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

Religion, economy, and religious-economic practice

The fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in April 2019 brought to light the immense fundraising potential of religious buildings and institutions, even in an allegedly secular twenty-first century Europe. In the midst of undergoing a major restoration, itself funded by a worldwide fundraising campaign (FRANCE24 2017), the spectacular devastation of the cathedral’s 800-year-old roof prompted further outpourings of financial largesse. While French tycoons competitively flashed donations measured in the tens and hundreds of millions of euros – up to 90 percent tax-deductible, some cynics alleged – online crowdfunding campaigns also registered millions in pledged funds, made more privately and in far smaller amounts by hundreds of thousands of individual members of the public.¹ Alongside the flood of cash there was a healthy discourse about the rationale, morality, and values that lay behind such a vast financial commitment. Objections, amplified by social media, were pointed: critics questioned the ethics of the fact that almost a billion euros in charity could be conjured up in mere days for this project, while a third of the world’s population still lacked access to adequate sanitation, while the planet faced extinction as a consequence of climate change, or while black churches in the US were being destroyed by racist arson attacks. A languishing crowdfunding campaign for three of the black churches finally reached its $1.8 million target as a direct result of the criticism (BBC 2019). Clearly, connections between religion, economy and value, broadly defined, remain a live issue. The Notre Dame saga starkly demonstrated the capacity of fundraising for religious purposes to reveal fault lines in societies’ conceptions of what matters, who matters, and why.

Economic practices have always been central to religion, from securing its material foundations to the (re)production of religious authority (Baffelli and Caple 2019, p. 18) and the mediation of relationships between humans and deities, both worldly and transcendent or supramundane. Despite this, a modernist dichotomization of religion and economy has informed academic scholarship, accompanied by persistent binaries between the religious and the secular, altruism and instrumentalism, gift and commodity. A burgeoning literature on religion and economy in anthropology, sociology, economic history, and religious studies has sometimes reinforced but more often problematized these dualisms,² as illustrated in previous discussions in JCE on conceptualizations of the relationship between faith and markets among middle class Muslims in Turkey (Zencirci 2020), on the theological content of economy (Konings 2015), and on the American Prosperity Gospel (Bowler 2015; see also Cummings 2015). Among its other contributions, this literature has included studies that challenge longstanding essentialisms grounded in Weberian typologies, questioning, for example, the thesis that the Protestant ethic stimulated the rise of capitalism (e.g. Becker and Woesmann 2009, Cantoni 2015, Kaell 2017, Zafirovski 2019) and showing that Buddhism has not been antithetical to wealth creation, economic expansion, or capitalism either historically or in many of its contemporary forms (e.g. Gernet 1995, Williams-Oerberg 2019, Brox and Williams-Oerberg 2020, Elverskog 2020).

Perhaps the most rapidly expanding sub-field has been the ‘economics of religion’ (see McCleary 2011, Iyer 2016, Carvalho, Iyer, and Rubin 2019), which applies market models and economic concepts to the study of religion and takes a ‘rational choice’ approach. But it remains dominated by American studies ‘usually using data on Americans’ (Stark 2021, p. 21) with little attention paid to non-Abrahamic religions (Carvalho, Iyer, and Rubin 2019, p. 16). In contrast, other scholars have engaged in an often explicitly normative ‘religious economics’, which analyzes the economic ethics of religious traditions as the basis for economic systems alternative to modern capitalism. Here, Islam and Buddhism have received considerable attention (see, e.g. Zslonai 2007, Langton et al., 2011, Sivaraska 2011, Hassan and Lewis 2014).³ Meanwhile, beyond the study of religion, the resurgence of anthropological interest in theories of value (Graeber 2001, Miller 2008, Robbins 2012, Otto and Willerslev 2013a, 2013b, Lambek 2015) has helped us to start to rethink the relationship between value in an economic sense and values in a sociological and cultural sense. While economic value and religious values might be incommensurable, they are evidently not oppositional. However, much work still remains to be done.

