Books
Reframing Religions as Platforms
An aerial view shows the temporary camp set up for Hindu devotees at the Sangam, the confluence of the Rivers Ganges, Yamuna, and mythical Saraswati, during the Maha Kumbh Mela festival in Prayagraj, India, on January 16, 2025. Photo by Sanjay Kanojia/Nurphoto via Getty Images
By Swayam Bagaria
From January 13 to February 26, 2025, India was home to the Maha Kumbh Mela. The Kumbh Mela is a gigantic pilgrimage event held every 12 years in which people from across the country congregate at the confluence of three holy rivers, Ganga, Yamuna, and the now-vanished Saraswati, to bathe in its waters. The Maha Kumbh Mela (Great Kumbh Mela) is a singular version of the Kumbh Mela that is held every 144 years (12 cycles of 12 years each), in which the already-salutary celestial alignment that occasions the Kumbh is even rarer and grander. To get a sense of the scale and grandiosity of the Maha Kumbh Mela, the government of India estimated the number of visitors during the Maha Kumbh Mela to be 660 million. 2,700 cameras installed across strategic locations, with all of them dedicated to real-time crowd analytics, were used to estimate the complexities of random human footfall behavior and prevent stampedes. Even if this estimate is somewhat bloated, as some suspect, half of that number would put the figure at 330 million, which would still be around 150 times the number of people who had undertaken the next biggest pilgrimage, the hajj, in 2024. Numerical precision aside, the scale is astounding to say the least.
What brings so many people together from a country as diverse as India to descend to a makeshift pop-up city that spans 4,000 hectares? There is, of course, the broader religious goal for most people who undertake the pilgrimage of the Kumbh Mela, which is to take the holy dip in the purgative waters of the river. The history of India evolved as a sacred geography of networked pilgrimage routes, and the Kumbh Mela honors the riverine system of Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati, the main triad around which this network grew. However, over time, I have found that, while this answer (as the only available answer) is not wrong, it is aseptic for many reasons, not least of which might be that it fails to capture the wide array of practices and purposes to which the event of the Kumbh Mela is put.
Government bodies consider the Kumbh Mela as an occasion to promote religious tourism and have an outsized return on the fiscal investment that the regional state government makes in setting up the core and peripheral infrastructure for the event. Trade bodies estimate that the commercial value and business generated by the Maha Kumbh is close to Rs 3 lakh crore (USD 36 billion) in economic activity through goods and services. Urban designers see in the Kumbh Mela a prototype for the way in which a temporary makeshift city can be flexibly assembled and disassembled at rapid speed. Consumer brands use the prime outdoor advertising spaces at the Kumbh Mela to provide a high degree of visibility to their products at a relatively low cost. Public health organizations treat the Kumbh Mela as an organically available laboratory site to pilot prospective interventions for studying the vectors of disease transmission. Even the holy dip, which is treated as the sacred undercurrent by the somber and sober-minded, is undertaken by most people in such a ludic, even unceremonious, way as to defeat any likelihood that the dip itself is the sole trigger for the magnitude of the event. The innocence of foraging for a simple transcendent glue to aggregate all these cross-purposes is touching but insufficient. But what then binds all these pieces of the Kumbh Mela together, and what does the Kumbh Mela, as a result, become? Paul Seabright’s The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People might provide an answer to both questions.1
Religions, Seabright argues, are not just corpuses of transmitted doctrine or clusters of ritual practice but platforms in the most profanely contemporary sense of the term. By “platforms” Seabright is referring to all those hybrid organizations that intermediate and bring together otherwise unconnected and unrelated people. Rather than metaphysical arcana, Seabright regularly reaches for the mundane details and insights in the economic and organizational literature on nightclubs, Uber, pizza parlors, Instagram, housing societies, shopping centers, corporations, and business houses to say something meaningful about the organizational forms of contemporary religion. Putting all these entities into the same container as religion might make an earnest theologian wince, but all these entities share certain features as platforms that allow for such cross-referential purloining of practical and intellectual insight.
