Smith's Contributions to the Religious Market: Brazilian Religious Entrepreneurship Evidence

Abstract

Although market competition may sound unusual in a religious context, in recent years, Brazil has experienced a dynamic religious market characterized by increasing competitiveness among evangelical churches, mainly between the neo-Pentecostal denominations. The notion of a religious market owes much to a little-known chapter of Smith's classic work, The Wealth of Nations. This paper explores possible associations between Smith's reflections and those of contemporary authors in the qualitative study of neo-Pentecostal and entrepreneurial churches in Brazil. In doing so, this paper: i) highlights the relevance of Smith's traditional perspective for the study of the religious phenomenon, including its entrepreneurial manifestation; ii) innovatively suggests a dynamic and cyclical process between the parishioners' economic rationality and the religious agents' activity, and; iii) strengthens and expands the current literature on the rationalized processes of religious behaviour.