and open supply of religious “products.” He demonstrates that numerous
other cultural phenomena factor into religious membership: the church’s rela-
tionship to political dissent, national identity, economic prosperity, etc. The
rational choice approach to religion in these countries is not informed by a
detailed study of the relationship of particular religious organizations to local
socio-cultural conditions. Furthermore, as Bruce adds, “most supply-side
propositions are framed without reference to differences in theology or eccle-
siology” (2000:42). It is difficult not to conclude, therefore, that this approach
to religion is shaped according to external neoconservative presuppositions
about human motivations and behavior.
Amartya K. Sen criticizes these assumptions in a manner not unlike Hork-
heimer and Adorno’s arguments against instrumental rationality. He ques-
tions whether “it is appropriate to assume that people always...try to
maximize personal gains” (1997:333). Citing economist L. Johansen, he chal-
lenges the idea that people will only be honest to the extent that they have
economic incentives to do so; “the assumption can hardly be true in its most
extreme form. No society would be viable without some norms and rules of
conduct” (p. 332). For this reason, he concludes, “the purelyeconomic man
is indeed close to being a social moron” (p. 336).
This human behavior-equals-investment equation returns us to the ratio-
nal choice reduction of religion to the theory of compensation, and to the
deeper problems involved in the application of rational choice theory to the
study of religion. Such an unflinching embrace of the compensatory role of
religion is startling from a position informed by Marx’s criticism of the ideo-
logical nature of religion as “the opium of the people” (1978:54). For Marx,
the promise of consolation in the afterlife all too easily becomes reduced to
decorating the chains of unjust social relations with flowers. The critical prin-
ciple implied in this perspective is the argument that discourse which fails
to acknowledge that it is shaped and produced by its historical context is
abstract and naïve. On this point in particular, rational choice theory repeats
errors that Adorno and Horkheimer criticize in their analysis of Logical
Positivism. It is thus useful to return briefly to this critique.
Adorno and Horkheimer on Positivism
One of the principal goals of the early work of the Institute for Social Research
in Frankfurt, under the direction of Max Horkheimer, was to challenge the
From A Beautiful Mindto the Beautiful Soul • 167