INTRODUCTION: SPIRITUAL, SOCIAL, HUMAN, AND FINANCIAL CAPITAL

Peter L. Berger and Gordon Redding

Explaining the role of religion in societal progress has for long remained a major challenge to thinkers observing the varieties of success and failure in the progress of societies towards wealth and a better life for their people. In the Western world, from the full analysis by Adam Smith two and a half centuries ago, and his insistence on addressing the question of 'moral sentiments', to more recent returns to the same issue by writers such as Deidre McCloskey, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the question of how such influence works remains open to clarification. This is the terrain walked over in this book. In doing so, the walk is taken in the company of scholars who have dedicated years of enquiry into specific countries and religions, and each of them is well recognized in his or her specialism. They have in addition been encouraged to explain not just their theories, but the facts on the ground as they exist in China, India, Russia, Indonesia, South Africa, and Eastern Europe. They do so on the basis of current studies in the environments they observe. An overall guide to world trends is provided at the outset, as is also a statement of the setting of the core question: how does religion sponsor or otherwise a society's progress towards prosperity?

The religions considered here include Confucianism and Taoism as practised in China and Taiwan, charismatic Christianity in the form of Pentecostalism as practised in South Africa and also India seen more historically, Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Russia, Islam in Indonesia, and the swirling complex of spirits of capitalism in the cross-currents of Eastern Europe. These are described against their own societal contexts. This allows us to take into account issues of economics, politics, sociology, and psychology, as well as religion itself, and the work is consequently both inter-disciplinary and comparative. Above all it is designed to be alive with the realities of religion's current contribution to the complex flows of forces that make up any society.

We work with the notion of 'spiritual capital', seeing it as a set of resources stemming from religion and available for use in economic and political development. The word 'use' is of course to be interpreted loosely, as there are rarely instances where a conscious policy is adopted to apply such influences in a deliberate shaping of behaviour. Instead the influence process is extremely varied, and would encompass features such as the following:

(a) the adoption within a society of specific institutions stemming from religion, and initially developed within a religious context, examples of which would be shari'a law, at an earlier period double-entry book-keeping, or the concept of the corporation as legal person;

(b) the adoption of attitudes and values capable of shaping behaviour in the context of the economy, such as the 'Protestant ethic';

(c) the fostering of communal ideals that lead to behaviour within ideologically controlled limits such that the behaviour of others can be more easily predicted, this in turn leading to higher trust;

(d) the encouragement of the idea of the self as autonomous and self-reliant (with its opposite in the encouragement of fatalistic acceptance of one's lot in life);

(e) the stabilizing of a society's power structure by making it legitimate through an elite's borrowing of religious support, in turn permitting greater control and coordination of economic action, as with 'God bless America'.

Spiritual capital is a subset of social capital. The latter amounts to a society's ability to make the processes of social and economic exchange run smoothly and fully, by drawing upon norms about cooperation and about the public good. Its spiritual subset is that part in which religious beliefs exert influence. For example, the powerful and efficient business networks of the regional ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia are at least partly explained by the 'glue' formed among people with shared Confucian ideals about reciprocal obligations. It is important also to see the workings of spiritual capital as possibly negative as well as positive. For instance the relative failure of many Islamic economies is influenced by inheritance traditions that prevent the passing on of business empires intact from one generation to another. For economic growth there is 'bad' spiritual capital as well as 'good'.

In looking for the connections between worlds of ideas and of action we are faced with both the complexity and the dynamism of societal systems. Stable economic systems that work efficiently are miracles of balance. The fact that they are capable of being unbalanced and thrown into temporary states of disorder such as recessions, downturns, overheatings, currency crises, strikes and mass protests, is a reminder that their components normally work together in an achieved equilibrium, perhaps one that can re-establish itself. This is not to say that the equilibria are fixed and unchangeable as they may transit to a newer state of balance containing different features, but in essence when they work well they remain internally cohesive and consistent, and their parts fit together well enough to keep the total running. These longterm equilibria are achieved only if they contain three subtly invisible elements that keep them capable of maintaining their balance: they have to be efficient in how they treat the resources at their disposal; they have to be able to sponsor innovation; and they have to be capable of adapting without losing the equilibrium. The more the world's systems of equilibria interact and compete, the more crucial do such conditions become. Religion can play a significant role in a society's meeting of these three requirements, but it will share influence with a long list of other features.

The other features in the list might be thought of as the other forms of capital available for use, in simple...