56 5 august 2019t
he ThirTy years’ War (1618-1648) was probably
one of the most destructive episodes in history. Millions
perished and the destruction witnessed during that
time was unprecedented. The long-run results were salubrious.
The Peace of Westphalia led to the birth of the modern system
of nation states. More importantly, it led to the ushering in of
extensive religious freedom in europe. secularism—the separa-
tion of the state and the church—was a decisive outcome.
The German sociologist Max Weber interpreted these
events as the root of Capitalism. in Weber’s analysis,
Protestantism birthed Capitalism through thrift and
frugality. For long the staple of hand-waving arguments about
economic development, progress and the decline of religion,
these ideas are now part and parcel of economic studies
that parse cause and effect, layer by layer. rachel McCleary
and robert Barro’s The Wealth of Religions: The Political
Economy of Believing and Belonging (Princeton University
Press; 216 pages; rs 1,615) is a summation of the major results
in the area in recent years.
What McCleary and Barro look at carefully is the two-way re-
lationship between economic growth and religious belief. Does
economic growth lead to a progressive reduction in religiosity?
and what effect does religious belief
have on economic growth?
The scholars note, ‘Weber thought
that Protestantism was important
in the early phases of the industrial
revolution...because it provided
moral discipline and a psychological
compulsion to work hard.’ in less
than a century, this ‘moral discipline’
had transformed into the modern no-
tion of rational choice for allocating
time for work and leisure. They note,
‘Our central finding is that the effect
of religiosity on economic growth
involves a positive response to believ-
ing relative to belonging (attending).
We conjecture that religious beliefs
stimulate growth because they help
to sustain aspects of individual behav-
iour—honesty, thrift, work ethic—
that enhance productivity.’
it is interesting to note that nearly
115 years after The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism growth theorists
dwell on the theme of thrift and hard work, never mind that
the theory of economic growth is premised on rational behav-
iour and has virtually no room for religious ideas. are rational
mechanisms too arid for the complex choices made by human
beings under a variety of constraints, ones that defy even the
most arcane production functions?
Given this two-sided relationship between religion and
economic growth, it is interesting to conjecture about modern
indian history from this perspective. Data shows that most
indians are believers in some faith or the other. a 2015 Pew
research report showed that 86 per cent of those surveyed
said religion was very important to them personally. Figures
like this one are subject to fluctuations but the trend is clear:
indians remain a deeply religious people.
This bit of data throws a spanner in the Weberian secu-
larisation thesis that McCleary and Barro used to describe
the demand for religious services. Thus india seems to be an
outlier with respect to secularisation. There is plenty of data to
sketch a history based on such a conjecture. Data gathered by
political scientists steven Wilkinson and ashutosh Varshney,
when supplemented with other sources, shows two trends.
One, from 1950 until 1983 roughly, the number of riots per
year remained below 50. The number
peaked at around 100 per year in 1990
and then subsided to their historical
average in the 1990s. The 2002 Gujarat
riots broke this trend dramatically and
thereafter the trend subsided. Two, the
intensity of riots was the highest in
1968-69, late 1970s and 1992—the
year Babri Masjid was demolished.
2002 was considerably lower and
nowhere near the historic triple peaks
(1968-69, late 1970s and 1992).
These trends, especially the num-
ber of riots per year, point towards
the fact that inter-religious violence,
strongly held religious beliefs, corre-
late to an extent with the period when
economic growth took off after succes-
sive reforms in the 1980s and 1990s.
These and other aspects of religion
in india have been explored by sriya
iyer, a Cambridge University econo-
mist, in her book The Economics of
Religion in India (harvard UniversityOpium for the Masses
The relationship between economic growth and religious belief
books
If anything, the empirical
puzzle is why does India defy
the European pattern
of economic development
and secularisation?
Why is intense religiosity
a product of those years
when the country witnessed
an economic boom?