In particular, a new focus on the finances of religious institutions themselves offers potentially significant insights into the articulation of religion, economy, and society. One notable feature of religious fundraising is that it has always taken place in recorded history. As the contributions to this issue highlight, it has left, and continues to leave, traces across time periods, across cultures, and across faiths. Thus, in stark contrast to many other financial practices and economic transactions whose globalization may be more recent or contingent, a focus on religious fundraising as a shared human practice renders it possible to draw out common cross-cultural patterns and themes. A second notable feature is the analytical purchase that it offers. While most studies of religion and economy in the social sciences and history have focused on how religious practices and values have been influenced by economic practices and ideology, or vise versa (Obadia and Wood 2011, p. xiv), religious financing is by definition religious-economic practice. As such, it provides an analytical starting point that collapses the boundary between the economic and the religious as ‘separate ontological categories of thought and practice’ (Osella and Rudnyckyi 2017, p. 6; see also McLaughlin et al. 2020) – even if they are often perceived as such by those whose lives and practices we study (see, e.g. DePalma 2018), and remain conceptually useful to us (and difficult to escape) as scholars.

Despite this potential, religious financing remains an understudied field (Iannaconne and Bose 2011, p. 2., Jonveaux 2013, p. 160, Koenig 2016, pp. 91-92, Vala 2019, pp. 111-112). There has been some in-depth documentation and analysis of individual cases,⁴ as well as monographs and edited volumes that present a broader view of financing in particular traditions and regions such as Christianity in America (Chaves and Miller 1999, Hudnut-Beumler 2007) and Buddhism in contemporary Asia (Brumann et al. 2021). But religious fundraising has yet to be viewed from a more global perspective across traditions, cultures, regions, and historical periods.⁵ This is reflected in the most recent editions of the Routledge and Wiley Blackwell companions to the study of religion (Hinells 2010, Segal and Roubekas 2021). While they include entries on the ‘economics of religion’ authored by pioneers in this field (Iannaccone and Bainbridge 2010, Stark 2021), there is a striking absence of economy, financing, or funding as topics among their otherwise fairly wide-ranging entries from new religious movements, secularization, and fundamentalism to ritual, ethics, politics, science, and gender.

This special issue represents a first attempt to collect historical perspectives on religious financing from multiple religions, places, and time periods. It originated in a ‘Religion, Economy and Value: Histories of Religious Fundraising’ workshop organized by the guest editors at the University of Copenhagen in December 2018, which brought together mostly early-career scholars from area studies, anthropology, history, and religious studies interested in starting a dialogue beyond their specialist fields. Rather than assuming an antagonism between religion and economy, each of the contributors addresses their articulation, examining changing modes of religious fundraising, when and why tensions, debates or dilemmas have surfaced, how these have manifested, and their effects. In contrast to the economics of religion approach, none of the authors assumes the primacy of maximizing behavior nor the sociological ‘objectivity’ of economic truth (Bourdieu 1998) over other ways of knowing, understanding, and acting in the world. As David Graeber (2001, p. 29) puts it, ‘there is no area of human life, anywhere, where one cannot find self-interested calculation. But neither is there anywhere one cannot find kindness or adherence to idealistic principles: the point is why one, and not the other, is posed as “objective” reality.’ Instead, the articles highlight the entanglement of the economic with other forms of value through in-depth empirical studies.

By bringing together these individual histories of religious fundraising, our aim is to enable a reading across a diverse range of contexts, from early Buddhist monastic financing in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE to the shifting funding strategies of a Yoruba traditional religious group in contemporary Nigeria. It is beyond the scope of this special issue to attempt to represent all, or even the major religious traditions; we are not seeking to develop a general theory of religious finance along the lines proposed by Laurence Iannaconne and Feler Bose (2011). Moreover, since our objective is to move away from generalized (often essentializing) assumptions, the cases addressed in the articles are not intended as representative examples of the broader traditions (Buddhism, Catholicism, African traditional religions, Protestant Christianity) or cultures (Japanese, American, Yoruban, Tibetan, Irish, Sri Lankan) upon which they focus. Rather, each is treated as a site for exploring religious-economic practices in the specific political, social, and economic configurations within which particular financing strategies have emerged, taken root, and been contested. At the same time, the net is sufficiently broad to allow for an initial attempt to identify cross-cutting themes and patterns. We believe that this is a productive way of working towards new, empirically-grounded understandings of the dynamic relation between economy and religion, value and values in human society and lives. It is also an approach that helps us, as scholars, reflect on assumptions underpinning both academic and popular knowledge of the world and its cultures and economies, and how these assumptions have been formed and shaped.

