Quantifying the Harm of Religious Restrictions
Written by Christos A. Makridis |
Tuesday, October 11, 2022
A mountain of empirical research demonstrates that religious attendance and participation benefits health and well-being. My research offers evidence that Covid restrictions on religious communities have had adverse effects.
My newly published research in the European Economic Review finds that the introduction of Covid-related restrictions on houses of worship led to a substantial decline in subjective well-being and an increase in social isolation among religious adherents relative to non-religious people.
Using a sample of 50,000 Americans surveyed between 2020 and 2021, I find that the adoption of these restrictions reduced current life satisfaction and made it more probable that religious people would isolate themselves. These effects remained after controlling for demographics, income, political affiliation, industry, and occupation—and they wiped away nearly half of the life-satisfaction advantage that religious people generally enjoy over the non-religious. Limits on exactly how many people can gather were associated with more harm than were percentage caps on occupancy.
Further, my research finds no public-health benefits to these restrictions—they did not limit the spread of Covid infections or deaths, on average. This finding joins a large body of empirical literature identifying adverse economic effects, no public-health benefits, and dreadful benefit–cost ratios for Covid restrictions. Some evidence showed an association between the restrictions and a reduction in Covid in the early months of the pandemic, but as sample sizes grew, these benefits disappeared.
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A Better Illustration of Spiritual Blindness
You’re missing something that is obvious to everyone around you. That’s spiritual blindness. You and I can function in life, and because we can, we don’t notice our blindness to our true condition. We go through life ignorant of the depths and extent of our sin. We cannot see it. Sin is blinding. By nature it fools us, and when we’ve sinned for a long time in the same way, we become less and less able to see it in all its ugliness.
Every pastor, every biblical counselor has talked to a counselee that really couldn’t see his sin very accurately. You’ve patiently showed him how he’s hurting his marriage, how he’s not fulfilling his biblical role, how he’s not loving his wife as Christ loves the church, and he’s not seen it. He refuses your counsel. He doesn’t own his sin. He rejects blame. It’s difficult to communicate the biblical concept of spiritual blindness—that we don’t see our sin very clearly. Sin deceives us to its existence (Heb 3:12-13), and we want to be deceived about it.
In this life we will never have 20/20 vision about our own sin. The Laodicean church shows us that.Revelation 3:17 (ESV) For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.
Did the Laodicean church think that everything was okay while in fact, everything was radically wrong? Did they really believe that things were A-Ok when they were really wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked? Yes they did. So do you. And so do I (Cf. Mt 7:3-5).
So what illustration can a biblical counselor use to communicate our tendency to be spiritually blind? Most use physical blindness which works, but has limitations. One, a physically blind person knows they are physically blind; a spiritually blind person often does not know they are spiritually blind. Two, physical blindness as an illustration is all or nothing, but there can be degrees of spiritual blindness.
Protanopia or deuteranopia are types of color blindness. With protanopia you cannot see the color red (1% of men) and with deuteranopia you cannot see the color green (5% of men). Most commonly a colorblind person struggles to differentiate between reds and greens. What is life like for the colorblind?
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Corporate Social Responsibility and its Newest Version: ESG
Written by Mark W. Hendrickson |
Monday, August 22, 2022
To get swept up in the latest CSR or ESG fad is bad business. By pursuing partisan political goals instead of traditional business goals, business leaders offend some consumers, demoralize or anger some employees, and poorly serve their shareholders. Since consumers, employees, and shareholders are the members of society that a business affects most directly, it follows that sacrificing their welfare in the name of certain activists’ cause hurts society. In practice, ESG can be very antisocial.What is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)? Wikipedia defines CSR as “a form of … private business self-regulation which aims to contribute to societal goals of a philanthropic, activist, or charitable nature.” That seems rather vague, even amorphous. As Wikipedia acknowledges, “A wide variety of definitions have been developed but with little consensus.”
Investopedia says that CSR “helps a company be socially accountable to itself, its stakeholders, and the public” and that CSR helps companies be aware of their impact “on all aspects of society, including economic, social, and environmental.” Once again, the very definition of CSR seems fuzzy, even amorphous.