Platforms are in the business of facilitating relationships between people; they do so in a manner that would otherwise be difficult to do in the absence of those platforms; they offer a bundle of services to keep and retain the interests of their participants; they recover a portion of their operating costs by appropriating the value of the relationships that they help to bring about; and leaving these platforms would entail removing oneself from participating in the social and network benefits that accrue from their lock-in effects.
The Divine Economy by Paul Seabright
To understand where Seabright is coming from, it is helpful to take a small digression to the discipline within which he is immersed, that of economics. The standard framework for understanding religion in the discipline of economics is inspired by Laurence Iannaccone, who conceptualized religion as being akin to club goods.2 Club goods are goods that benefit, up to a limit, from an increase in the inputs (participation) of other people. Think of a club that allows for membership but only up to a certain point such that it offers the social benefits of accessing membership without diluting its value by making it too widely available for free-riders. The costs associated with membership can increase the value of the experience, but only up to a certain point. Religions, for Iannacone, function in the same way. For Iannacone, to access a religious experience, one cannot dilute participation in it too much as then the costs associated with maintaining that religious belief reduces, which will eventually dilute the value of the good (religious participation) associated with it. So paradoxically, for Iannacone, a more stringent organization might ensure more commitment from its followers than a less stringent organization.
One may rightly ask why this specific formulation of religion is necessary? The answer in short is that it helps explain a particular sociological fact: that places with more religious competition, such as the United States, have a less secularized population than places with less religious competition, such as Europe. This sparse model birthed the supply side account of secularization, and it has functioned as an alternative and a provocative analytical framework alongside other sociological accounts of modernity and its impact on religion.
One of the problems with the club goods model of religion is, ironically, the lack of religion in it. What about religious belief, ritual, supernatural commitments, theology, history? Is it not absurd that there are no criteria that distinguish a religious organization from, let’s say, the Harvard Club of Boston? Irrespective of where one’s intellectual commitment lies, this oversight seems jarring. It is relative to this argument that Seabright’s intervention is helpfully located.
Seabright builds on some of the same economic intuitions but reframes religions as platforms instead of club goods. One of the primary things that this reformulation allows him to do is to reintroduce the “religion” in the study of religion but through the backdoor. The circularity of this move is not lost on me, but it is not that absurd if one thinks of the way in which Seabright introduces religion. One can think of this as a skeletal or a building-block understanding of religion that differentiates religious platforms from other kinds without diminishing the platform-like features of religions. This is a conceptual map of religion filtered through the frameworks of the disciplines of cognitive psychology, micro-economics and evolutionary anthropology. In a succession of chapters, Seabright draws on evidence from these disciplines to make a series of interlocking arguments about religious belief, ritual, myth, mission, doctrine, the supernatural and other constituting blocks of religion that allows one to understand the precise stakes of each in the operation of religions as platforms.
Consider the concept of religious belief. There is often an underlying assumption that religious beliefs are first-order beliefs that inform the way in which we view the world. However, in most cases, human beings work with incompletely worked out beliefs. If we were to work out all the subsequent consequences of a deeply held belief, then we might realize that we would have to drastically change our lives to accommodate the full range of ramifications associated with that belief.
A rudimentary simplified example would be the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the rather low number of those practitioners who believe that the wine, if taken to a laboratory, would test positive for hemoglobin. One may say that such a simplification disregards the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accidents within which the act of transubstantiation becomes intelligible. Seabright would probably agree but would then enquire about the scope of the other practical realities of a person’s life that such a metaphysical framework illuminated. Is this specific belief about wine circumscribed, context specific to the liturgy, or simply orthogonal to the daily conduct of life? The answer may vary depending on whether one is a theologian, an anthropologist, a historian, a polemicist, a believer, a non-believer, an insider, an outsider or what have you. Whatever the answer is, what matters more elementarily, for Seabright, is that in most cases we hold our beliefs, including and especially religious beliefs, unevenly, lightly, and with a measured enchantment.