Collectively, the contributions ask two important, interlinked questions. First, what can histories of religious fundraising tell us about the dynamic relationship between economic and other-than-economic forms of value in the ongoing formation of religious institutions and communities? Second, what can they reveal about contested conceptions of the relationship between economic practice and virtue, piety, or faith within religious communities, as well as (shifting) societal ideas about debt, obligation, profit, fairness, fortune, and the common good? While there are connective threads running through all of the contributions, we have divided the issue into two parts for greater coherence. Taken together, the first three articles highlight the mutual interplay between religious fundraising strategies, their ethics, and broader, changing economic thinking and practices. Those in the second part emphasize the politics of value that is at stake in histories of religious fundraising,⁶ highlighting how religious-economic practices and projects often serve as condensed symbols of religious and broader societal values and their contestation.

Religious fundraising and economic thinking

As a tangible, often prodigiously archived material link between religious organizations and their supporting communities or members, religious fundraising practices and the debates that they provoke can reveal much about the interplay between religion and (changing) economic thinking and practices and conceptions of the social good in particular places at certain times. Religious fundraising is necessarily embedded in the broader economy in which lay members and patrons make a living before some portion of their produce or income is redirected towards their religious institution, whether through local or state taxation, voluntary contributions, or remunerations for religious services and products. The consciousness of that surrounding economy can be implicit – for example, in calculations of how many bushels of corn are to be tithed from farmers after good or bad harvests, how much to expect someone to pay for a ritual (Caple and Roddy, this issue), or how much it will cost to rebuild a ruined Cathedral (McClelland, this issue). It can also be explicit, as when religious institutions develop commercial enterprises (Caple and Roddy, Milligan, Mitchell, Omotayo, all this issue) or invest their capital in the stock market (Short, this issue) – and when they appropriate financial terminology to frame the practice of donation.

Andrew Short’s article on missionary funding in America’s nineteenth-century Presbyterian Church neatly illustrates the latter through a discussion of the introduction of ‘certificates of stock’, which enabled Church members to buy ‘shares’ and become stakeholders in home missionary enterprise ventures (e.g. church- and school-building) among the Mormon, Mexican, and Native American peoples of the American mid-West. These proved to be extremely popular. In contrast to the financial dividends that commercial investments offered, the returns were purely spiritual, but Short argues that, as tangible fundraising objects, the stock certificates served to materialize and hence strengthen the donor’s relationship with the missionary project. Highlighting the ambiguity in Protestant attitudes toward investor capitalism at the time, he shows how the Home Missionary Enterprise’s use of stocks was not just a savvy adoption of the language and strategies of the market for fundraising purposes; it was also one way that Presbyterian leaders helped to legitimize investor capitalism among their membership. Moreover, the introduction of religious stocks represented a broader change in members’ religious-economic relationship to the Church, as financial donations became reframed as a form of worship.

Matthew Milligan also places language at the center of his analysis of ‘deliberate’ economic engagement among early Buddhist monastic communities in Sri Lanka (1st c. BCE – 5th c. CE). Through a careful analysis of often fragmented epigraphic records pertaining to the lay donation of assets to support monastic communities, Milligan provides an intriguing insight into the growth of Buddhism on the island, which, he argues, was closely connected to the accumulation of assets such as land and reservoirs with resources that could be sold for profit. Previous scholarship has highlighted asset capitalization as a form of early Buddhist monastic financing (Schopen 2004), but Milligan’s work allows us to date this to several hundred years further back. Even more interesting is his fascinating account of the development of a vocabulary for economic concepts, especially profit. By analyzing the shifts in the language used in donative inscriptions carved into stone in caves and temples, he tracks the emergence of a ‘coherent and consistent’ set of terms. While Short’s article shows how Presbyterian fundraisers borrowed concepts from investor capitalism, imbuing them with other-than-economic value,⁷ Milligan raises the intriguing possibility that at least some of the vocabulary to ‘express the nuance of asset capitalization’ in early historic Sri Lanka emerged from religious concepts.

These and the other articles in this issue show that there are important differences in religious fundraising across time and space. For example, while the idea of making regular financial donations as an explicitly religious practice was new to nineteenth–century American Protestant churches (Short), giving or dāna is a core lay Buddhist practice found in the earliest historical records (Milligan), as well as doctrinal sources (Heim 2004). But they also highlight the fluctuation and diversity of ideas about the ethics and religiosity of different forms and modes of fundraising within communities. Hence, while giving to monasteries remains a core Buddhist practice, many twenty-first century Tibetan monks came to consider institutionalized alms collections from patron communities, long a staple of Tibetan Buddhist monastic financing, to be ethically problematic (Caple and Roddy). And among nineteenth-century Irish Catholics, differing levels of wealth and varying relationships with capitalism seemed to influence the popularity of fundraising mechanisms such as pew rents, seen by some as introducing ‘ideas of the market’ where they did not belong, but by others as an efficient and effective means of demonstrating a respectable and devout religiosity (Caple and Roddy).

