Religion and the Social Economy

Abstract

This chapter presents “elective affinities” between, on the one hand, strands in contemporary religiosity that seek to rediscover or reinterpret older religiosities in a contemporary context and idiom (e.g. liberation theology, multi-faith activity, the SBNR - spiritual but not religious - phenomenon, and the new monasticism), and, on the other hand, the contemporary phenomenon of the social economy (social business, social enterprise, and the sharing economy). As the social economy occupies a space between the values of capitalism and the strategies of socialism, rooted in a civil society that strives to maintain a freedom from both the economy and the state, so these religious phenomena occupy a space between secularisation and sacralisation, between a separation of church and state and a subsumption of state under church. They are all concerned with social justice now (rather than after the revolution), and bear witness to a potential for religious and societal transformation.