The basic problem is that the concept of CSR is highly subjective. It all depends on what any particular advocate of CSR expects or wants corporations to do for the alleged betterment of society. What tends to distinguish the most vocal advocates of CSR is that they generally operate outside of the corporations that they are trying to influence. In fact, most of them have no experience at business. They prefer to tell businesses what they should do.
Traditionally, in our (mostly) free-market economic system, corporations have been deemed to have several sets of stakeholders—people with a direct connection to the activities of the corporation. These stakeholders include the corporation’s customers, its shareholders (owners), its employees, and its suppliers, distributors, lenders, etc.
CSR activists reject such a circumscribed, well-defined list of stakeholders. They argue that “society” itself is a stakeholder, and then they appoint themselves spokespersons for society, presuming to tell corporations how they should alter their business practices, revise their product lines, allocate their capital, and so on. If you agree with the political objectives of CSR activists, you might support the activists’ assertions that they are legitimate stakeholders in the corporation’s activities. If, on the other hand, it seems fishy to you that people who don’t own a business or work for that business should have as much or more say about corporate policies than the business’s shareholders, customers, and employees, then you would be inclined to view CSR activists as intrusive meddlers.
Activists play hardball. They often intimidate corporate leaders into making concessions using threats of bad publicity. One wonders, in these cases, where the legal line between free speech and extortion lies. Clearly, outside activists have little respect for the property rights of the legal owners of the corporation when they attempt to hijack a corporation to promote their favored political goals.
The current guise adopted by the CSR folks is called ESG: Environmental, Social, Governance scores. ESG has become a blunt instrument used to raise the costs of targeted businesses and sometimes to steer capital away from them.
In the area of the environment, activists and elite money managers tend not to focus on pollution. Indeed, that would be mostly superfluous, given the strict environmental regulations with which American businesses must comply. Instead, their scoring system penalizes both businesses and state governments for the “sin” of using or developing fossil fuels. Thus, ESG scores give states such as West Virginia lower scores of creditworthiness, even though their finances are in order and their bond-ratings high. And companies that produce fossil fuels, or even those companies that deal with fossil-fuel companies, are given low scores designed to discourage anyone from lending capital to them. In other words, activists try to asphyxiate such companies by denying access to the financial oxygen of capital.
ESG is an even bigger farce when it claims to seek “social improvements.” Today, many American citizens are struggling under soaring gasoline prices and rising heating and cooling costs due to the anti-fossil fuel policies of the Biden administration and its ESG allies. Perversely, ESG activists use low social scores to hamstring the very companies that could produce the energy that Americans so desperately need. If anyone deserves low social scores, it would be the ESG advocates who are crippling the production of fossil fuels that Americans so badly need.
As for governance, pressures from the self-anointed ESG graders may cause corporate leaders to misgovern their companies to the detriment of shareholders, employees, and customers. Two prominent examples of the danger posed by ESG to sound corporate governance are last year’s decision by Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred to move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta (taking a partisan position on a Georgia election law and thereby alienating many fans) and this year’s fiasco at Disney.
The Disney CEO declared that his company opposed a new Florida law that prohibits the teaching of sexual identity to children before the fourth grade. Regardless of how one feels about a particular law, it is poor corporate governance for a corporation to take an official stance on contentious moral issues. Inevitably, some customers are on one side, others on the other side. The same with employees and shareholders. Consequently, every time corporate leaders take an official corporate position on some controversial issue, they foolishly and gratuitously alienate a significant percentage of their legitimate stakeholders. And for what? To placate outside activists who often have zero actual stake in the corporation. CEOs should no more declare that their corporations are on one side or the other of a political controversy than to say the company officially supports a specific church or political party. The wise and respectful approach is for the company to remain officially neutral while encouraging its stakeholders to follow their own conscience in deciding which laws and initiatives to support and whether to do so privately or publicly.
