What Can Caesar Render Unto God?
Dan Koev September/October 2025The unexpected consequences of religious favoritism
The notion that government should not generally be involved in promoting or regulating religion is relatively popular in the United States but is far from common elsewhere. The political scientist Jonathan Fox distinguishes two aspects of religious freedom: free exercise of religion and a level playing field between different religions. Using his Religious Characteristics of States dataset, Fox finds that neither of these concepts is espoused in most of the world’s countries. An equal playing field is particularly rare, with only 5.1 percent of countries meeting a strict standard and 13.6 percent meeting a loose standard of impartiality. Even free and democratic countries whose constitutions contain religious freedom clauses tend to favor one or more religions over others. Favored religions can receive a variety of perks, including official recognition as the “national” church, subsidies, tax breaks, representation in government institutions, and a role in the education system. Even in the United States, which is historically averse to the melding of church and state, the idea that government should promote Christianity (or some form of it) is gaining popularity in some conservative and religious intellectual circles. But what are the practical consequences when government tips the scales in the realm of religion? Does such preferential treatment actually benefit the “favored” group?
Help or Harm?
I examined this question in my recent study “The Influence of State Favoritism on Established Religions and Their Competitors,” published in the journal Politics and Religion. Most of the previous studies on this subject have a serious limitation: they focus on the relationship between a government’s religion policies and society’s religiousness at a fixed point in time. Such research carries the possibility of reverse causation: it seems plausible that societies that are more religious could also be more likely to have an established or otherwise favored religion. It would be a mistake to conclude that religious establishment is what makes Islam popular in Saudi Arabia, Orthodox Christianity popular in Greece, or Buddhism popular in Myanmar; the reverse seems at least as likely. To address this problem, I studied change in religious affiliation over time. If preferential government policies are indeed beneficial for a church, we would expect that church to grow or at least maintain the number of its followers over time.
An additional point of contrast from previous studies is that I focused on the influence of official favoritism on two types of religions: the one that is favored, and all other religions in the state. Following sociologist Rodney Stark’s religious markets theory, which argues that various religions and denominations compete for adherents in a “religious economy,” I hypothesized that preferential policies would produce negative consequences for the “favored” religion. In their book Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion, Stark and Roger Finke show that dependence on government support disincentivizes effort by clergy, reduces participation from laity, and can compromise a church’s theology. In a competitive religious market, clergy and church leaders have an incentive to be diligent in attracting new followers and meeting the needs of their congregations. When a church is an organ of the state and the clergy are unionized civil servants, as is the case in Scandinavia’s established Lutheran churches, the incentives are reversed: a larger congregation means more work for the same pay and does not increase a minister’s job security. The perception that religion is a “free” service provided by the state also dampens lay participation, because people tend not to accord value to things that require them to pay no cost and make no sacrifice. Last, government support tends to come with strings attached. While some established churches, such as the Church of England, retain considerable autonomy, in many cases governments influence ecclesiastical appointments and theological doctrines. In liberal democracies this has led to official churches’ acceptance of progressive views on sexuality that contradict historical Christian teachings. In authoritarian theocracies, it has led to cynicism toward clergy, who are viewed as an extension of corrupt and oppressive regimes. In their study of the effects of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, Abdolmohammad Kazemipur and Ali Rezaei find that Iranians have shifted away from communal religious activities promoted and controlled by the government and toward private religious beliefs and practices. When a religious institution loses its social distinctiveness and independence from the state, a drop in popular engagement and participation is likely to follow.
What about the influence of state favoritism on nonfavored religions? I argue that the weakening of the favored religion through official support creates opportunities for growth in rival faiths. Unless they are prohibited from doing so by extreme and pervasive government repression, alternative denominations and religions should benefit from the vacuum created by an increasingly hollow, complacent, and inefficient state-backed church. In the “religious economy,” if demand for religion holds constant but the “product” offered by the dominant state religion is increasingly unattractive, we can expect other religions to grow.
What the Numbers Reveal
To test my theory, I examined data on changes in religious affiliation in 174 countries between 1990 and 2010. I measured state favoritism based on two factors: whether the largest religion in the state was the “official” or established state church, and whether it received exclusive government funding not available to other religions. There were 34 countries in the dataset in which a single religion or religious institution met both criteria. In only 10 (29.4 percent) of those countries did the favored religion perform better than other religions in the country (that is, it gained more adherents or lost fewer adherents). The remaining 24 countries (70.6 percent) saw the relative decline of the favored religion. In contrast, among the remaining 140 countries, 50 percent saw better performance for the largest religion while 50 percent saw better performance for minority religions. In a regression analysis in which I controlled for a host of variables that can influence religious change, I found that both religious establishment and preferential funding were associated with a decline in affiliation with the largest religion and growth in affiliation with minority religions. Overall, I found statistically significant evidence that in countries in which the dominant religion was favored by the government, this religion tended to lose ground relative to other religions.
