“Anyone who regards religion as a marginal factor overlooks a part of the deep structure of our societies.” That is how Sascha Becker, an economics professor at the University of Warwick, summed up a new research review when he spoke to Religion News Service, which reported on it in mid-June 2026.
The review comes from the Rockwool Foundation, a Berlin-based think tank. Its title is “Religion and Economic Growth: What We Know and Why It Matters.” Becker is the lead author, working with Jared Rubin of Chapman University and Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich. They did not run a new experiment. They surveyed a wide range of economic literature, looking at evidence across the centuries and around the globe.
Their argument, as Religion News Service described it, is that religion matters in a secularising Europe less through church attendance than through values built into everyday economic behaviour: education, family size and savings.
Faith schools still shape choices
Education is where Becker sees the clearest case. Religion helped spread literacy because people had to learn to read in order to reach the Bible, and its imprint remains. Many European countries still run faith-based schools, and minority communities often lean on religious institutions.
England is the example the review leans on. Around a third of state schools there carry a faith designation. Most are linked to the Church of England, a substantial number to the Roman Catholic Church and a very small minority to Jewish and Muslim institutions.
“Even quite secular parents may value faith schools because they associate them with a clear ethos, discipline, good behavior and aspiration,” Becker said. He was careful not to oversell it. The evidence is complicated by selection and peer effects, he said, so the point is not that religion automatically produces better schools. It is that religiously rooted institutions can still steer parental choices.
For policymakers, he warned, a secular education policy may look neutral on paper “but can trigger resistance if communities experience it as an attack on identity.” The authors say officials need not endorse any doctrine. They do need to understand the moral worlds in which people decide how large a family to have and where to send their children.
Migration, and where the argument stops
The review also turns to migration and social cohesion. Protests against migration have surfaced across several European countries, often invoking Christianity in disputes over national identity. In the United Kingdom, a movement called Unite the Kingdom has stressed Christianity’s place in British heritage, something many clergy have been wary of endorsing. Meanwhile, groups such as the Jesuit Refugee Service have helped newcomers settle, learn a language and find their way around local services. Muslim networks do similar work. “Understanding religion helps policymakers design integration policies that are neither naïvely multicultural nor simply assimilationist,” Becker said.
Faith does not explain everything, he added. Spain has been more welcoming toward migrants than some neighbours, and Catholic charities and the Church have played a major part in supporting arrivals. Becker put the motive down to economics: “It reflects labor shortages.” The week before the report, Pope Leo XIV had visited Spain and the Canary Islands and met migrants and the groups that rescue them. He urged governments worldwide to share responsibility and to protect people from traffickers.
The researchers also list the downsides. They point to Afghanistan, where women’s absence from the labor force, tied to Taliban thinking on their role, is contributing to a stunted economy. They note that some Christian denominations now stress the environment and urge simpler living, which Becker said “could well impact economic growth.” He suggested believers ask whether it could encourage a different, greener kind of growth rather than hinder it.
He is not convinced that churches carry much ethical weight with those in power today. “The U.S. has a large church attendance, yet it is the most capitalist society,” he said. “There is significant tension there.”
One idea has traveled furthest from its origins. Subsidiarity began in Catholic social teaching, where it meant that higher authorities should support, not replace, families, communities and local associations. The founders of the European Union adopted it, and today it is a foundational legal principle of the EU, under which decisions should be made locally under certain conditions. “So, the religious roots are part of the genealogy,” Becker said, “but the principles now have a broader, pluralist meaning.”
