religions contain seemingly implausible elements within their narratives: A crucified-and-resurrected rabbi in Christianity, or a single-evening’s trip from Mecca to Jerusalem and then an ascension into Heaven, according to Islam. These types of narratives, especially ones that speak about victory over defeat, can be empowering and a “subject of envy and emulation” for political leaders to utilize as a tool for mobilization because, historically, they work. After mentioning political narratives like America’s “Manifest Destiny,” “Lebenstaum” under Hitler’s Germany, or Russia’s “passionarnost” in its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Seabright writes:

“Narratives that tell the story of a nation or a political movement in terms designed to promise that initial suffering will eventually be crowned in glory have proved irresistible to ambitious leaders.”

During his recent court trials and ultimate conviction for falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to a porn star, former President Donald Trump has compared himself as a martyr a lá Jesus. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump-ally, also made the comparison at a rally: “The man that I worship was also a convicted felon.” Following Trump’s assassination attempt, some saw the event as a sign that he was “chosen by God” to save the United States. These Christian theological overtures and comparisons infer a narrative that Trump is not just “suffering” unfairly, but on behalf of others — in this case, his supporters. The implication is that, like Jesus resurrecting after his crucifixion and “defeating death,” Trump will also defeat his political enemies and regain the presidency.

The religious motifs within this political narrative are no accident, according to Seabright. In fact, wielding religious narratives and communities for political purposes is quite deliberate.

***

On January 4, 2020, during the 2020 election cycle and before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Trump presidential campaign launched its first “Evangelicals for Trump” rally in a Pentecostal/charismatic megachurch in Miami, Florida. One prominent photo from the rally captured notable evangelical leaders rallying around Trump on the stage; they laid their hands on him and prayed for a second-term win of the White House.

Seabright only minimally addresses American evangelical Christianity in his book (although he does include the aforementioned “Evangelicals for Trump” photograph). There is, however, one argument from the book that’s relevant in examining America’s relationship between religion and politics today.

Adam Smith, the economist of The Wealth of Nations repute, believed that the consequences of a religion-and-state partnership would, ultimately, lower the number of adherents and decrease that religion’s power. For Seabright, the picture is a bit more complex. Citing studies done on politics’ influence on religion, Seabright compares the religiosity levels of certain countries in Europe, like Ireland and Spain, to argue that changes in people’s political identities drive their perceived religious identity. For example, someone who holds conservative political views would more likely identify as religious (especially if the “religion” in question is associated with political conservatism) because of their conservative views than because of their religious views.

We’re seeing this play out in American evangelicalism in the United States today. Pew Research Center found in 2021 that a) American Evangelicalism actually grew from 2016 to 2020 during the Trump administration; and b), White Americans who supported Trump were far more likely than those who didn’t to identify as evangelical, with the inference that people were drawn to become evangelical Christian more because of its association with the GOP than because of theological convictions or a personal conversion experience.

Interestingly, Seabright doesn’t believe that conservative-leaning churches push political views on its members. He bases this assertion partially on a study done by himself and another economist by examining posts from roughly four-thousand Facebook accounts of churches from Democratic and Republican-leaning counties. Taken during the pandemic, they expected to find churches in Republican-leaning counties less likely than churches in Democratic-heavy counties to move their services online. They found no differences between the two groups in their willingness to move online. After Seabright says they found more political posts from churches in Democratic-counties than in Republican-counties during an on-going study, Seabright surmises:

“A better way to describe what has been happening in America is not that churches have been instrumentalizing politics, but that politicians have been instrumentalizing religion.”

While I certainly agree that politicians utilize religion to mobilize their supporters, the premise seems to follow from a flawed research method. An analysis of sermons, homilies, and teachings from a sample of churches would better reflect the political messaging of churches than social-media posts. While a sermon from far-right pastor Greg Locke saying that one “can’t be a Democrat and a Christian” might be more of an outlier, the lessons that religious leaders teach, and that their followers take to heart, reflect much better the political messaging they might or might not receive compared to simple memes and statuses posted on Facebook.

Nonetheless, Seabright’s canvas of the global religious landscape is painted with subtlety; the breadth of his book is global and draws from various episodes of world history and economic thought, yet his arguments offer insights on America’s political and religious climate at this moment. The question, especially for those who are combating anti-democratic forces in the U.S. and the world today, is whether they can compete in the marketplace of worldviews and mobilize a community with a much better story to tell.

Miguel Petrosky is an essayist, writer, and journalist based in Washington, D.C. and has written for The Revealer, Sojourners, Religion & Politics, and Christianity Today. You can follow him on Threads @miguelpetrosky.