THEIR WORK ethic appears to be alive and well but Protestants are less likely than others to back notions of sharing the benefits.
A new European Central Bank study has also found that Catholics are more likely to favour sharing wealth and to support government intervention in the economy than are Protestants.
Based on data from Swiss cantons of Fribourg (Catholic) and Vaud (Protestant), the study found support for early 20th century German sociologist Max Weber’s theories about the Protestant work ethic.
It also concluded that Weber’s theories apply more widely than thought, including in the choice of political institutions and in explaining income inequality.
In his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published in 1904, Weber argued that Protestants were more likely to regard hard work as a way to salvation and that this encouraged the accumulation of wealth.
He noted the post-Reformation shift of Europe’s economic centre away from Catholic countries such as France, Spain and Italy, toward Protestant countries such as the Netherlands, England, Scotland and Germany.
He also noted that societies which had more Protestants had a more highly developed capitalist economy and that, in societies with different religions, the most successful business leaders were Protestant.
Weber also argued that Catholicism impeded the development of capitalism in the West, as did Confucianism and Buddhism in the East.
In their study published on the ECB website at the weekend but not officially endorsed by it, researchers Christoph Batzen and Frank Betz, said they found that “Protestant municipalities exhibit, clearly, higher income inequality.”
They also found that “relative to Roman Catholicism, Reformed Protestantism has curbed preferences for redistribution and for government intervention in the economy.”
Batzen and Betz concluded that Weber’s work better explained economic development than that of Karl Marx.
“Religion is not just, as Karl Marx would have us believe, ‘People’s Opium’, but can, by its own force, significantly change people’s preferences,” they found.
Meanwhile last week the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace called for “a kind of central world bank” to discipline markets.
In a statement last Friday, following a meeting in Brussels, EU Catholic bishops said the causes of the current financial crisis were structural and mainly rooted in the short-term and very often electorally-motivated political choices.
“These choices often reflect individual behaviour of credit-financed consumerism . . . populism . . . [and] moral relativism,” they said.