In short, our beliefs often hit up against the intransigence of our ordinary and daily engagement with our surrounding world, and we can only quip along with Jean Pouillon, “It is only the nonbeliever who believes that the believer believes.”3 Seabright wants to argue that even doctrines and creeds, that could otherwise become sclerotic, are, by design, ambiguous enough and flexible in their application, so that the set of associated beliefs can be held within a lot of margin.
This has practical consequences for the ways in which religious organizations function, as they rarely expect new recruits to fully commit to the beliefs that the congregant leaders might espouse as doctrine. The only expectation is acceptance: “Accepting doesn’t require believing, and believing is optional in practice for most members, most of the time (even while it passionately preoccupies some other members). It’s only after joining that most members start to shift their beliefs in the direction of the religion’s doctrines—and they do it because it comes naturally to them, not because their membership requires it” (127).
What allows Seabright to argue for this position is a combination of insights about the evolution of epistemic vigilance in humans, the minimally counterintuitive nature of most religious beliefs, compartmentalized thinking, and the lax enforcement of belief standardization within religious organizations. These arguments from the adjacent disciplines are certainly not uncontested truths, but they are sufficiently robust insights from which to understand the actual operation of religious belief within contemporary religious organizations.
Belief is less a switch that turns on and off and more like a sliding scale that runs from acceptability on one end to a more encompassing metaphysical buy-in on the other.
In such a framework, it is a very different task to understand the content and spread of religious beliefs as they are distributed in a religious population than it is to understand the elaborate theology behind the belief. The latter might be thought of as the cognitive extravagances (something for which human minds are primed) of a very select few within the organization that are otherwise redundant for the actual practice of recruiting people, maintaining membership, and running the organization. Or the theological resonance might be present but only in pianissimo. In either case, belief is less a switch that turns on and off and more like a sliding scale that runs from acceptability on one end to a more encompassing metaphysical buy-in on the other. Most people lie somewhere in between with the newer congregants often being more skewed towards the former.
Such differentiated and loosely held systems of belief are a lot more advantageous for ensuring the salience of identity-affirming organizations like those belonging to religions than the details of an elaborate theology. It is here that the premium that Seabright puts on the identification of religions as platforms becomes important. For him, all the building blocks of religions (ritual, myth, belief, ideas about the supernatural) are adapted so that they ultimately scaffold the primary identity of the religious organization as a platform that must compete and thrive with other similar organizations in the world. This overall stance of treating religions as platforms that need to compete is perhaps a consequence of Seabright’s disciplinary location in economics, but I don’t think it is completely off the empirical mark.
In short, religions do function as platforms especially in the contemporary world. Whether they always did or not seems to be an open question for Seabright. In some sense, religions have always been platforms given that all religions have had some requirement to persuade people to participate in them. But their resemblance to modern day platforms might have grown with time given the necessity for religions to adapt to more complex forms of social organization and this somewhat insouciant world that privileges an increased differentiation of spheres of value. Perhaps, religious platforms need to keep using strategies to expand their portfolio of services with time. Seabright does not provide any finality about this question of temporality. I will leave it to the historians to carp about details of the several case studies sprinkled throughout the book and to test for historical generalizability and the temporal arc of Seabright’s thesis.
As a person who is trained in anthropology, I should be skeptical of such wide-ranging comparative and historical claims, but as a person who also does not like to bear the burden of being a card-carrying anthropologist, I find the contributions of Seabright’s book refreshing. It is a lot more illuminating of the boring, routine and banal operations and strategies through which religious organizations are sustained or disappear. As someone who has always cultivated a healthy dose of suspicion for the metaphysically extravagant in favor of entraining my attention towards the daily dullness of phenomenon, my preference is to notice the more nonchalant and elementary concerns and instincts that often drive our imaginative legerdemain.