Bottom line: A corporation can’t be all things to all people. To survive and to prosper, corporations need to focus on satisfying their customers and those to whom they have fiduciary and moral responsibilities, i.e., their shareholders and employees. To get swept up in the latest CSR or ESG fad is bad business. By pursuing partisan political goals instead of traditional business goals, business leaders offend some consumers, demoralize or anger some employees, and poorly serve their shareholders. Since consumers, employees, and shareholders are the members of society that a business affects most directly, it follows that sacrificing their welfare in the name of certain activists’ cause hurts society. In practice, ESG can be very antisocial.
Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson is a retired adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with the Institute for Faith and Freedom at Grove City College. Used with permission.Related Posts:
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Ten Reasons Why Church Membership Is Biblical
Paul called Christians to bear with one another (Eph. 4:2), sing truth to one another (Eph. 5:19), forgive one another (Col. 3:13), teach and admonish one another (Col. 3:16), care for one another (1 Cor. 12:25), serve one another (Gal. 5:13), show hospitality toward one another (1 Pet. 4:9), and love one another (1 Pet. 4:8). Are these primarily ambiguous Christians? No, they’re not. They belong to the house church at Ephesus and the house church at Colosse and the house church at Corinth. Who are you responsible to teach and admonish? To show hospitality toward? To care for? To bear the burdens of? To sing to? To serve and edify? The context of these letters is instructive: we are called to practice the “one another” commands with those who belong to our church.
Have you ever heard a professing Christian say, “I don’t need to join a church to follow Jesus. Church membership isn’t even biblical!” Such a person would require a verse that says, “Thou shalt join a local church as a member”—and there’s not such a verse.
Is church membership biblical? Yes. The reason is that the biblical nature of church membership is established from a variety of passages and considerations. Here’s a cumulative case of ten reasons why church membership is biblical.
First, the New Testament letters were written to organized churches. People were to gather and hear the words of the apostles who exhorted and taught them. What evidence is there of organized saints? Think about the opening of Paul’s letters.
Paul wrote Philippians to “all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi” (Phil. 1:1). This is a group in the Philippian church. He also mentioned “the overseers and deacons” at Philippi (1:1). These were church officers. This pair of terms means there was church government! The presence of church government suggests both leadership and an organized body of believers.
Paul wrote letters to the church in Corinth (1 Cor. 1:2; 2 Cor. 1:1), the churches of Galatia (Gal. 1:2), and the church in Thessalonica (1 Thess. 1:1; 2 Thess. 1:1). If you were not part of the churches in these places, you wouldn’t be reading those letters. Paul wrote his letters to recognized bodies of believers who assembled together and belonged to one another.
Second, there are reports in the New Testament of people being counted and added. We can see such reports, for example, in the book of Acts and in 1 Timothy.
In Acts 2:41, “So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.” In Acts 16:5, “So the churches were strengthened in the faith, and they increased in numbers daily.”
People were added to the church. This involves a formal recognition. People were not just being baptized and then disappearing in their own individual pursuit of Jesus. People were being incorporated, added to those who professed to know and follow Christ.
In 1 Timothy 5:9, “Let a widow be enrolled if she is not less than sixty years of age, having been the wife of one husband…” Apparently this church kept a record of particular church widows. This record reported the names of those who met certain criteria.
Third, elders are called to shepherd a particular flock. Elders were not tasked with shepherding random flocks. They had oversight over particular people.
In 1 Peter 5:2 we read, “Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you…” In Hebrews 13:17, the leaders are those who “are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account.”
Who makes up this flock? Anybody who would show up to an assembly? Surely not. How do you know who to shepherd? Who are the leaders responsible for? Whose souls are they entrusted with?
There is an understanding in these passages that a flock is under the oversight of its leaders, and a “church member” is our phrase for someone who belongs to that flock.
Fourth, the practice of excommunication involves removal from something you belong to. Several passages confirm this. We will consider words from Matthew’s Gospel and from 1 Corinthians.
In Matthew 18:17, the church must treat an unrepentant sinner as “a Gentile and a tax collector,” which means as an unbeliever. In 1 Corinthians 5:2, Paul is speaking about the unrepentant person when he says, “Let him who has done this be removed from among you.” Later in that same chapter, he writes, “Purge the evil person from among you” (1 Cor. 5:13).
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