Reading Religion Economically

— Thomas R. Blanton IV

The relationship between religion and economy involves materiality, spatiality, and temporality—and not a little imagination. Neither seeing religion as separate from the economy, nor as a superstructural projection of existing class relations, nor again as a commodity subject to rational selection within a “marketplace” of offerings, I propose to reread some “religious” texts and rituals in broadly economic terms and to reflect on the nature of religion more broadly.[1]

The contemporary term “economy” (Ökonomie, économie, economia, etc.) derives from the ancient Greek oikonomia, literally, “management of the estate.” A distinct genre of ancient Greek literature instructed male owners of landed estates on the use and maintenance of those resources: Xenophon’s Oikonomikos (written ca. 360 BCE), Pseudo-Aristote’s Oikonomika (late 300s–early 200s BCE), and similarly titled works by Philodemus (d. ca. 30 BCE) and Bryson (60s CE) fall into that category.[2] This literature was written by and for aristocratic landowners who praised themselves for their self-sufficiency, living largely from what could be produced on the estate.[3] This would include farming and raising livestock that could be used to provide labor (e.g., work animals like oxen to draw a plow), wool (sheep), or food. Textiles would ideally be woven at home and distributed to members of the household and slaves or sold; flax grown on the estate could be woven into linen. Similarly in the Hebrew Bible, an idealized wife and matron of a landed estate was one who “seeks wool and flax, and works with willing hands…. She makes linen garments and sells them; she supplies the merchant with sashes” (Proverbs 31).

Oikonomia notably involved managing and maintaining a hierarchical order within the household, whose members were organized into a series of dyads: husbands/wives, masters/slaves, and parents/children. In each case, the former party was tasked with the management of the latter. Good management, both of personnel and of resources, ensured the productivity and success of the estate. Not only personnel, but time too was an important factor: labor and production were organized around the seasons of planting, growing, and harvest, and daily cycles of work and rest. The human lifecycle was also determinative: children needed to be reared to assume productive roles in adulthood, and to take care of parents when age had caused their own productive capacities to wane. The family and both the enslaved persons and animals that co-labored with and for it together constituted a single, hierarchized, time-managed economic unit.

Fig. 1. Plowing a field with ox and donkey (Palestine, ca. 1898 to 1948) (Source: Wikimedia Commons; image in the public domain.)

 In ancient Greece, landed aristocrats generally looked down on the merchant class. Slightly later than Xenophon in the 300s BCE, and quite differently from Proverbs 31, Aristotle went so far as to declare that the purpose of oikonomia was to be entirely self-sufficient so as to provide for the measured needs and desires of all members of the estate, while attempting to avoid entirely the need to buy or sell anything on the market. Market activity was in Aristotle’s view the opposite of oikonomia: whereas good estate management involved the production of resources and wealth sufficient to maintain a moderated but “good” life (Politics 1.3.8), the goal of market activity was simply to make more and more profit to satisfy immoderate and unlimited desires (Politics 1.3.9, 10, 18). By positing a strict opposition between oikonomia and market exchange, Aristotle placed the latter squarely outside the realm of the “economy.”^[4]

By the late 1700s, there was a shift in the use of the term. Under the influence of mercantilism, a constellation of theories and practices that aimed to concentrate monetary reserves in the form of gold and silver within a given country through a positive balance of trade, the focus of “economic” activity shifted away from taking the landed estate and instead took the nation-state as the basic unit of interest. Rather than the orderly management of the landed estate, the new goal became the accumulation of monetary resources within the confines of the state, a goal that could only be accomplished at the expense of neighboring nations with which it was engaged in trade. In 1776, Adam Smith would use the phrase “political economy,” which he defined as “a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator, [which has] two distinct objects: first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people … and second, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign.”[5] “Economy” for Smith was a branch of statecraft.

In the second half of the 1800s, during the Industrial Revolution the phrase “political economy” was used interchangeably with the simpler designation “economics,” which by that point had begun to concern itself with general “principles” or “laws” of commerce rather than the policies of nation-states. In 1871, determined to found economics as a science, William Stanley Jevons proposed this: “It is clear that Economics, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science…. My theory of Economics … is purely mathematical in character…. The theory consists in applying the differential calculus to the familiar notions of wealth, utility, value, demand, supply, capital, interest, labour, and all the other quantitative notions belonging to the daily operations of industry.”[6] Attempting to define economics as a “scientific” discipline, and further assuming that mathematics was the “language” in which science was framed, Jevons mathematicized economics. Contemporary “mainstream” economics largely derives from the tradition Jevons initiated. One more notable shift brings us to the present: in 2023, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Christian Hederer rightly noted that economics as currently practiced can be described as a “science of markets” (in contrast to Jevons’s focus on “the daily operations of industry”).[7] It is somewhat ironic that after beginning with Aristotle, who posited that market activity was the opposite of oikonomia, there is now a tendency to define “economy” in terms of market activity. What was once its opposite has now become the object of “economic science.”

