The Economics of Religion

Course Description

ECP3524 The Economics of Religion applies the tools of microeconomics to religious behaviour. The statewide description, which Florida State University's catalog repeats word for word, says students "develop an economic approach to understanding religion": a rational choice approach used to explain individual religious choices, the strategies religious groups use to overcome free-rider problems, and the dynamics of the religious marketplace. The approach is meant to produce testable predictions and to account for observed patterns of observance, participation and conversion, and for the stability, growth and decline of religious movements.

The course is an economics course, not a theology or religious-studies course. It does not evaluate whether any religion's claims are true, and it does not rank traditions. It asks the questions an economist asks of any choice: what people give up to participate, what they receive, how groups organise to provide shared benefits, and how competition between providers shapes what is offered. Students of any belief, or none, take it on the same terms.

⚠ One institution teaches it, and it is new. Florida State University is the only Florida institution carrying ECP3524, in its Department of Economics (College of Social Sciences and Public Policy). The course record took effect on 24 August 2026, so fall 2026 is its first term and no published syllabus was found. This guide therefore follows the official description closely; reading assignments, assessment and emphasis are set by the instructor and should be checked on the FSU syllabus.

The field the description draws on has a recognised literature in economics. Adam Smith discussed the organisation of religious groups in Book V of The Wealth of Nations (1776). The modern field is usually dated from Corry Azzi and Ronald Ehrenberg's 1975 model of church attendance as household production, and was shaped by Laurence Iannaccone's work on strictness and the club-good model: costly requirements screen out free riders and raise the quality of the shared good for those who remain. The "religious marketplace" in the description refers to the supply-side or religious-economy view associated with Iannaccone, Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, in which religious organisations compete for adherents and the degree of competition and state regulation affects participation.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Apply the rational choice framework (constraints, costs, benefits, substitution) to individual decisions about religious belief, affiliation and participation.
• Explain the free-rider problem in religious groups that provide shared goods, and analyse the strategies groups use to overcome it, including costly membership requirements, sacrifice and stigma.
• Describe the religious marketplace: religious organisations as suppliers, adherents as demanders, and how competition, entry and regulation shape what is supplied.
• Derive testable predictions from economic models of religion and state what evidence would support or contradict them.
• Use economic reasoning to interpret empirical patterns of religious observance, participation and conversion.
• Analyse the stability, growth and decline of religious movements in economic terms.
• Distinguish an economic explanation of behaviour from a judgement about the truth or worth of a religious tradition, and discuss what the economic approach leaves out.

Optional Outcomes

• Evaluate the empirical literature linking religious belief and participation to economic outcomes such as growth (for example, the Barro–McCleary research), recognising that the official description does not name macroeconomic questions, so coverage depends on the instructor.
• Read and summarise a published empirical paper in the economics of religion, identifying its data, its identification strategy and its main limitation.
• Work with public survey data on religion (for example, the General Social Survey) to describe a pattern of participation.
• Compare the economic approach with sociological and religious-studies accounts of the same phenomena.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• The economic approach to religion: rational choice, its assumptions, and the history of the field from Adam Smith onward.
• Individual religious choice: participation as the use of time and money, household production models (Azzi and Ehrenberg), religious human capital, and switching and conversion.
• Religious groups as clubs: shared goods, free riding, and the strictness argument (costly requirements that screen members and raise participation).
• The religious marketplace: suppliers and demanders, competition and pluralism, state religion and regulation, entry by new movements.
• Empirical patterns: observance, attendance, giving, conversion, and how economists test predictions against them.
• Growth and decline of religious movements: why some groups expand and others shrink, in economic terms.

Optional Topics

• Religion and economic outcomes at the national level, such as belief, attendance and growth.
• Religion and trust, social capital and mutual insurance.
• The economics of religious organisations as nonprofits: donations, volunteer labour and governance.
• Critiques of the rational choice and supply-side approaches, including the debate over whether pluralism raises participation.

Resources & Tools

• Laurence R. Iannaccone, "Introduction to the Economics of Religion," Journal of Economic Literature 36 (1998): the standard survey of the field.
• Rachel M. McCleary and Robert J. Barro, The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging (Princeton University Press, 2019): a book-length treatment of both the micro and macro questions.
• Sriya Iyer, "The New Economics of Religion," Journal of Economic Literature 54 (2016): a more recent survey.
• Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (University of California Press, 2000): the religious-economy view from sociology.
• Corry Azzi and Ronald Ehrenberg, "Household Allocation of Time and Church Attendance," Journal of Political Economy 83 (1975): the founding model of participation as a time-allocation choice.
• Public data: the Association of Religion Data Archives (thearda.com), the General Social Survey, and the Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Study.
• These are the field's standard references. Which ones FSU assigns is set by the instructor; check the syllabus.

Special Information

Offering Notes

Florida State University is the only Florida institution that carries ECP3524, at 3 credits. FSU's course record lists 3 contact hours a week of class lecture, which is 45 contact hours over a standard semester. The course is not repeatable for credit.

Prerequisites and position in the curriculum

The statewide record names one prerequisite: ECO 2023 Principles of Microeconomics. It does not require intermediate microeconomic theory (ECO 3101), so the course is open to students who have finished principles, including non-majors. Expect the models to use supply and demand, opportunity cost, the free-rider problem and simple choice under constraints, all of which principles covers. Confirm FSU's current requisite before registering, since the university's own system controls enrolment.

At FSU it is a 3000-level course in the Department of Economics, so it should count as an upper-division economics elective toward the B.S. in Economics, which requires 15 hours of such electives beyond the core. Confirm with an FSU economics adviser that ECP courses count toward that requirement in your catalog year.

Transfer

No other Florida institution carries ECP3524, so no other school has the same number to match on transfer. A student who takes it at FSU and moves elsewhere will normally receive elective credit, and may ask the receiving economics department to count it as an upper-division economics elective. Keep the syllabus.

The course carries no general-education designation and no Gordon Rule writing designation. The statewide record marks it as available for dual enrollment, with high-school credit as an elective.

A note on approach

Students sometimes worry that an economic model of religion is dismissive of faith. The field's own writers address this: the claim is that religious behaviour responds to costs, benefits and the options available, as other behaviour does, not that belief can be reduced to a calculation. A good test of the course is whether it explains behaviour without passing judgement on belief, and whether it discusses what the economic model cannot capture.

AI Integration (Optional)

AI tools can help summarise the economics-of-religion literature, explain a model step by step, or write code to tabulate survey data from the General Social Survey or the ARDA. Two cautions apply with particular force in this course.

• Citations. The field is small, and a model asked for sources will produce plausible but non-existent papers attributed to its best-known authors. Check every reference against the journal or a library database before using it.
• Representing traditions. Generated text tends to flatten religious groups into stereotypes and to state contested empirical claims (for example, that pluralism raises participation) as settled. The course asks for testable predictions and evidence, so treat a generated generalisation as a hypothesis to check, not a finding.

Follow FSU's academic integrity policy and your instructor's rules on AI use for each assignment.