How have evangelical Christians organized themselves over time to express their political and social views? Has this coalition remained stable over time, or has it changed? Nathanael Snow, a a PhD candidate in the department of economics at George Mason University discusses how the analytical tools of public choice theory can be applied to the study of the Evangelical Coalition over time to understand the organizational role that religion can play in political life.
As Tony can never resist the opportunity to explore where scholars develop their ideas from, he starts the discussion with an exploration of Nathanael’s background and how he came to blend public choice theory with economics. Nathanael reveals that he was inspired to follow the path of economic study while serving as a missionary serving inner city youth and teaching economics. This developed into a pursuit for a Ph.D. at George Mason University where student are encouraged to explore unique and non-traditional topics as economic graduate students. His marriage of public choice theory to the study of religious organizations was prompted by a quip made by one of his professors during a graduate seminar, and that becomes the focus of our discussion today. Public choice theory is then explained as a subfield of economics that applies the analytical tools of micro-economics to the world of politics, imposing the assumptions of methodological individualism, analytical egalitarianism, and self-interest onto the actions and decisions of people in the political realm. As religious individuals are also people with political preferences that seek to get those goals realized in public policy, Nathanael reasoned that this theoretical perspective would be an ideal one for examining the changing nature of the Evangelical Coalition.
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