Harnessing Faith: A Productive Approach to Development Action and Policy

Research that connects religion with low demand for public schooling, credit or other “modern” services usually attributes fault to the consumer's faith, not to the service of interest. Accordingly, supposing that the service is inherently good, the argument is made that the object of policy should be the recalcitrant parent or borrower, because there cannot be anything wrong with the (unmarketable) service. This kind of reasoning, more or less sidestepping the idea of consumer rationality and sovereignty, emanates to a considerable extent from adoption of imprecise concepts, absence of robust causal theory, and overreliance on data that are too inappropriate or insufficient to provide useful insight on religion-service interactions. Providing clearer insights are empirical instances demonstrating that religion does not act as a barrier to modernization. One such experience is an education experiment in Chad that originated from an understanding of religion's causal function in schooli