Economists for the first time managed to demonstrate the connection between religious beliefs and climate

Discussions about the origin of religious beliefs are popular among anthropologists, but the surprisingly well-known hypothesis that unique geographical conditions are the primary source of religiosity has been confirmed by econometric methods. In a joint American-Spanish paper, economists examined a 14th-century ritual of calling rain by the Catholic Church in Murcia, Spain, showing that in this case—and in thousands of others—praying for rain could only be effective in specific climates—and in almost any event ended in rain.

The question of what are the determinants of religious beliefs is entirely within the domain of anthropology. All the more unusual is the work of José-Antoni Espin-Sanchez and Nicolás Ryan of Yale, who, together with Salvador Gil-Zhiyrado of the Spanish University of Murcia, in an article, a preprint of which was published in the NBER series, investigated (by methods purely econometric in form) the practice of the most ancient in typology anthropologists and religious scholars of the rites of calling rain. The work began as a field study of prayers for rain, practiced in Murcia by the Catholic Church since the 14th century, and the prayers of the Murcian priests, beginning at the request of the faithful in case of drought and not ending until the moment when the rain finally stops, are never excessively long: rain really goes.

The authors compared Murcian religious practices with two other well-known examples of the same genus, the Ainu in Japan and the Puyallup Indian tribes around Seattle. In the environment in all three examples, the practice of praying for rain is not common. The paper shows that prayers for rain in these cases are a way to strengthen the authority of religious beliefs: in the design in which they take place, the success of a prayer for rain is practically guaranteed, since long-term observations of climatic conditions in these places demonstrate that short-term droughts never occur there. are not long. Actually, the task of the organizers of such rituals is to resist the demands of believers to begin the ritual as long as possible, since the quick “fulfillment of the request by heaven” sharply strengthens the authority of faith.

However, Espin-Sanchez and his colleagues went a little further, in a less complex technique, comparing the “Murcian phenomenon” with thousands of practices of rituals and prayers for rain recorded by anthropologists with the corresponding climatic conditions. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the assumption put forward by the anthropologist James Fraser back in 1890 is that rituals of this kind significantly strengthen the authority of religion and, probably, in prehistoric periods, it was precisely such “magic” climatic zones that were the centers of the emergence of beliefs that the priestly collectives created in this way were less effective. distributed in surrounding places, – was confirmed. Prayers for rain have been effective where the very expectation of rain is effective.

The study of Espina-Sanchez in itself would be anecdotal if it were not for its significance for anthropologists: the origins of the “original religion”, for example, in prehistoric Egypt, without such works, have the status of a hypothesis that cannot be confirmed or refuted by ordinary anthropological methods. Meanwhile, the question of the “technique” for the emergence of the state and its connection with proto-religious beliefs and rituals is important even outside of the “climatic beliefs” of the 21st century – in calls to action against global climate change (which is prudently not mentioned in the text of Espina-Sanchez and colleagues not a word) it is very easy to see a modern replication of an ancient scheme, but with a significantly longer time scale.

Dmitry Butrin, Tel Aviv