Fig. 2. Manchester cotton mill, ca. 1834. (Source: Wikimedia Commons, image in the public domain)

A conclusion to be drawn from this history is that economy is not a “thing,” in the sense that it is not a self-evident or given aspect of all cultural formations; rather it is a discursive construct (with material, temporal, and spatial concomitants) that shifts and is adapted and readapted over time, sometimes in contradictory ways. In light of this tortuous history, moving from estate management to statecraft to industry and finally to markets, it seems advisable to adopt a more expansive definition of economy. I propose this four-part definition: economy involves (1) the production, transmission, distribution, and consumption of resources, goods, and services of all sorts; (2) the patterns into which all of those are organized; (3) the narratives that justify, decry, or seek to reorganize those patterns; (4) and the relations (social, intra-species, environmental) entailed by those patterns and narratives.[8] By “distribution” here I refer to where things “end up” when they are transmitted: this includes property, ownership, and rights to control and/or use land and resources; distribution may be (read: almost always is) asymmetric. Issues involving labor fall under the category of “production.”

One additional factor needs to be considered: since the 1980s, New Institutional economists have pointed out that because it structures economic action, ideology—defined for present purposes as socially structuring narratives—is itself part of the economy, not something separate from it (cp. #3 above).[9] This opens the possibility of redescribing “religion,” a specific type of ideology involving reference to not-immediately plausible beings, gods and goddesses, as part of the economy, too.[10]

Consider, for example, a paradigmatic “religious” act, sacrifice: an actor transmits an ox, sheep, or goat to the altar of a goddess or god and slaughters it as a “gift” to the deity, in the hope that the goddess might reciprocate by safeguarding the prosperity of the individual, her family, and/or her community, for example by ensuring a sufficient crop yield, the fertility of livestock, success in business ventures, and so on. This paradigmatic event can be construed to involve an economic relation in which humans and gods exchange goods and services in an attempt to ensure material prosperity, potentially that of both parties. No one denies that humans have significant material needs, and in ancient Babylonia (but not only there), even the gods themselves were understood to have similar needs. For example, in the Atrahasis Epic (ca. 1700 BCE), the hungry gods are depicted as receiving a burnt offering of meat from the flood hero Atrahasis: “When the gods smelled the fragrance, they gathered like flies over the offering, [until] they had eaten the offering” (Atrahasis 3.5).[11]

Fig. 3. Devotees prepare to sacrifice a lamb to the nymphs (ca. 540–530 BCE; Pitsa, Corinthia) (Source: Wikimedia Commons, image in the public domain)

Note that the economic relation, framed in this way, need invoke neither “market mentality” nor postulate a calculating homo economicus, or “economically maximizing human being,” who seeks to minimize expense while maximizing gains. Typically in religious ideologies, neither the gifts of the gods nor the offerings of human beings can or should be assigned a market value. One neither buys nor barters for the favor of the gods, which is made manifest through their acts of magnanimous giving.[12] As is typical of systems of gift exchange, it is the “social” relation between humans and their gods that is to be safeguarded; the gods may delight in receiving gifts, but their favor cannot be “bought.”[13]

Considering human parties again, this paradigm can even be construed as extending to life beyond death, envisioned as a time and place where material sufficiency is no longer in question, as bodily need and desire are transcended in a more-than-human existence, either in a disembodied state, or in a body transformed by apotheosis so that it is purged of all material need, and, as a corollary, also of desire for objects, food, nourishment, and sex. Imagined in that way, life beyond death thus bears a striking similarity to existence in the mythic Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis, where embodied humans could satisfy their material needs without having to engage in significant labor, nourished by an abundance of fruit that grew with little if any cultivation and was apparently always in season. In postmortem existence and in Eden, the basic economic problem that all biological entities face—how to acquire the material resources necessary to sustain life—is overcome, albeit in different ways: in Eden, by imagining constant access to a superabundant source of nourishment, obtainable with only a minimal expenditure of energy; and postmortem, by imagining scenarios in which corporeal need is transcended.

