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

Abstract

AbstractThe 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 ArticlesGainous, 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.