Analysing religious denominations as firms that compete in a marketplace has been at the centre of the “economics of religion” approach. What has been ignored, however, is whether the same isomorphism (“churches as firms”) is accepted by the regulatory institutions themselves. By relying on the theory of the social control of business
and the institutional choices for controlling the dangers of dictatorship and disorder, we evaluate these claims. The paper examines the relationship between indicators of business regulation and religious regulation across different levels of socioeconomic development. The analysis finds that in a given country the extensiveness of religious regulation closely mirrors the extensiveness of business regulation. In other words, churches are treated as firms not just for analytical purposes, but also in practice. We conclude that the choices for regulatory institutions are not differentiated by sectors. This allows us to generalise about the modes of regulatory governance.
