Histories of religious fundraising: religion, economy, and value in global perspective: introduction

ABSTRACT

This special issue brings together a series of articles addressing histories of religious fundraising across a diverse range of religious and geographical contexts and historical periods. This guest editors’ introduction situates the issue within the broader literature on religion and economy, reflecting on the new perspectives that the study of religious financing can offer, particularly when considered across different cultures and times. We then highlight and discuss two major themes emerging from the articles: the mutual interplay between religious fundraising strategies, their ethics, and changing economic thought and practice; and the politics of value at stake in histories of religious fundraising. We finish by drawing attention to the potential for religious fundraising as a concerted field of study and some possible avenues of future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion and economy
• histories of fundraising
• politics of value
• religious-economic thinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for example, the €13million raised in just three days by the Fondation du patrimoine (French Heritage Foundation) https://www.fondation-patrimoine.org/les-projets/sauvons-notre-dame-de-paris

2 For fairly wide-ranging literature reviews see Obadia and Wood 2011, Osella and Rudnyckyj 2017. On the religious-secular binary, see Calhoun et al. 2011.

3 For a critical analysis of Islamic economics see Kuran 2004; on Buddhist economics see King 2016.

4 Specific literatures are addressed in the individual articles.

5 Iannaconne and Bose (2011) offer an initial attempt at a general theory of religious finance from an economics of religion perspective, but there are serious flaws in their argumentation. The authors focus primarily on Christianity, Judaism, and the New Age in European and American contexts. This is followed by some highly problematic generalizations about ‘Buddhism, Paganism, Hinduism, and More’ (pp. 9-10), the most detailed example they offer being taken from the US, while others are plucked from a couple of dated sources on religion in Japan and from the complaints of Christian missionaries on religion in India. Overall, the article gives the impression that the authors have uncritically selected a few examples that fit their model rather than making any serious attempt at broader comparison.

6 We use ‘politics of value’ here in a broad way to refer to the struggle to define value in both economic and other-than-economic senses (see, e.g., Graeber 2013), rather than in the more specific ways it is employed by Appadurai (1986) to refer to the politics of ‘what links value and exchange in the social life of commodities’ (p.57; see also Dobeson 2021 for a recent revision and expansion of this in JCE), or by Jane Collins’ (2017) in her eponymous book, which argues for a framework of economic value alternative to that of the current economic system.

7 This is of course not peculiar to the nineteenth-century Presbyterian Church; see, for example, Sufyan Abid’s (2015, pp. 158–168) discussion on the use of the language of banking and finance among Muslim fundraisers in twenty-first century Birmingham, UK.

8 We have borrowed here from Fassin 2009.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 747673; University of Manchester SALC Research Support Fund.

Notes on contributors

Jane Caple

Jane Caple is the author of Morality and Monastic Revival in Post-Mao Tibet and is currently writing a monograph based on her EU Commission-funded project ‘Wealth, Virtue and Social Justice in Contemporary Tibet.’ Her main research interests are in religion, economy, morality, and emotion, and the anthropology of Buddhism.

Sarah Roddy

Sarah Roddy is author of Population, Providence and Empire: The Churches and Emigration from nineteenth-century Ireland and co-author, with Julie-Marie Strange and Bertrand Taithe, of The Charity Market and Humanitarianism in Britain, 1870–1912. She is currently writing a monograph based on her ESRC-funded project ‘Visible Divinity: Money and Irish Catholicism, 1850-1921.’