“Butts, Budgets, and Behaviors”

This chapter examines how pastors match their own evaluation of themselves as “successful entrepreneurs” against external evaluations of them as “failures” based on conventional measures of success: large congregations, large bank accounts, and large sanctuaries. This chapter shows that an essential component of founding pastors’ beliefs that their churches are successful, even if they only have 30 members or are mortgaging their home to pay the church’s bills, is the ambiguous and difficult-to-quantify measure of “changed lives.” They argued the evidence of their success was the way parishioners’ souls have been revived, their lives have been rebuilt, and the communities around them have been revitalized. Sociologist Carl Bankston sees “religious environments as economies in which religious groups are firms competing for customers who make rational choices among available products.” With this in mind, this chapter also examines how pastors think about competition and their position in a competitive religious economy.

Religious Economies and Religious Mobility

Religious economies are a novel idea with potential application in a free market economy. They bring the idea of the existence of the supernatural and concern with ultimate meanings, so ubiquitous to religions, in touch with the multiplicity of paths available to us. In Islamic Sufism, there are as many paths to God as there are individuals. A situation in which people could compare and evaluate religions, regarding them as a matter of choice, can best described as a religious economy. Just as commercial economies consist of a market in which different firms compete, religious economies consist of a market (the aggregate demand for religion) and firms (different religious organizations) seeking to attract and hold clienteles. Just as commercial economies must deal with state regulations, religious economies' key issue is the degree to which they are regulated by the state. From Stark's viewpoint, the natural state of a religious economy is religious pluralism, wherein many religious “firms” exist because of their special appeal to certain segments of the market or the population. However, just as there is incentive for a commercial organization to monopolize the market to maximize its profit, it is always in the interest of any particular religious organization to secure a monopoly, maintain its followers, and expand into new interest groups. This can be achieved, (and even then to a very limited extent) only if the state forcibly excludes competing faiths (Stark, 2001). The building blocks of Stark's ideas are the assumption of a free market, a market economy, and the key issue of rational choice theory, hand in hand with American Pragmatism. As with the history of religions, which are not and have not been free from contest and cooperation, similarities, and differences, so religious economies have not been and are not easily shaped without considering forces from within and among different economies. Religious actions, reactions, and interactions in monotheism, diversity of textual interpretations, the growth of intellectualism or counter-intellectualism, human perception of transcendence and the sacred, as well as the realities of everyday life, all imply that the idea of religious economies needs more exploration. Christianity and Islam, one dominating the West and the other the East and Africa, offer the instances of two massive markets. Each religion has more than a billion adherents and a history of sharing the monotheistic market. Both religions, in spite of Islamophobia in the West, have formed and will participate in the decline, incline, or stability of the market. This subject is timely in light of the political movements in the Middle East and monolithic misconception of Islam.

Policymakers’ Logic on Islamic Banking: Islamic Banking as an Ethno-Political Tool in Malaysia

Social scientists have long sought to understand what Islamic banking is. This study seeks to answer this question by exploring the neoliberalisation process of Islamic banking policies in Malaysia and identifying policymakers’ logic behind this process. For this purpose, this study conducted interviews with actors associated with Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM), the central bank of Malaysia. The findings demonstrate that, in the neoliberal era, BNM quietly and continuously pursued the goal of preferably giving economic opportunities to Malay Muslims by establishing institutional mechanisms rather than by offering preferential treatment in a straightforward manner. The Shariah nature of Islamic banking served to conceal this goal from the public. I define Islamic banking as an ethno-political tool rather than simply as a religious economy and contend that the philosophy of Islamic banking as a moral economy conceals an agenda of protecting Malay interests.

Porous Religious Economies and the Problem of Regulating Religious Marketplaces

This paper reframes the theory of religious economy by developing an understanding of the effects of transnational religious influence on religious marketplaces. In doing so, it highlights the need to rethink the role of regulation in shaping the ways in which religious marketplaces operate. By reinterpreting regulation as the ability of the state to control the extent to which religious groups are able to access resources, it argues that transnational religious networks can enable access to extraneous resources, which, in turn, can enable religious groups to subvert the regulatory prescriptions of the state. Transnational religious influences therefore highlight the porosity of religious economies and the problem of regulating religious marketplaces. Qualitative data are used to demonstrate how Singapore-based churches create and strengthen transnational religious networks with their counterparts in China. These networks enable religious groups to operate with a degree of independence and to overcome regulatory restrictions on (and other limitations to) religious praxis.

Is the Disintegration of Christianity a Problem—or Even a Surprise?

This article argues that if Kenneth Howard’s prediction of a “religion singularity” is true, it should not be a worry for social scientists, who must remain neutral on religious matters. Further, the deinstitutionalization, fragmentation, atomization, and even extinction of religion should come as no surprise to scholars who have observed these processes repeatedly. This process occurs not only in the realm of religion but in all social domains, from family and marriage to government—and indeed not only in social domains but in the natural world, as well. Contemporary forces of mediatization and neoliberalism are only the latest threats to institutional membership, creating a crisis among established authorities and encouraging “irregular” religion just as much as they encourage “irregular” employment. While the “religious economy” model suggests an adaptation of religion to the tastes and preferences of today’s religious consumer, ethnographic evidence illustrates the difference between religious institutions and religiosity, the rise of multiple small religious movements, and the struggle for survival between sects, denominations, and churches. Ultimately it may be the case that the institutional phase of Christianity was only one moment in its religious evolution, which evolved from small, local, independent congregations and may return to—or end in—that form.