I WAS not, I confess, entirely looking forward to reviewing this book. The “-onomics” genre — give me a topic, any topic, and I’ll show how economics explains it — has become depressingly popular of late. As publishers leap on the Freakonomics bandwagon, and as we continue our slide from having a market economy to being a market society, our shelves fill with books entitled Crickonomics (2014), Date-onomics (2015), or, indeed, Faithonomics (2016), which apply economic reason to everyday life. Here, or so I assumed, we go again.

We don’t, or at least not quite. Paul Seabright is an economist, and The Divine Economy does seek to apply economic thinking to the ways in which religions operate. But the book doesn’t simply insist that all humans are essentially rational utility optimisers and then force everything we might call “religion” into that Procrustean anthropological bed. It is subtler, and more sprawling, than that.

The economic approach to religion has much raw material on which to work. Religions need to attract “customers”. They offer various “goods”. They compete with one another. Some enjoy state-enforced monopolies. All this is meat and drink to economists, and, protest as many believers will at this coldly contractual framing of faith, it can shed light on religious behaviour.

What distinguishes the book from the “-onomics” genre is Seabright’s big idea, that religions are best understood as platforms, “organisations that facilitate relationships that could not [otherwise] form”. By this logic, the platform’s members are “more than consumers of the benefits. . . they are assets . . . active in the delivery of such benefits to each other.” An economic analysis of religion does not imagine that I am a consumer of religion’s “goods” in the same way as I am a consumer of “fast moving consumer goods”. If a religion is a platform, I am the part of the product.

It is a fresh idea, and it allows Seabright to interrogate religions economically without trapping himself in a narrowly reductive idea of what religion is. The problem is that this idea sits uneasily with his core definition of religion as a diverse set of human activities “that directly or indirectly involve interaction with invisible spirits who intervene causally in the world, and who can be influenced by appropriate appeals from human subjects”.

That being so, it is not always clear what economic thinking is supposed to be explaining: the patterns of relationship facilitated by religious “platforms” or the nature of our underlying spiritual belief. It is fair to say that it does better at the former than the latter. Economic thinking can be good at explaining, for example, why people give time, money, energy, information, and the like to a religious group, or why some religions flourish and others die. Ideas of monopoly, competition, insurance, and the like may not be an explanatorily powerful as economists think, but they are, none the less, helpful heuristics.

When, however, we enter the realm of spiritual beliefs, we are repeatedly, and not always convincingly, forced from the arms of economics into those of natural selection. The Divine Economy has a section on “Evolution and Non-Bayesian Reasoning”, a chapter on the “evolutionary origins of enchantment”, and another on the origin and significance of narrative. It is not that Darwinism has nothing to say about our religious development. But when we told that humans’ “attitudes to trust were shaped by the fact that, in the woodland savannah . . . our most dangerous predators were one another,” or we are asked to imagine “that individuals who were prepared to stay for long hours listening to stories around the campfire would have become better at navigating their natural and social environments than those who quickly became bored and wandered off in search of other pursuits”, you do wonder how valuable its contributions are.

Overall, The Divine Economy is an intelligent, wide-ranging, and well-researched book offering a helpful economic lens through which to interpret religion. You don’t have to be sold on its central “platform” metaphor, still less buy into its evolutionary Just So stories, to recognise that the tools of economics can shed light on the many different ways in which humans “do God”.

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos and the host of the Reading our Times podcast. Read his Comment column in this week’s issue here.

The Divine Economy: How religions compete for wealth, power, and people
Paul Seabright
Princeton University Press £30
(978-0-691-13300-3)
Church Times Bookshop £27