Until the 1980s, there was a virtual consensus among Western social scientists that religion’s public influence was waning fast and would eventually become marginal. There would still be many people who would personally be religious, but the ability of religion to influence the world’s movers and shakers—including, states, international organizations, and multinational corporations—would terminally decline.

How wrong this assumption turned out to be. My first book on religion and politics, Religion in Third World Politics, published in 1993 by the UK’s Open University Press, was an attempt to debunk secularization theory in a specific context and period of world history: anti-colonial struggles in the “third world”—aka the global south—in the early and mid-twentieth century. This was when religion’s waning public influence seemed to be most obvious in the West, especially Western Europe. In Europe’s “third world” colonies, on the other hand, secular nationalists allied with religious actors to great effect, creating potent and highly successful political movements that swept aside European empires and colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Paul Seabright is cognizant of the demise of secularization theory’s explanatory power and fully aware of the current public and popular power of religion. Seabright, a professor of economics at the Toulouse School of Economics, has written research monographs on gender relations and on “strangers” in economic life. While Seabright writes from an economist’s point of view, in the book under review, he offers an expansive take on the role of religion in the world today. The book’s ambitions cover the so-called “world religions”—that is, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. Christianity—especially in the West—and Islam—notably in the Middle East—take the lion’s share of Seabright’s attention.

Seabright’s central claim is that “religious movements are a special kind of ‘business’”: a religious “platform,” which brings together people who seek various things from one another—including spiritual fulfilment, a sense of community, friendship, marriage, and business opportunities (p. 8). Committed religious adherents offer much of themselves—time, money, thoughts, and behavior—to their chosen platform. Such platforms enable religious leaders to gain and build power. Note that this is not necessarily—or even often—power at the state level but in relation to what I call “religious popular power,” that is, when “ordinary” people draw on their religious faith as an ideology to pursue political change, as in Poland during the dying days of the Soviet Union when the Roman Catholic church became the standard bearer of popular attempts to do away with Soviet control.

My interest in the book was immediately stimulated on page 1, where Seabright relates an anecdote about a religious platform in Ghana. By chance, my current research project is on the political and developmental role of Pentecostal-Charismatic churches in Ghana, and my research monograph on this topic will be published in 2027, entitled Pentecostalisation, Politics and Development in Ghana.

Seabright’s anecdote is from his 2015 research visit to Ghana. He interviewed a young woman he calls “Grace” who earned the equivalent of $1.50 a day by selling “iced water in little plastic sachets stored in a basket above her head” to thirsty motorists enduring the endless traffic jams on the streets of Ghana’s capital, Accra (p. 1). Grace comes across as a highly religious and financially poor person, who donates around one-eighth of her meagre earnings to her Pentecostal-Charismatic church. Such contributions are known as “tithes” in Ghana. This money goes, in theory, to the good of the church, but in practice, much of it appears to end up in the pocket of the church’s Big Man: the lead pastor.

Seabright explains that the pastor is extremely and very ostentatiously wealthy: he drives a big, fancy car and has a silver belt buckle in the shape of a dollar sign. Why on earth, Seabright rhetorically queries, would Grace—a woman of meagre means who lives in sub-standard accommodation with an aunt in a poor neighborhood of Accra—freely give a significant share of her income to an obviously very rich, well-fed, and self-satisfied pastor? Seabright dismisses the idea that Grace is stupid or gullible. He explains that Grace gains a lot from belonging to her church, including status, companionship, a sense of community, spiritual well-being, and perhaps the chance of finding a spiritually suitable, benign husband. From her perspective, Seabright asserts, church membership is well worth the entry fee and represents good value for money.

The book is divided into four parts. Part One—“What does religion look like in the world today?”—is devoted to a thorough debunking of secularization theory as an approach with universal pretensions. Part Two—entitled “How do religions gain their power?”—examines the evolution of “transcendent” religions, that is, those with a divine being or ultimate reality that exists beyond the physical, material world and human understanding. Part Three focuses on “Religion and the uses of power,” covering political uses and abuses of religion, including in relation to gender relations. Part Four concludes the book, speculating about how religious platforms will evolve over time and what the impact on society, politics, and economics might be.

Seabright’s book is strongly and persuasively argued. As a social scientist, he is right to back up his arguments with empirical evidence of religiosity, social capital, and religion’s economic impact, drawn from numerous studies from all over the world, and supported by a 22-page statistical appendix. The book is thought-provoking and nuanced, subtle and nonjudgmental. While it covers a lot of ground, there are areas about which he could say more. For example, I would have liked to see what Seabright makes of the current alliance between religion and nationalism—including in Trump’s United States—as well as the globally burgeoning Pentecostal-Charismatic churches and their huge and growing political and societal influence in South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of East Asia. On the other hand, one book cannot do everything, and Seabright has made a good attempt at explaining quite a lot.