Gordon Hanson Comments On U.S. as Top Religious Exporter
Faith in the market
06/16/2011
Joshua Keating,
Passport, Foreign Policy Blog
This week, Molly Worthen wrote about how Mormonism may affect the foreign policy positions of GOP candidates Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. Mormons tend to get singled out in discussions of international religion because of their active missionary culture, relatively recent founding, and the fundamental American-ness of their founding doctrine.
But in fact, Mormonism is hardly alone on the list of America's religious exports. Of the world's 35 largest protestant denominations, 24 are headquartered in the United States, making the U.S. the world's largest single exporter of Protestant Christianity. The most significant of these if Pentecostalism, a movement that originated in the United States in the early 1900s and involves a literal reading of the bible as well as "ecstatic" worship practices, such as speaking in tongues. Today, Pentecostalism has 600 million adherents worldwide today, accounting for 26 percent of all Christians.
These facts come from a fascinating new paper by economists Gordon Hanson of U.C. San Diego and Chong Xiang of Purdue University, titled, "Exporting Christianity: Governance and Doctrine in the Globalization of U.S. Denominations." The paper takes the novel approach of looking at religious sects as types of multinational enterprises, whose success or failure is determined by how well their "product" responds to local market conditions.
Click here to read the full article.
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Gordon Hanson is the director of the Center on Emerging and Pacific Economies and is a professor of economics at UC San Diego, where he holds faculty positions in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the Department of Economics. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a co-editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics.