Tales of postmortem existence and of Eden are thus economic in nature, responding to the most pressing of all human problems, how to provision human life; and involving all aspects of “economy”: production, transmission, distribution, and consumption. In Eden, a host of trees produce quasi-magically, there is always more than enough, and consumption is an ever-present possibility: minimal or no labor is involved. It is not by accident that, after the first mythic humans, Adam and Eve, were expelled from Eden, they obtained food only through intensive effort: “By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread” (Genesis 3:19).

Fig. 4. The no-sweat surplus economy in the Garden of Eden (Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, 1615) (Source: Wikimedia Commons; image in the public domain.)

Tales of postmortem existence may however sidestep the economic problem by positing a disembodied existence: no material sustenance is required in the absence of a body. This solution to the basic economic problem is not universal however: to revisit ancient Babylonia, family members were tasked with providing regular offerings of beer and bread to feed their ancestors. If that task was neglected, the dead suffered want. When Gilgamesh’s deceased companion Enkidu was summoned from the underworld, for example, he reported seeing there a man “whose ghost has nobody to supply it; he feeds on dregs from dishes, and bits of bread that lie abandoned in the streets” of Erkalla, the Babylonian name for the underworld (Gilgamesh 11.6). Before Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh promised to make a statue of him out of gold and lapis lazuli, which would then become an object of mourning and potentially feeding (Gilgamesh 8.2–3). Whenever ancestors or dear departed comrades are provisioned, the economy, like love, is stronger than death.

Religious “moral orders,” too, may be redescribed in broadly economic terms. Inasmuch as an actor’s behavior may affect the delicate balance of exchange between the human and the divine, transgressions against a moral order may be imagined to precipitate negative outcomes in which the material well-being of actors, individuals or communities, is at minimum no longer safeguarded. At maximum, such transgressions could be imagined to elicit punitive sanctions from the gods. In the seventh to sixth century BCE biblical book of Deuteronomy, for example, which outlines the torah, a Hebrew term meaning both “law” and “instruction”—in either case, the blueprint for a particular “moral order”—a series of curses is pronounced against transgressors: “Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Cursed shall be the fruit of your womb, the fruit of your ground, the increase of your cattle and the issue of your flock.” (Deuteronomy 28:17–18). Conversely, if the “moral order” is followed, blessings ensue: “Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb, the fruit of your ground, and the fruit of your livestock, both the increase of your cattle and the issue of your flock. Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl” (Deuteronomy 28:4–5). The rewards and punishments listed are economic, directly impacting the material well-being of individuals and communities.

In all cases, however, risk is involved: the gods may turn a blind eye to the needs of the humans who propitiate them, or simply refuse to reciprocate their gifts and acts of recognition. As the author of the biblical book of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), noticed in the fourth or third century BCE, transgressors may paradoxically prosper while the law-abiding languish: “I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skilful; but time and chance happen to them all.”[14] The strict policing of a given moral order may be viewed by religious actors as a means to reduce the uncertainty involved in their relations with the gods, but there are never any guarantees.[15]

To extend the insight of New Institutional Economics, religion is not separate from the economy; it is part of it. Once we free ourselves from the historically recent reduction of “economy” to “market” and define it in broader terms, this opens productive possibilities to reread religious texts economically. The rereadings explored here already invite us to redescribe religion as a type of economic relation uniting humans and not-immediately plausible beings, gods, goddesses, and ancestors. Conversely, they invite us to redescribe economy in processual terms, involving the management of materiality, spatiality, and temporality to organize and reorganize patterns of production, transmission, distribution, and consumption of resources, goods, and services. Religion from this perspective would be viewed as one of the historically prominent modes by which this managerial function is implemented.

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[1] On the Marxian base/superstructure motif and criticisms of it, see, e.g., R. J. Robinson, Base and Superstructure: Understanding Marxism’s Second Biggest Idea, 2nd ed. (Putney:2, 2023); for the “religion as marketplace” approach and its discontents, see, e.g., Laurence R. Iannaccone, “Religious Markets and the Economics of Religion,” Social Compass 39, no. 1 (1992): 123–31; Gregory D. Alles, “Religious Economies and Rational Choice: On Rodney Starke and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith (2000),” in Contemporary Theories of Religion: A Critical Companion, ed. Michael Stausberg (London: Routledge, 2009), 83–98.

