Intervention(s)
Pentecostal Christianity is linked strongly with increased aspirations, hope, and trust, all factors which economists have identified to play a major role in economic development and poverty alleviation. (e.g., Nunn and Wantchekon, 2011, Lybbert and Wydick, 2018; Genicot and Ray, 2020; Bloem, 2021; McKenzie et al., 2022). Much of the recent economic literature has focused on the drivers of the strong global growth of Pentecostal Christianity. In Brazil, for instance, Costa et al. (2023) find that recessions lead to increases in Pentecostal affiliation, likely due to increased social insurance provided by the churches. However, an open question is how the practices and beliefs of Pentecostalism change economic behavior. Understanding this question requires entangling the direction of causality: are those who are more aspirational more likely to join Pentecostal churches, or do the practices and beliefs taught in Pentecostalism make one more aspirational?
The global rise in Neo-Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity (hereafter NPC) in recent decades has been dramatic, particularly in the Global South. In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in particular, it is estimated that there were approximately 229 million adherents to this form of Christianity as of 2020 and it is the fastest growing religious group in the region (Johnson and Grim, 2023). The continued spread of NPC may have important implications for economic growth in one of the least economically developed regions of the world. Freeman (2015) describes that particular traits of NPC can have significant economic impacts, such as a focus on material wealth and well-being as a reward for faith (i.e., the “Prosperity Gospel”), which empowers individuals to take risks and stimulates entrepreneurial behavior. Indeed, Van Dijk (2012) describes sermons in NPC churches as explicitly presenting the Christian Gospel as a roadmap to economic success.
Randomized experiments can aid in identifying the relationship between religious affiliation/beliefs and economic outcomes. This proposed research project will provide the first randomization-based evidence on economic outcomes arising from NPC messages such as the prosperity gospel. To this point, however, there have been few randomized interventions related to religion in developing countries. One notable example, however, is Bryan et al. (2021), who in the Philippines show that poor households randomly selected to participate in an Evangelical Protestant education program have higher religiosity and income, the latter of which the authors attribute to an increase in ``grit.’’ We plan to diverge from this previous work by learning the economic effects of an intensive but short-term program related to NPC messaging in an African setting. Butinda et al. (2023) highlight how economists have largely underestimated the impact of beliefs in influencing economic development in Africa. This setting and design allows us to uncover increasingly relevant and generalizable evidence into the developmental implications of the fastest growing religious doctrine across the continent.
In our proposed project, we plan to organize intensive religious workshops to occur over two-days within informal settlements of Kisumu, Kenya. These workshops will serve as the intervention exposure, providing different forms of religious messaging to attendees randomly assigned to attend that workshops. We expect these workshops to be two days long to generate significant enough exposure to generate potential differences in behavior, but not so long as to be too inconvenient to the attendees.