On the Disappearance of Religion in American Economics: A Transformation of an Academic Discipline

American economics has undergone several quite significant transformations since the early days in Colonial America, during which time there had been no distinct academic discipline called economics or political economy. The current hegemony of neoclassical economics, which is widely accepted as the mainstream economics, is only a relatively recent phenomenon. In the process of its transformation from being a part of moral philosophy to an independent academic discipline, American economics has shed the characteristic moral and religious influences. That is, American Protestantism has lost its place of influence in economics, and now is largely marginalized from the academy in general. In this paper, we trace the history of how religion in general and American Protestantism in particular have lost their places of influence in academic enquiries, having been largely relegated to the periphery of the academy.