In this episode, Ryan Keating, a PhD student at Cambridge University and pastor in North Cyprus, engages with Professor Sriya Iyer, a pioneer in the field of economics of religion. They discuss the role of religion in mental health, the impact of religious communities on public welfare, and how economic theories can help understand religious interactions. Their dialogue explores the intersection of religion and economics, offering valuable perspectives for policymakers and faith leaders alike.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

01:32 Exploring the Economics of Religion

03:31 Religion, Mental Health, and Wellbeing

06:13 Faith Communities and Economic Perspectives

11:08 Concluding Thoughts and Future Directions

Resources mentioned

• SCORE | Religion and Economic Development programme, reported at interfaith.cam.ac.uk: Exploring religion and economic development.

• Iyer’s research on religion, mental health and wellbeing, reported at interfaith.cam.ac.uk Research news: “Religion may have helped during COVID”.

• Sriya Iyer, 2018, The economics of religion in India (Harvard University Press).

Hello, I'm Ryan Keating. I'm a PhD student at Cambridge University in Philosophy of Religion, and I'm interested in questions about the nature of God and metaphysics. And I'm also a pastor of a diverse congregation here in North Cyprus, a majority Muslim context, where I'm sitting right now.

I'm glad to be participating in this series of dialogues around interfaith futures with the Cambridge Interfaith Programme.

And I'm pleased to welcome my guest today, Professor Sriya Iyer.

Hello, very nice to meet you all.

Professor Iyer is a professor of economics at the Faculty of Economics and a fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. Professor Iyer has been an important pioneer in the relatively recent field of economics of religion.

She's done important work on the impact of religion on mental health, including in the context of COVID 19, but also in other contexts internationally. Some of her recent publications include articles about religious discrimination, about religious freedom, and about fundamentalism, as well as in other areas of intersection between religion and economics.

Professor Iyer, a first question for you. Could you give us a description of the field of economics of religion and how it might relate to our theme of interfaith futures?

Thanks so much Ryan, and thanks so much for your question. So the field of the economics of religion is really a relatively new field of research in broader studies of religion.

And what it's really trying to do is to use economic theory and statistical tools to evaluate the role of religion in society. So it's looking at various areas such as public goods provision, competition, innovation. But really, if you think about it Adam Smith was the one who first wrote about religion and competition and then for about 250 years, economists were relatively silent about this field.

But more recently, they've really been engaged in thinking more about the economics of religion. It's a really thriving field at the moment with scholars internationally and globally engaged in it. And we have, for example, several grant programmes such as the one that we're doing here at Cambridge on religion and economic development which is involving scholars globally to think both about academic issues in this field as well as policy implications.

I think the real reason why economists are also interested in this field, and why it's relevant really to the whole interfaith futures dialogue that we're having is that our shared future depends on religion, of course, but it also depends on economics. We've had the recent US election, and it's very clear that inflation, the economy, these are big issues for voters.

And while there's been lots of research on religion and politics there's actually been comparatively little research on religion and economics. So that's really what this field is trying to do, to bring economic theories and understanding to wider debates about the nature of religion and global society.

That's excellent. I appreciate that a good comprehensive answer and helpful.

Can you describe some of the conclusions or applications from your research about the connection between mental health and religion, particularly in terms of policy in the UK and beyond? Really, it's asking, is there a particular insight that you would like policymakers to understand?

Yes so we've been doing a lot of work here in Cambridge and in other places on this whole area of religion, mental health, and wellbeing. A lot of my research has really been focused on the US and the UK in the context of this research. And really, we've been looking both at whether religion effects depression among adolescents, for example, in the US, but also particularly we had this huge shock of the COVID pandemic, which has allowed us to examine whether the interactions between religion and mental health and wellbeing were also affected when the whole world was exposed to this very major shock.

And we've been doing studies, both in the US and in the UK on these issues. So in general a lot of the research that's been looking at well value survey data shows that religiosity is positively correlated with life satisfaction by about 10%. And that's really significant even after controlling for things such as the frequency of prayer or service attendance or belief in God or religiosity.

And the idea here is that religious communities might be really good in creating social capital or that religion might be a very effective way for people to cope with stress. So it's a stress buffering mechanism. So that's really where the economists have come in to try to understand whether there is some association between religion, depression, mental health, wellbeing, both more generally, and in the context of the pandemic.

Just to give you an example, some of the research which we did in the United States is really looking at whether religiosity affects depression. We had a sample of about 20, 000 adolescents who were aged between 7 and 12 and what we showed in that research is that, so in technical terms what it's saying is that a one standard deviation increase in religiosity decreases the probability of being depressed by about 11%.

