Religion, Culture, and Development

Hal Bozarth has written a lengthy post on the Protestant work ethic, and the role of religion and culture in economic development. It has not received much attention yet, but I will be curious to see if reactions emerge. The piece takes a strong tone on these issues, with Bozarth (let me refer to the scholar by his last name, as convention dictates) calling the Protestant ethic "nonsense", for instance.

My own reactions to the piece are mixed. On the positive side, there are two items. First, I am intrigued by Bozarth's argument that the fragmentation of authority in modernizing Europe contributed to economic dynamism, and will be on the lookout to see how and where that argument is developed further. The thrust of my reading being that the rivalry between Protestant and Catholic authorities and between Protestant denominations themselves inhibited the rise of a continental church-state (a "super-Church") that might have stunted economic growth. An interesting historical hypothesis to test and consider further.

Second, I too am generally queasy about cultural interpretations that can become overly deterministic. The suggestion that a certain theology or worldview is more conducive to dynamism more sound innocuous, but a paired implication is that other worldviews are more conducive to backwardness. From here, the leap is too easy to the idea that if, say, Africans are economically behind, they must have certain cultural deficiencies. Experience in Africa and other developing countries leads me to object to that culturalist implication more strongly than almost any other proposition in all the social sciences. I rather think of seemingly cultural expressions of economic practice (in Africa, for example) as something less theological and culturally-given, and more environmentally adaptive and even rationalist: communal solidarity and collectivism (at the level of families, villages, community groups, and other local units, but not at the level of the state) have a different economic significance when people are living at close to a subsistence level, to use one example. I have met very few Africans who have any less ambition for capital accumulation than Americans, but I have probably met more Africans who feel strong socio-economic obligations to share meager wealth with family and friends.

On the other side of the argument, Bozarth seems too quick to categorize and to make sweeping statements in some areas, even as he adds welcome nuance in others. Islam's economic history is much more varied than the caricature of Koranic limitations on usury would suggest, for instance. It also strikes me as overstated that "Calvinism and other sects had no bearing on economics". Cultural theories of development come in a range of flavors, from the baldly deterministic (which I do often find reprehensible and inaccurate) to much subtler and more conditional theories that treat religion and culture as factors that may matter among others, and that further deem religion and culture to be endogenous, subject to their own modifications and alterations over time.

This would be central to my critique of Bozarth: that he treats religion as rather exogenous and fixed, rather than being itself malleable, adaptable, and engaged in a more reciprocal relationship with economy and society. Perhaps this is because he is responding in kind to what he sees as religious determinists, but I would not find it fair to assert that Weber and others necessarily do the same. I am not a culturalist, yet I feel comfortable saying that one of the reasons for Weber's enduring significance is that he both carved out a clear theoretical statement of religion's possible impact (which I agree may well have been wrong) AND understood religion's embeddedness in economy and society, and its own adaptability. For this reason, while I agree with Bozarth on the merits of some of the critique of religious and cultural arguments, I think it precipitous to flatly argue that these lines of thought are of necessity wrong and/or imply they are reprehensible. Instead, cultural arguments are only partially correct (at best, and they require constant revision) and exist on a spectrum from reprehensible to something much more thoughtful and even humanistic.

It would also be useful to distinguish further between strict scriptural or textual interpretations of religions and their actual application in different societies. On this note, Bozarth offers an interpretation, drawing on Christopher Hitchens (see brief, but touching obituary here) of biblical requirements on the accumulation of wealth, but we cannot paint with a broad brush the extent to which these have been adopted as Christian practice; we cannot simply cast Protestantism as looking solely to scripture for guidance, then assume it should come out with a single, fixed interpretation of what that scripture says. It has never done so. No major text survives centuries without being subject to interpretation and reinterpretation. (Consider the Supreme Court and the U.S. Constitution, among others.) It is unclear the extent to which people and cultures through history have taken the "vow of poverty" and service as the central interpretation of the Christian economic gospel. Certainly, modern Christianity has included hugely ranging perspectives on wealth, from the "prosperity gospel" to liberation theology's "preferential option for the poor", with the Calvinist ethic being one of these many understandings.

I risk a reply that is longer than the original post, which I prefer to avoid for substantive blog entries. I encourage others to have a look and offer comments on Bozarth's blog and/or here.