A Place for Economics of Religion in Lower-Division Courses

The economics of religion is typically confined to specialized upper-division courses. It belongs in lower-division courses too. Peculiar religious rituals and practices are behaviors that students believe economics cannot explain, which makes them ideal for demonstrating the reach of the economic approach. Economic analyses of such behavior also offer a valuable reversal of the typical lower-division course exercise: instead of finding optimal behavior given an objective function and constraints, students must recover the problem situation and constraints under which behavior that seems like it could not be optimal in fact is.