Now, what does that mean in plain English? It basically means that if you go to church at least once a week or some other place of worship, this actually reduces your incidence of depression, and that effect is really significant. What we've also found in some of our research is that more depressed individuals are affected significantly more from religiosity than the least depressed.

So really building on that research, more recently we've been looking both at the US and at the UK to think a little bit about whether this has also been the case during the Covid pandemic.

Okay. So I've been listening to some of your lectures, reading some of your work, and a question that arises for me, something of a paradox in the way that you describe a faith community as a provider of religious goods and services.

As a pastor here in North Cyprus, it seems to me that a church is at its best when it doesn't think of itself as a provider of religious goods and services. That kind of mindset creates a vendor– consumer distinction, a performer– spectator distinction, rather than thinking of ourselves as a community committed to God and to one another for the benefit of the world around us.

So it seems that I shouldn't encourage an adversarial or competitive attitude toward other churches or other religious groups. And then beyond that, it seems that I'm obligated not to calculate the benefit to myself as part of my motivation to serve in this ministry role or even in the role of a church member.

Is there a way to reconcile my conviction about that with your observations as an economist?

Ryan, that's a great question. So I think, one point to clarify with some of the economics research that we're doing is that we're not denying the importance of religion and religious organizations like churches, mosques temples, pastors, priests fundamentally engaging with communities to provide a spirituality and service.

Our sense is that these are the main roles which you know these communities and these groups are providing. But what this research is really trying to do is to say, can you take insights from subjects like economics and try to understand how all of these groups in different countries, in different parts of the world— how are they actually interacting with each other? Whether it's groups or whether it's nations or other kinds of communities. And our sense is that given the large amount of research that exists between, on sort of religion and politics, maybe we should be looking at a religion and economics as well.

And the reason we really think that this economic perspective is important is because we know that there are issues with public goods, with unemployment, with education. These are all very central concerns to people's well being. And what we're really trying to look at is whether religious organizations can help alleviate some of these concerns.

It is the case that the US, for example, is one of the richest countries in the world, but it's also one of the most religious countries in the world. So in some ways, this economics research is looking at what is actually going on on the ground with respect to religious, organizations.

And of course, some of the research that I describe in my book, The Economics of Religion in India, which was published with Harvard University Press, is really talking about religion as a positive factor in economic growth and development, bringing in the role of women and other things. And so this kind of religious market approach, which is really what the economists are using, is really terminology which economists use to describe this particular sector, just as they're describing other industries or other sectors.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with the view that using this approach necessarily increases a competitive attitude among religions. I think it's simply trying to make sense of what we observe at ground level. Because, at least in the work that I've been doing on India, it's not just religious services that many of these organizations, churches, mosques, temples are providing.

Actually, they're very involved in providing what we could think of as welfare services: education, health, employment, food distribution, childcare, and in my work, for example, we found many of the organizations were providing blood donation camps, medical camps, computer classes, aerobics classes for younger devotees.

And all this was in response to changes in inequality and sometimes the lack of welfare provision by the state. So maybe we should be thinking about the organizations, not so much as in terms of a religious competition framework, but really they're also cooperating with each other to provide many of these services.

So maybe we should think of this as co-op-etition, cooperation and competition rather than as competition, rather than as competition alone. And providing all of this there's also a lot of innovation that's g oing on. Again, the economics of innovation is something the economists are interested in, and we see that happening in this sector, too.

Excellent. Yeah. And I suppose if it allows for us in ministry to be able to preserve the idea that I should be serving selflessly without calculating benefit to myself and still be able to benefit from the kinds of economics insights that you're describing. As long as that seems like they're potentially compatible as you're describing...

We think so. We were talking a little earlier about the work on religion and mental health and wellbeing. A lot of that research is motivated by the idea that religions are a great source of resilience, that they are actually helping people cope with stressful circumstances in tumultuous times.

And this is really something we should be thinking about because certainly, whether you're looking at depression or whether you're looking at public goods provision, there are clinical interventions in the case of depression. There are real world economic interventions in the case of public goods provision.

And maybe we should be looking beyond the clinical and the economic to also start looking at some of these non clinical factors, such as religion and with the role of these religious communities in helping areas where conventionally we might not have thought that religion actually plays a big role.

I think that, that's really where some of the economics research is coming from. It's trying to integrate what we're observing at the ground level with other things that economists and others may be interested in, but trying to have a dialogue with those who are also interested in shared futures when we're thinking about different religions in different parts of the world and how they're interacting with each other, both nationally, but also at grassroots level.

Excellent. That's good to hear.

Thank you very much for your time today and for those contributions.

Thank you very much, Ryan.