Religion is big business. Just how big? A new study, published Wednesday by a father-daughter researcher team, says religion is bigger than Facebook, Google and Apple — combined.

The article in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion said that the annual revenues of faith-based enterprises — not just churches but hospitals, schools, charities and even gospel musicians and halal food makers — is more than $378 billion a year. And that’s not counting the annual shopping bonanza motivated by Christmas.

Georgetown University’s Brian Grim and the Newseum’s Melissa Grim — in a study sponsored by an organisation called Faith Counts, which promotes the value of religion — produced a 31-page breakdown of all the ways religion contributes to the US economy.

The largest chunk of that $378bn tally comes from faith-based health-care systems. Religious groups run many of the hospitals in the United States; Catholic health systems alone reportedly account for 1 in 6 hospital beds in the country.

Then there are churches and congregations themselves. Based on prior censuses of US bodies of worship, the Grims looked at 344,894 congregations, from 236 different religious denominations (217 of them Christian, and others ranging from Shinto to Tao to Zoroastrian). Collectively, those congregations count about half the American population as members. The average annual income for a congregation, the study said, is $242,910.

Most of that income comes from members’ donations and dues, meaning Americans give $74.5bn to their congregations per year, the study said.

Religious charities also contribute to the economy. By far the largest faith-based charity, according to the study, is Lutheran Services of America, with an annual operating revenue of about $21bn. The study counted 17 more faith-based charities, all among Forbes’s 50 biggest charities in America, with revenues ranging from $300 million (Cross International) to $6.6bn (YMCA USA).

Almost all the charities are Christian, except for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, with an annual operating revenue of $400m.

Religious revenues also include faith-based colleges and universities, where 2m students pay more than $46.7bn in tuition annually, the study said. The tally includes tuition revenues for religious elementary through high schools as well, plus the Christian book industry, sales of Christian music, the Christian cable networks EWTN and CBN and the $1.9bn halal food industry that caters to faithful Muslim consumers.

The study counted $12.5bn in annual sales of traditional kosher foods, but not the $300bn in food sold that has a kosher certification but, like everything from Oreos to Coca-Cola, is generally purchased by non-Jewish consumers.

The study suggested all sorts of other ways one could count the contribution of religion to the US economy - the revenues of faith-linked businesses such as Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, the box office profits of religious blockbuster movies such as “Heaven Is for Real,” even the household income ofms of Americans who run their financial lives guided by their faiths.

But sticking just to the direct profits of faith, religion comes out as highly lucrative - a larger chunk of the country’s $16 trillion GDP, the Grims pointed out, than many giant corporations.

Bloomberg-The Washington Post Service

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2016