My research thus suggests that governments that attempt to aid and promote a particular religion may paradoxically harm it. However, we should not hastily conclude that such government interference is inherently harmful and ineffective; some important caveats and considerations are in order.
First, while the effect is negative on average, there is considerable variation across cases. It is possible for a country to elevate a religion through its policies. South Korea’s military dictatorship was effective in promoting both Protestant Christianity and Buddhism from the 1960s to the 1990s, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s pro-Islam policies may have contributed to Türkiye’s desecularization over the past two decades. Studying Romania, one of the most notable cases of religious resurgence in recent decades, the sociologist Malina Voicu found that the construction of government-funded Romanian Orthodox Church houses of worship between 1991 and 2018 was associated with growth in attendance of religious services. It is possible that some forms of state support are more constructive than others. For example, providing block grants for the construction of new houses of worship may be beneficial, while turning a church into a de facto branch of government may be counterproductive. A common thread among success cases seems to be that the favored religion retained operational autonomy from the government, and that it did not become overly reliant on the state as its primary source of revenue.
Second, the religious markets theory on which my research is premised is not without its critics, particularly on the other side of the Atlantic. United Kingdom–based sociologists Steve Bruce and David Voas write: “The idea of a religious seeker, trying a variety of faiths in order to maximize his or her utility, perhaps fitted Californians. It made much less sense in most European countries, where people acquired their faith in the same way that they acquired their nationality and their language: by birth and childhood socialization.”
There is certainly something to this critique. We arrive at religious convictions and identities through a process quite different from that of shopping for cereal or car insurance. But while birth rates and childhood socialization are more important drivers of religious change than adult conversion is, state policies toward religion can also affect socialization. Low enthusiasm for an established church that is perceived as corrupt, irrelevant, or theologically compromised can also inhibit the willingness and ability of parents to bring up children in their faith. As for religious conversion, it is true that religious markets theory may not be very useful for explaining why a Christian would become a Muslim or vice versa. However, it may explain why a born-and-raised Episcopalian might join a Presbyterian church, or why a Brazilian Catholic might become a Pentecostal. In a study of religious congregations in Manhattan from 1949 to 1999, Casey Homan found that an increase in nearby congregations over time led to increased advertising by existing congregations, but only if the new congregations were theologically similar to the existing ones. In other words, an evangelical church appeared to feel competitive pressures from a new evangelical church but not from a new Eastern Orthodox church, a mosque, or a synagogue. This suggests that there is such a thing as a market for religious congregants, but that it occurs primarily within the same religion or religious tradition.
Last, even if official support for a particular religion may not help it attract or retain followers, the state may see such support as desirable for other reasons: the preservation of national culture and history, strengthening the legitimacy of the state, exerting control over doctrine, and the like. The British sociologist David Miller defends what he calls the “liberal establishment” of religion, which combines government support for a national church with a commitment to liberal principles such as freedom of conscience, while keeping church and state organizationally separate. He argues that such a form of establishment encourages national unity and protects against religious extremism, since the doctrines and actions of the state religion cannot deviate too far from the preferences of society’s mainstream. Perhaps this is desirable if the goal is to have a bland, domesticated, broadly acceptable religion. But this vision does not comport with the desires of many serious religious believers, who seek a meaningful, transformative, living faith.
The Burden of State Preference
Most countries today engage in some form of partiality in the realm of religion. My research indicates that two aspects of favoritism—the establishment of an official religion and preferential funding of that religion—tend to achieve an effect that is the opposite of the one intended. On average, state-supported religions tend to lose followers relative to religions that must fend for themselves. It is possible for state policies to bolster a religious institution, but it takes great care to get it right. Policies that preserve the organizational independence of churches and prevent overreliance on state resources are likely to achieve the best results. However, the safest bet for flourishing religious life seems to be a government that is minimally involved in religious affairs. Some of the most religious countries in the world, such as those in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, are also ones that regulate religion the least. It is difficult for a government to be truly impartial with respect to religion, particularly when religious influences have profoundly shaped the country’s history, culture, and institutions. It would be a mistake to attempt to root out all such influence to pursue some utopian vision of perfect fairness. But protecting the free exercise of religion and creating a reasonably fair playing field for religious competition is a recipe for ensuring the vitality of all faiths, including the one cherished by a majority of the nation’s people.
Article Author: Dan Koev
Dan Koev, Ph.D., is professor and chair of the Government, History, and Criminal Justice Department at Regent University, Virginia Beach, Virginia.