Long before the latest exemplar in Paris, the ethics of religious fundraising, including the modalities through which funds are raised, as well as the uses to which they are put, have been a perennial subject of scrutiny and debate within both religious institutions and wider society. Jane Caple and Sarah Roddy home in on the terms and effects of these debates to interrogate the stakes of religious financing, bringing into dialogue examples from their respective research on late twentieth and early twenty-first century Tibetan monastic Buddhism and the nineteenth century Irish Catholic Church. Foregrounding institutional actors’ ongoing evaluation and adaption of their fundraising strategies in similar contexts of economic transition and religious resurgence (see also Omotayo, this issue), they highlight the fluidity and contingency of ideas about how specific financing mechanisms related to religious values and the social good. But they also point to similarities in the underlying terms of debates about Church and monastic financing, which show that its stakes extended well beyond material support of these institutions to their ongoing formation during periods of break-neck socioeconomic change.

These articles prompt reconsideration of the exceptionalism of the centrality of economy in the religion of our times that is implied in many studies, whether in negative terms as a ‘silent takeover’ (Carrette and King 2005) or in a more positive light as spurring religious dynamism and the creation of new religious forms (see Obadia and Wood 2011, Gauthier and Martikainen 2020). As Short and Milligan’s articles demonstrate, there has been an articulation rather than rejection of or antagonism with new economic thinking and strategies in the ongoing formation of ‘traditional’ Protestant and Buddhist institutions, as well as in the newer forms of Protestantism and Buddhism that emerged in concert with late modern capitalism (Coleman 2000, Bialecki 2008, Scott 2009, Vaca 2019, Borup 2020). Caple and Roddy emphasize that many Catholic and Tibetan Buddhist leaders were also quick to capitalize on new market opportunities and the increased wealth and financial agility of their supporting communities during periods of economic transition. As the examples they discuss show, religious fundraising practices can certainly provoke anxieties about the creep of ‘economic thinking’ into clergy-lay relations. They can become a site of tension where ideas about religion and economy are played out. Generalizations about ‘religion’ or the values of specific religious traditions tell us little about why and how this occurs at certain times and in particular communities and not others (see also Osella and Rudnyckyj 2017, p. 8). To understand this, we need to pay attention to the historically contingent relations of power and politics of value in which religious fundraising practices and their contestation are embedded.

Politics of value

Religious financing can be central to, as well as shaped by, a politics of value involving negotiations and struggles between religious and political authorities, scholars, communities and individuals. As religious institutions and communities have appropriated changing economic practices and thinking for both institutional and soteriological goods and goals, translating economic into other-than-economic value, ideas about religious goods have been shaped by reconfigurations of local, national and global political and moral economies.⁸ The economic practices of religious institutions have often served as a key ground upon which the ‘worthy’, ‘pure’, ‘authentic’, ‘virtuous’ and ‘degenerate’ have been contested and (re)defined. As such, histories of religious fundraising offer a vantage point from where we can see how essentialist ideas about religion, economy, and particular religious traditions and cultures come into being, are reproduced, and challenged.

This is exemplified in Matthew Mitchell’s discussion on Japanese Buddhist temple lotteries during the early modern period (1600-1868). These lotteries evolved out of temple rituals to become an important money-spinner for institutions that needed to find income sources for temple repairs as government funding waned. By tracing the shifting government policy on these lotteries, which were sometimes banned and sometimes permitted, Mitchell shows how they were drawn into larger moral-economic debates at a time when reformist thinkers were pushing against increasing commercialism and anti-Buddhist discourse was on the rise. The shogunal government’s periodic bans on lotteries suggests that it shared the concerns and values expressed by anti-lottery critics to at least some extent. But Mitchell shows that these had to be balanced against ‘deeply entrenched’ values of tradition and precedent, as well as the limits of the shogunate’s coffers. Over the longer durée, it was the anti-Buddhist critics who exerted the greatest influence; as Mitchell notes, their disparagement of Buddhist fundraising practices, including lotteries, had a lasting impact on scholarly and public perceptions of the corruption and ‘degeneracy’ of early modern Japanese Buddhism – and indeed contemporary Temple Buddhism (Covell 2005) – in relation to a moral Buddhist past.

