All that happens in God’s name

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness – The Dalai Lama. 

I don’t get startled these days when on travel abroad people tell me about the rise of a Hindu India. Neither does it take me by surprise when a returnee colleague in an Indian university with an American Ph.D. mentions to me (let’s give him the benefit of doubt and assume, in jest): we are in the wrong profession, we should have been a Baba, or a Guru, or a Sri Sri or even a Swami instead. Neither is there intrigue when one observes that in 2019 India start-ups are shedding western scientific inspirations and adopting Vedic names. And it is certainly not amusing anymore to see almost all political parties pivoting from their earlier development-oriented positions to add soft/hard religiosity to their signalling repertoire. 

I am blasé now not because I may have internalised these changes but because I have found the rationale behind this behaviour; especially when one observes religion-related institutions filling up voids left in society developing from inequality possibly dominantly driven by globalization impacting India in the last 3 decades. India is now reported after all to be a very unhappy nation in the World Happiness Report of 2019; it is ranked at 129, seven places lower than last year jostled between Yemen and Botswana and very close to Syria and Venezuela at 131 and 132. 

Elsewhere I have also written about the rising burden of mental health in the country. Maybe religion, after all, is the new magic potion for the mentally unhealthy, the rich and poor, the gendered, the young and the old, the city going or the farmer distressed, I reason with myself. Indeed, it may also be providing a karmic answer for unhappy Indians visiting Vedic resorts for panaceas amidst gloominess with crony capitalism, joblessness, lacunae in the skills market or farm distress coming from policy or market failures or some combination therein. 

In fact, similar thoughts now are emerging in economics as is witnessed in a new book The Economics of Religion in India published by Harvard University Press in 2018 and written by Cambridge University faculty member and economist Sriya Iyer. Iyer argues with a survey of some 600 religious organizations in India that in a liberalized post-1991 nation, as the state withdrew and market forces unleashed its full might, religious organizations substantially increased their provision of services, compensating for the state’s withdrawal that caused inequality, deep existential and identity concerns. To me, this argument is broadly plausible with some exceptions like in healthcare. Here, privatization is continuing while India’s old missionary hospitals or Ayurveda centres either are vanishing from the fringes or are struggling still to gain legitimacy. So overall, there may be sectoral exceptions. 

Be that as it may, Iyer also suggests that religious violence is more common in India where economic growth is higher, apparently because growth increases inequality, which sectarian politicians might exploit to encourage hostility toward other religions. This is a similar hypothesis proposed by Harvard University economist Ed Glaeser in his 2005 paper which explains the political economy of hatred and the formation of in-group and out-group behaviours. 

Indeed, not just in India, but globally, religion is making a comeback. The Pew Global Religious Landscape Study across 230 countries estimated that more than 5.8 billion adults and children are religiously affiliated in the world in 2012, a number that stays around the same in 2017 estimates. This is almost 80 per cent of the 2010 world population of 6.9 billion as Iyer points out in her 2016 paper titled The New Economics of Religion. And while Voltaire may have forecasted in the 1700s that science and industrial revolution will make religion extinct, there still it seems is a lurking presence of religiosity in global societies, India included. Not without reason, therefore, Harvard University takes an interest in religious gatherings like India’s Kumbh Mela trying to unpack its underlying role in social norms, antecedents and welfare effects. 

In fact, religion may also help solve depression explicitly. In Iyer’s forthcoming Journal of Political Economy paper, she and her coauthors show that among school-going adolescents in the US, there are robust positive effects of religiosity on depression, with effects stronger for the most depressed. The reason offered here is that religiosity buffers against stressors in ways that school activities and friendships do not.

To be sure, there is actually a long history of economists’ concerns with a non-market factor like religion, especially if one goes back to Adam Smith’s take on the church and religious competition in his The Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments. Alfred Marshall also talks about individual motivations being driven by religion and even Joseph Schumpeter, the father of economic thought on creative destruction talks about religion in his History of Economic Analysis. 

However, even today, much remains poorly understood as Iyer has also argued. For example, what exactly is the definition of religiosity? Are there diminishing returns from over-religiosity? What might social media be doing to religiosity? What is the relationship between religion and science, going back to the great Tagore and Einstein debates herein? If secularisation isn’t happening despite globalization in the world as the Pew numbers seem to suggest, through what channels precisely is religion making a comeback? What are the competitive dynamics, strategic stances and marketing approaches adopted by religious organizations herein to enhance their diffusion?

What are the similarities and differences between a Gita Press, the Gorakhpur located world’s largest publisher of Hindu religious text and similar such entities in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Jainism or Buddhism? Ultimately would religiosity translate to long-run human welfare? How exactly is public policy responding to the return of religion? Is it ignoring or buckling up with more granular and causal science? Or is it blending in religion in policy exhortations and what are the apparatuses of blending herein? 

Clearly much more, therefore, remains to be done in the re-emerging new economics of religion and this mandate goes beyond 2019 Indian national elections with a necessity for deeper longitudinal examinations in countries around the world.

The author is with IIM-A and Hoover Institution