종교와 사회는 밀접한 관계를 가지고 있다. 그 관계의 전형적인 양태는 종교와 사회가 서로 영향을 주고받는 것이다. 특히 종교가 사회변동에 영향을 미치거나 혹은 사회변동 상황이 종교에 영향을 미치는 현상에 대한 연구는 종교사회학의 가장 중요한 연구과제의 하나이다. 본 논문에서는 종교와 믿음이 경제적 발전에 미치는 영향을 기존의 연구결과를 바탕으로 종합적으로 재정리함을 목적으로 한다. 본 논문의 구성은 제2장에서 주요 이론적 배경을 정리하고 제3장에서 사례연구를 통한 종교와 믿음이 경제적 발전과의 연관관계를 분석한다. 제4장에서 본 논문의 종합적 결론을 제시한다.

Forget investment and savings rates, worker productivity and wage scales to determine which countries will become richer or poorer. What really stimulates economic growth is whether you believe in an afterlife - especially hell. Barro and McCleary have found after analyzing data collected in 59 countries between 1981 and 1999. "Our central perspective is that religion affects economic outcomes mainly by fostering religious beliefs that influence individual traits such as honesty, work ethic, thrift and openness to strangers." "For example, beliefs in heaven and hell might affect those traits by creating perceived rewards and punishments that relate to ``good`` and ``bad`` lifetime behavior," they wrote. Since the German sociologist Max Weber wrote about the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism, social scientists have argued that culture -including religious habits- is part of the complex mix that determines a country`s economic health. What distinguishes the work of Barro and McCleary, some scholars said, is that it uses a sophisticated analysis of a huge set of data to quantify the arguments of anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists. "The study`s important less for what they found than that they looked," said Mark Chaves. "They are not the first to look at this but they are the first to look at this as systemically and as rigorously as they have. For forever, people have been saying that culture matters in analyzing economies." Last year, Sapienza, Zingales and Guiso published a paper that did not compare countries but looked at the relationship between religious beliefs and the attitudes shown to foster economic growth. "On average," they wrote, "religious beliefs are associated with good economic attitudes, where good is defined as conducive to higher per capita income." Barro and McCleary also used data from the World Values Surveys and "I find that belief factors play a major role in economic growth, but here is one of the world`s leading economists saying so," Inglehart said, referring to Barro. "When Weber argued that big breakthroughs in economic growth were in Protestant countries, it was at a time when many cultures were shaped by Protestant institutions. His notion in the broadest sense is that belief factors play a role in economic factors."