[2] For an overview, see John T. Fitzgerald, “Early Greek Economic Thought,” in The Extramercantile Economies of Greek and Roman Cities: New Perspectives on the Economic History of Classical Antiquity, ed. David B. Hollander, Thomas R. Blanton IV, and John T. Fitzgerald (Routledge, 2019), 29–50.

[3] David B. Hollander (Farmers and Agriculture in the Roman Economy [Routledge, 2019]) points out that motifs of self-sufficiency were largely rhetorical constructs, not accurate descriptions of the “economics” of estates; see also Fitzgerald, “Early Greek Economic Thought.”

[4] For discussions, see Dotan Leshem, “The Ancient Art of Economics,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 21, no. 2 (2014): 1–29; Leshem, “Aristotle Economizes the Market,” Boundary 2 40, no. 3 (2013): 39–57; Leshem, “Oikonomia Redefined,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 35, no. 1 (2013): 43–61; Karl Polanyi, “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,” in Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi, ed. George Dalton (Boston: Beacon, 1971), 78–115; Thomas R. Blanton IV, “The Economic Functions of Gift Exchange in Pauline Assemblies,” in Paul and Economics: A Handbook, ed. Thomas R. Blanton IV and Raymond Pickett (Fortress, 2017), 279–306. For the necessity of rejecting the reduction of economy to market activity in studies of ancient Greek and Roman economic history, see Thomas R. Blanton IV and David B. Hollander, “The Extramercantile Economy: An Assessment of the New Institutional Economics Paradigm in Relation to Recent Studies of Ancient Greece and Rome,”  in The Extramercantile Economies of Greek and Roman Cities: New Perspectives on the Economic History of Classical Antiquity, ed. David B. Hollander, Thomas R. Blanton IV, and John T. Fitzgerald (Routledge, 2019), 8–28.

[5] Excerpt from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, as cited in Steven G. Medema and Warren J. Samuels, The History of Economic Thought: A Reader (Routledge, 2003), 165.

[6] William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, as cited in Medema and Samuels, History of Economic Thought, 415–16.

[7] Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Christian Hederer, A New Principles of Economics: The Science of Markets (Routledge, 2023), 26–47. In response to the mathematization and disembodiment of economic theory, Frédéric Basso and Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Embodiment, Political Economy and Human Flourishing: An Embodied Cognition Approach to Economic Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 11, argue that economics now needs to be re-embodied, which “requires linking perception, cognition, and action, and coupling the organism and the environment.”

[8] For criticisms of neoclassical economic approaches and an overview of more expansive, Marxian-inspired perspectives that ore relevant to the study of the ancient Mediterranean, the Levant, and western Asia, see Roland Boer, The Sacred Economy of Ancient Israel (Westminster John Knox, 2015), 1–52; Roland Boer and Christina Petterson, A Time of Troubles: A New Economic Framework for Early Christianity (Fortress, 2017), 1–48; for an old but still useful introduction to approaches of economic anthropology, see Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Aldine de Gruyter, 1972), with a focus on domestic modes of production and gift exchange.

[9] Douglass C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (Norton, 1981), 45–58; on the varied definitions of “ideology,” see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (Verso, 1991), 1–32.

[10] “Religion,” too, is variously defined; here I have in mind the formulation of Jörg Rüpke, “Religious Agency, Identity, and Communication: Reflections on History and Theory of Religion,” Religion 45, no. 3 (2015): 344–66; see further Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after 9/11, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1–18; Michael Stausberg and Mark Q. Gardiner, “Definition,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion, ed. Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler (Oxford University Press, 2018), 9–32.

[11] Translations of the Mesopotamian sources are those of Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), slightly modified.

[12] For the logic of gift economies in relation to religion, see Thomas R. Blanton IV, A Spiritual Economy: Gift Exchange in the Letters of Paul of Tarsus (Yale University Press, 2017), 1–26; Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford University Press, 1998), 92–126.

[13] On gifts as materialized markers of social relations, see Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 185–276; James Carrier, “Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations: A Maussian View of Exchange,” Sociological Forum 6, no. 1 (1991): 119–136; James Laidlaw, “A Free Gift Makes No Friends,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6, no. 4 (2000): 617–634.

[14] Ecclesiastes 9:11.

[15] Even the pax deorum, the peace between the Roman gods and people, could be disturbed: “Die pax deorum konnte durch rituelle Fehler, Nachlässigkeit oder die Übertretung göttlicher Rechtsnormen zu jeder Zeit gestört werden” (Der neue Pauly: Enzyklopädie der Antike, 16 vols., ed. Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider [Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1996], 9:456).

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