A deflationary stance, such as Seabright’s, reminds me of the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s quip against the archanthropologist of the nineteenth century and famous Victorian intellectual tastemaker, James Frazer. In his reading of The Golden Bough, Frazer’s widespread compendium of magical and ritual practices from across the world, Wittgenstein sees Frazer as being susceptible to a relentless drive to extrapolate universal symbolic overtures from the minutiae of a ritual, such as the Irish Beltane fire festival, to provide some explanatory relief for the existential and emotional import that such rituals might have in the present moment. In Frazer’s reading, the example of the Beltane fire festival becomes a concrete historical residual of a more abstract and universal drama of the “dying and reviving god” that, in some form or another, was present in most of the different cultures of the world. For Wittgenstein, Frazer had to self-consciously become oblivious to a lot of contextual depth in which the Beltane fire festival was being undertaken and go through a lot of intellectual gymnastics to make the “dying and reviving god” the primary explanation for a ritual, the mechanics of which simultaneously seem too ordinary and too opaque for such a reduction. In ignoring his own explanation as a chimerical “language game” that can trap the person in its own allure, Frazer was committing the same intellectual sin that he was finding in the people whose lore he was so successfully documenting—he was thinking superstitiously.4
I find Wittgenstein’s caution against the superstitious thinking of the anthropologist that tends to add undue excitement to otherwise ordinary phenomenon as being similar in spirit to Seabright’s warning against the metaphysical adventurism of the theologian that tends to exaggerate the intensity of religious practices and commitment of ordinary participants in religious organizations.
To return to the event with which this piece began, the Kumbh Mela almost seems like an ideal type of the kind of religious platform that Seabright writes about: the event gathers in the same space the entire network of organizations of ascetics in India, Hindus belonging to a range of distinct regional customs and traditions, service providers, state government officials, and regional religious leaders; it does so at a scale, immersed in the layered history of a specific site, and through a medium, the “holy dip” at the confluence of the rivers, that is comparable to no other religious occasion in India; it becomes the site for a wide variety of vendors to offer services and goods for consumption to the massive incoming hordes; it provides an occasion for different entities such as state government, consumer brands, ascetic organizations, and service providers to invest in its potential through time, effort and money; and it allows for participation in an event with a degree of exposure that is unimaginable otherwise. The collective practice of taking the holy dip in the all-important confluence of the three rivers is not a belief that makes all the other activities at the Kumbh peripheral and superfluous. Rather it is a ritual practice and a religious commitment, the acceptance of which affirms and allows for one’s own presence and identity at an event, the magnitude of which is by all measures colossal and astonishing.
By allowing the reader to discern the taste for narrative behind the theology, the distributed effervescence and social bonding behind the ritual, the acceptance and epistemic vigilance behind the religious belief, the suspension of our ordinary perceptual habits behind the awe and enchantment, and the expanding loyalty programs behind the congregational continuity, Seabright gives us a characteristically modern take on religion by allowing us to appreciate its shapeshifting commercial and organizational forms as well as its stubborn and persistent desire to remain true to its own convictions about its own past.
Notes:
- Paul Seabright, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People (Princeton University Press, 2024). Page numbers are provided in parentheses.
- Laurence R. Iannaccone, “Why Strict Churches Are Strong?” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994): 1180–1211.
- Qtd. in Marshall Sahlins, The New Science of the Enchanted World: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity (Princeton University Press, 2023), 13.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Mythology in Our Language: Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, ed. Giovanni da Col and Stephan Palmié; trans. Stephan Palmié (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Swayam Bagaria is Assistant Professor of Hindu Studies at Harvard Divinity School. His research explores the dynamics of multidimensional and compositional belief networks, especially spiritual and religious beliefs, in contemporary societies with a focus on India.
Please follow our Commentary Guidelines when engaging in discussion on this site.
