The paradigm of rational choice: the regulated market and religious pluralism

The theory of religious economies' advanced by Rodney Stark, Roger Finke and Larry Iannaccone has received scant attention from Latin American academia. Few local works have assessed their arguments carefully and evaluated them according to their own definitions and presuppositions. In this article, I review their main ideas regarding rational choice, the dynamics of the religious market and its consequences for religious pluralism. This discussion is particularly important since their new definition of 'rational choice' is virtually unknown locally, and their ideas about the religious market have been - more often than not - understood from the perspective of Peter Berger, whose position stands in sharp contrast to their own. Calling attention to the degree of regulation of religious economies, the authors show that these economies are not defined solely in terms of 'monopoly' or 'market,' but that there is actually a continuum of possibilities.