Credit: Aidar Ayazbayev/iStockphoto.
he current expansion of research into Spiritual Capital reflects increasing recognition by scientists of the legitimacy 
of this field of study. It is, in fact, an offshoot of the equally pioneering concept of Social Capital, developed by Professor Robert Putnam, another Templeton grantee. The crossover was inevitable, as Kimon Sargeant, vice president of human sciences at the Templeton Foundation and former director for research in the human sciences at the Metanexus Institute on Religion and Science, relates.
After Putnam’s work had revealed that more than 50 percent of all social capital in the United States derived from religious institutions—churches, synagogues, etc—it became an obvious priority to design research to investigate this phenomenon. “I was working for the Foundation,” recalls Sargeant, “but based at Metanexus, and we put together this initiative where we have three larger grants of $500,000 for about two and a half years and then ten smaller grants of $150,000 over two years.”
The planning meeting for the whole initiative was held in October 2003, at which it was agreed it was too early to establish a ‘lean and mean’ definition of spiritual capital. So it was proposed to fund projects with high standards of methodology, then use their findings over five or ten years to create a tighter definition. So far, 13 Templeton grants have been awarded, administered by the Metanexus Institute, of which the three larger ones have reached completion, with the ten smaller ones running until 2009. Conferences, seminars, and books have also been supported.
Has the project achieved success? “I think,” says Sargeant, “all of them have delivered on what they said they were going to do and have been quite productive.” Less successful was an attempt to create an interaction among the various programs, a later development of the initiative, which he admits did not make quite as much progress as he would have liked. “Individual projects have done an excellent job,” he says, “but in terms of greater clarity on how to define and understand spiritual capital, the jury is still out on that.”
In November 2007, most of the participants met and reported progress. Of the three larger grants now completed, Sargeant comments: “I think the Timur Kuran project on Islam and Robert Woodberry’s project on missionary activity in Africa are especially interesting, partly because they’re covering very different parts of the world and even different historical periods, but also because they’re focusing not simply on religious beliefs but instead on some of the legacy and the institutions that result from certain religious patterns.”
The smaller grants, still in progress, are even more eclectic. “We have a really wide-ranging group of projects. One is interviewing business leaders in China from different religious or philosophical traditions. He is interviewing Communists, agnostics, Confucians, Buddhists, Catholics, and Protestants. This is really groundbreaking research, no one has done anything like this.” This is a reference to the program “Faith and Trust in the Emerging Market Economy in China” being conducted by Professor Fenggang Yang of Purdue University, whose progress report identified a striking problem: “The second most difficult part is to find Communist Party members who are atheists.”
A contrasting program, under another of the small grants, is “The Impact of the Hajj,” an inquiry by Michael Kremer, of Harvard, into the impact of the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. More than 1,600 people have been interviewed and members of the project team have presented preliminary results in seminars at Harvard, the Dubai School of Government, and the London School of Economics, among other prestigious institutions.
Other programs include “Religiosity and Political Culture: Christians, Muslims and Spiritual Capital in Sub-Saharan Africa,” a study of whether various types of Christianity and Islam encourage people to promote trust, fight corruption, and engage in philanthropy and civic affairs; and a study being conducted at University of Cambridge into innovation and the resilience of religion, similar to the behavior commonly observed among commercial firms.
Interest in spiritual capital is clearly growing. A membership organization, the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics and Culture (ASREC), has grown over the past five years from 30 members to 150. The 13 grants are also producing a large number of publications, though the inevitable time lag between completion of research and a publishing house making a book available means that many of them are not yet in print.
What does Sargeant think is the big question in the sphere of spiritual capital? “What are the religious and spiritual dimensions of human life that influence the way the world works and that the social sciences generally overlook?” he responds. “And so part of the aim of Spiritual Capital is to show that there may be some of these areas where at least incorporating an understanding of religious and spiritual capital helps provide a fuller and richer explanation of why things happen the way they do in the world.”
