Theology 1.0: What is religious capital?

 

St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, Austria, 2010

One trend that continues to interest sociologists is the persistence of religion, even in heavily secularised communities. One popular way to explain such a trend is the idea of "religious capital".

Religious capital is investment of time, effort and resources one puts in a faith. Popularised by sociologist Rodney Stark (in his 2007 book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success), this idea is used to explain that people tend to behave in a way to reduce losses in religious capital.

For instance if a classical Protestant stops believing in his current system, he would tend to move towards Roman Catholicism, rather than atheism, Buddhism or Islam. This is because there are more shared practices and beliefs between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Origin
In the early 1960s, there was a persistent idea that as societies become more modern and educated, the number of religious people would drop. The reasons were manifold - many states became secular or explicitly atheistic (like communist regimes), rise of multicultural societies (leading to less unity of values) or that education who rid of old ideas of religion. In his 1999 book, Choice and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice, Steve Bruce actually predicted that religion would disappear based on his observations in Western Europe.

However, there were many countries in that bucked the trend. South Korea went from 20.7% Christians in 1985 to 27.6% in 2015. The proportion of non-believers remained roughly steady from 57.3% to 56.9% during that same period. In the Eastern European country of Latvia, the percentage of non-religious people stayed relatively steady from 28% in 2000 to 29% in 2018. The number of Christians decreased slightly from 69% to 64% during the same time period.

Christian display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2017

Thus the idea of "religious capital" was proposed to explain why religious people do not simply give up their belief and practices to embrace atheism or irreligiosity, but would rather embrace another religion.

What is usually suggested is that the actual decline is in the nominally religious (such as the "cultural Christian"), i.e. people who profess a faith superficially. In other words, people who put in little religious capital either become even more religious or less religious as society progresses.

In this aspect, religious capital makes sense. Looking at the United States from 1990 to 2008, Christian denominations which focused more on articles of faith (such as profession of belief etc, and thus more investment in religious capital) experience increases or little change in numbers, (Catholics +24.3%, Presbyterians -5.3% and Evangelical +294.5%). On the flip side, Christian denominations which require less investments in religious capital experience more drops (eg: Methodism -19.8%, Episcopal -21.0%).