The shift is in where economists are looking for the roots of growth. A review published by RFBerlin in May 2026, Research Insight No. 18/26, argues that religion has run through nearly every input the standard models care about, from how much people save to how many children they raise to whether societies adopt or resist new technologies. The authors, Sascha O. Becker at the University of Warwick, Jared Rubin at Chapman University and Ludger Woessmann at the University of Munich, wrap decades of empirical work into one blunt claim: the conventional growth literature is missing a crucial part of the story. Their underlying paper appeared in the Journal of Economic Literature in 2024.
The exhibit everyone reaches for first is the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther’s insistence that every Christian read Scripture pushed Protestant territories into mass schooling, for boys and girls alike; Protestant areas of Prussia, by the 19th century, were far more literate than Catholic ones, and that educational edge largely explains the Protestant economic lead long credited to Max Weber’s work-ethic thesis. What’s changing in the argument is the mechanism: books and schools, not temperament toward labor.
The trend underneath is global and stubborn. Regions of Europe that lived under Ottoman rule and its Islamic restrictions on interest still show 10 percent less bank penetration than their neighbors today. Islamic partnership and inheritance rules kept commercial enterprises small and short-lived for centuries. Districts reached by Protestant missionaries in Africa, Asia and Latin America still post higher literacy and stronger educational mobility. And content matters critically: religious schooling that teaches literacy, as with Protestantism and mainstream Judaism, feeds growth, while schooling that substitutes for secular knowledge, as with certain madrasas or ultra-Orthodox education, can impede it.
Technology and politics bend too. The Ottomans banned Arabic-script printing for roughly 250 years to protect the religious establishment’s intellectual monopoly, while religiously diverse Prussian cities produced more patents per capita, and the Reformation nudged Protestant rulers toward parliaments. The policy file carries warnings: Egypt’s secular-education expansion in the 1950s increased demand for Islamic education instead, and Turkey’s compulsory secular reform of 1998 triggered backlash in conservative areas.
The line that lands is the authors’ own: “Religion affects economic growth not just through individual beliefs, but by shaping the fundamental institutions and norms that govern society.” The forward read: secularization is emptying pews, not erasing institutions formed over centuries. Watch this space, because growth economics just acquired a very old variable.
Sources
- Religion Still Shapes Europe’s Economy, Education and Social Values Despite Secularisation, according to a study – ZENIT – English
- Religion and Economic Growth: What We Know and Why It Matters – RFBerlin
