I was intrigued to be sent this book and am delighted to contribute to this symposium. I warmed to the book immediately, as it is rare to find an economist ready to take religion seriously and to write so engagingly about those who involve themselves in it. We meet “Grace” from Accra on the very first page of the book and are immediately invited to reflect carefully about her commitment to a local church and her generosity to it. Why does she and so many like her do this? The chapters that follow offer an explanation.

The book is divided into four parts. Part I is relatively short and includes a definition of religion; it then estimates the extent of religious influence in today’s world. Part II engages with the power of religion: where it comes from and how it sustains itself as much in late modernity as in previous centuries. To explain this situation, Seabright develops the notion of “platforms,” meaning by this “communities that create shared meaning not as an abstract idea, as in a philosophy class, but as the natural product of shared experiences” (p. 18). Part III examines how this power is deployed “politically, socially, economically, psychologically, sometimes to good ends, and sometimes to bad ones” (p. 18). Part IV, finally, looks forwards and asks how this important, continuing—but all too often underestimated—phenomenon can be effectively managed both for those engaged in it and those who are not. The Statistical Appendix, detailed notes, and extensive bibliography are indicative of the range of resources deployed by Seabright.

How I wished that this book had been available when charged a decade or so ago with compiling a chapter on religion for the International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP)—see “Religions and Social Progress: Critical Assessments and Creative Partnerships” in Rethinking Society for the 21st Century, 2018. The final report of the IPSP was lengthy as indeed were the chapters within this; a rather more succinct version can be found on the London School of Economics blog Grace Davie, Nancy Ammerman, “‘A lived, situated and constantly changing reality’: Why Religion is relevant to the pursuit of social progress” (January 2019). As the blog makes clear, the initial meeting of the chapter team took place in August 2015 where we encountered attitudes that were to persist right up to publication, namely that significant sections of the social-scientific community with whom we were working were hesitant about the relationship between religion and social progress as we were learning to understand this. Such hesitancy took two forms: either religion was irrelevant (i.e., no longer of significance in the late modern world), or it was negatively perceived (or toxic to use a stronger word) and thus, by definition, inimical to social progress. The fact that religion was (or more accurately was deemed to be) “back” was therefore a problem. To have had Paul Seabright’s work to hand would have helped our task immeasurably.

It is clear however that we were working towards similar conclusions to those that are developed in this book. Seabright sees religion as a “very large and diverse set of human activities that directly or indirectly involve interaction with invisible spirits who intervene causally in the work, and who can be influenced by appropriate appeals from human subjects” (p. 36). He is concerned to discover why religion maintains a central place in human life and what are consequences of this situation. We (the IPSP chapter team) argued that religion is considerably more than the broad range of institutions and beliefs traditionally recognized by social science; it is rather an extensive cultural domain that includes the beliefs and practice of a large majority of the world’s population. Put differently: religion “is a lived, situated and constantly changing reality, and has as much to do with navigating everyday life as it does with the supernatural” (Grace Davie, Nancy Ammerman, ibid.).

A telling example in our account concerned the debate provoked by Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, published in 2015. Interestingly, Laudato Si’ caught the attention of the scientific community, a link that can be substantiated in a series of articles/ leaders in Nature, considered the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal. In June 2015, the journal published a short article by Quirin Schiermeier entitled: “Why the Pope’s letter on climate change matters”; in it can be found the following short paragraphs:

In other words, the science is commended but so too is the moral authority of the Pope in making such remarks; it is also the case that the dissemination of such thinking through the structures of the Catholic and other churches will—without doubt—reach far more people that their equivalents in the scientific world.

Not everything, however, is so positive. As Seabright recognizes all too well, the power of religion and religious platforms can enhance negative as well as positive causes. Religion, for example, is a major factor both in the war between Russia and Ukraine and in the tragedy that has unfolded in the Middle East. That said, the root causes of such disputes are rarely religious; they lie rather in disputes over territory. But in these and similar cases, religious differences intensify the conflict in question; it follows that the stakes are higher meaning that a solution is all the more difficult to find.

The starting point lies in the careful study of religion at all levels of society and by scholars of many different disciplines. Paul Seabright’s publication offers an impressive example of the kind of work involved. I read it with interest and recommend it very warmly.