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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

26. Causes and Consequences of Monotheism in the Supply of Religion

Author : Murat Iyigun

Published in: Advances in the Economics of Religion

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Human history is a testament to the strong complementarities between political and religious authority in conferring upon sovereignties the legitimacy to sustain, expand, and prolong their political rule. From Charles V, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Clement VII in Bologna as the last emperor to receive a papal coronation, to Yavuz Sultan Selim, who conquered Mecca in 1517 to enshrine the Ottoman Sultanate with the title of Sunni Caliph, all the way to contemporary nation-states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia that are ruled by sharia law, we have countless historical examples of ecclesiastical and secular political authority being combined to bolster the sovereign legitimacy necessary for social and political order.

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previous chapter Religiosity and Economic Performance: The Role of Personal Liberties

next chapter Religion, Political Power and Human Capital Formation: Evidence from Islamic History

Iyigun (2015) and Rubin (2017).

For further details, see Iyigun (2015, pp. 6–12).

This is not to dismiss the fact that wars and violent conflicts also raised real wages and income from labor while lowering real interest rates and income from capital.

Of course, this is true in a relativist sense as there are variations within Islam too in this respect, with Shi’a Islam being less congregationalist than Sunni Islam.

By contrast, recall that polytheist societies were more tolerant of other gods and religions (Armstrong 1993, p. 49).

By default, if an agent of either type matches with someone of the same type, then there is no conversion. Of course, it is conceivable and historically much relevant that if two type M agents interact and they subscribe to different monotheisms, one of them would convert to the monotheism of the other. Nonetheless, they’d both remain type M.

Also, one could enrich the dynamics of the model by allowing for spontaneous conversions (those that occur without any interaction) as well as deliberate and strategic shunning. The former would lead to steady states in which, even when the net conversion probabilities aren’t virtually zero, polytheism won’t become fully extinct, and the latter would bolster this. See Iyigun and Kimball (2017) for the complete details.

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Title: Causes and Consequences of Monotheism in the Supply of Religion
Author: Murat Iyigun
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Advances in the Economics of Religion
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-98847-4

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-98848-1

Copyright Year: 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98848-1_26