While Mitchell’s sources shed no light on whether the ethics of temple lotteries were contested among early modern Japanese Buddhists themselves, ethnographic data provides a much clearer picture of the politics of value shaping internal debates about the fundraising efforts of contemporary religious organizations. This is well highlighted in Charles Omotayo’s study of the financing of a new iledi or temple by the Ikenne branch of Ijo Orunmila Adulawo, a Yoruba traditional religious group founded in Nigeria in 1934 in part in reaction to a period of concerted Christian proselytism under British colonialism. Given the relative dearth of studies on the economic history of religion in Africa (Iyer 2016, p. 429), this study makes a significant empirical contribution to the religion and economy field, showing the centrality of religious-economic practice to the attempts of the Ijo Orunmila to ‘maintain authority and relevance as a modern traditional religious group’. Omotayo shows how the decision by Ikenne branch leaders to build a ‘modern’ temple and the various innovative fundraising mechanisms introduced to pay for it caused tension among group members as well as provoking criticism from other Yoruba traditional religious groups. In particular, the introduction of member donation cards and tithing, mechanisms more usually associated with Christian groups, met with some resistance as they were seen as disregarding ‘traditional’ ethics and values. But Omotayo also discusses how the group’s commercial and corporate fundraising innovations, including those involving a degree of appropriation from Christian models, worked to alter negative perceptions of the group as cultic among non-members, as well as to communicate to members and non-members alike the group’s values with regards to engagement in business. Overall, this study highlights the circulation of other-than-economic values through religious fundraising practices.

A common pattern emerging across these articles is how the ethics of religious fundraising are contested in relation to the imagined values of other religions and cultures (Omotayo; see also Caple and Roddy) or other times (Mitchell), serving to reinforce ideas about the values of particular religions and how they relate to ‘the economic’. Gwyn McClelland provides another perspective on the politics of value surrounding histories of religious fundraising by drawing our attention to how competing claims of value (Graeber 2013, p. 232) can reveal and be shaped by social rupture. His articles takes us to post-atomic Nagasaki and the contestation over the value and fate of the ruins of Urakami Cathedral, situated close to ground zero. While the majority non-Catholic population wanted to preserve the ruins as a potent symbol of the ‘folly of war’ and a touristic resource in the city’s reconstruction, the Catholic community wished to rebuild the cathedral on its original site. Drawing on oral history research among Catholic survivors and their memories of socioeconomic disadvantage and religious persecution, McClelland unfolds the meaning of the Cathedral for the Catholics as a ‘communal material resource and symbol of resistance and renewal’. The partial reliance of the impoverished post-war Catholic community on American donors to fund the Cathedral’s eventual rebuilding in the 1950s was a further point of contention that has given continued life to the debate up to the present day. For non-Catholics, exploitation of the cathedral ruins for their symbolic and economic value as an anti-nuclear tourist attraction would have been far preferable to the American bankrolling of the recreation of a space for worship.

Conclusion

Covering a wide variety of religious funding technologies from contexts as diverse as early historic Sri Lanka and present-day Nigeria, this special issue shows that histories of religious fundraising can offer an illuminating window on the dynamic relationship between economic and other-than-economic forms of value in the ongoing formation of religious institutions and communities. As many of the articles here highlight, examination of religious fundraising mechanisms and trends, as well as the reactions to them among both internal and external commentators, can also provide an insight into how lofty changes in economic systems, both sudden and gradual, impact on changes in economic life at a more intimate level. Across the cases examined, it is clear that the necessity for religious actors to adopt new fundraising methods and the moral debates that they invariably threw up, can tell us something about how larger economic transformations were perceived and engaged with by religious community members, who often represent a broad cross-section of social groups whose opinions on, say, capitalism or gambling are not often sought or recorded.

Meanwhile, analysis of particular religious fundraising mechanisms, in all their bewildering variety, provide a window onto evolving societal ideas and the politics of value around some very specific economic concepts. What kinds of debts were allowable, how far financial support should be an obligation of religious group membership, the degree of profit that could be morally sanctioned, the relationship between gambling and ideas about fortune, the ethics of price-setting, and many other ideas around economic practice and its connection to virtue, faith, or piety are all addressed. Although the examples examined in this special issue are thus rich and varied, taken together they confirm the potential for religious fundraising as a concerted field of study and suggest a number of thematic areas (debt, duty, fortune, price, profit), as well as specific fundraising mechanisms (e.g. lotteries, religious services, rentals), that could be productively explored in future research collaborations to move that field forward.

Disclosure statement

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

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.’

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.