This is a follow up to the post yesterday, Religion is good for your health? Conservative Christianity bad?. I finished reading the paper. It’s not a bad one really, but its plausibility will be strongly conditioned by theoretical priors. It is a work in the tradition of Emile Durkheim, and attempts to resurrect a functionalist conception of religious denominations, David Sloan Wilson is smiling somewhere…. The authors posit that the other-worldly orientation of Fundamentalist and Pentecostal denominations results in a host of social dynamics which increase mortality rates. In contrast, they contend that the this-worldly orientation of Mainline and Catholic denominations results in a more communitarian public spirit which generates positive externalities within a society. They don’t use the the term externality. In the paper they seem intent on carving out a non-economical space for their analysis, but that’s basically what they’re talking about. Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism focus on public social justice in a manner which injects capital into the community as a whole irrespective of sect. Fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches on the other hand are focused on their own narrow church-life and rather disengaged from collective public action which might produce communal capital (this shows up in the nature of mission-work, while Mainline and Catholic activities being more strongly geared toward education and health as opposed to just converting). An individual illustration of this might be James G. Watt, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, and a Pentecostal, who reputedly had little interest in being a steward of the land due to his belief that the End Times were approaching and environmentalism was ultimately in vain.

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