You'll never walk alone: Loneliness, religion, and politico-economic transformation

Abstract

The rise of subversive religious beliefs has been recently documented as related to the politico-economic radicalization of places that feel left behind. When is the traditional local religious institution so socio-economically inefficient in providing hope for “not walking alone” to become substituted by subversive religious beliefs on the market for hope? This article suggests a detailed methodology, linking micro and macro levels, that starts from the quantification of the individual gain from religion as a source for well-being by providing the feeling of “not walking alone.” This micro gain is next used: (i) to evaluate a religious institution in terms of the social welfare that it generates, and (ii) to monitor this religious institution for losing its market to subversive religious beliefs, related to radical politico-economic transformations. To illustrate this methodology, I analyze the socio-economic efficiency of the Church of England as a predictive tool for the Brexit vote. Related Articles: Gainous, Jason, and Bill Radunovich. 2008. “Religion and Core Values: A Reformulation of the Funnel of Causality.” Politics & Policy 33(1): 154–80. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2005.tb00213.x. Giugni, Marco, and Maria T. Grasso. 2016. “How Civil Society Actors Responded to the Economic Crisis: The Interaction of Material Deprivation and Perceptions of Political Opportunity Structures.” Politics & Policy 44(3): 447–72. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12157/abstract. Temple, Luke, Maria T. Grasso, Barbara Buraczynska, Sotirios Karampampas, and Patrick English. 2016. “Neoliberal Narrative in Times of Economic Crisis: A Political Claims Analysis of the U.K. Press, 2007–14.” Politics & Policy 44(3): 553–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12161.