Economist: MAX WEBER, the great German theorist of religious influence on economics, seems to be gaining more followers by the day. The latest person to posit a religious explanation for the euro crisis (or rather, for the way the euro crisis is being handled) is Emmanuel Macron, France’s economy minister.

Europe’s fault-line, he told a conference in Berlin, was between different forms of Christianity. On one hand, there was the Protestant north, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, a German pastor’s daughter. This was a region where people believed in retribution, and hence took the view that: “Some people failed, some member states…didn’t respect their commitments. They have to pay till the end of their life.” On the other, there was the Catholic (and presumably, Orthodox) south, to which France belonged, culturally if not geographically. In this space, people felt that sins could easily be forgiven: “We failed, we go to church, we explain the situation, and we can start another week, the day after…” The best approach, the minister diplomatically added, was a balance between the two attitudes.

One could, of course, write several doctoral theses, ranging through the entire canon of Christian theology and European sociology, in response to this off-the-cuff remark. It might be relevant, for example, to ponder the fact that Orthodoxy takes a somewhat more charitable view of human sinfulness than do either the Catholic or Protestant readings of Christianity. As with so many cultural stereotypes, the one put forward by Mr Macron isn’t completely false but it can be knocked down by myriad counter-examples. If religion is a determinant, why, one might ask, do politicians in Germany’s Catholic south seem to take an especially harsh view of southern European profligacy?

Here’s a slightly more interesting challenge to the neo-Weberian view. If there is one religious ethos which has shaped the United States, it is surely Protestant. Sam Huntington, the late Harvard University professor who loved to make vast generalisations about geopolitics and culture, described his country as “Anglo-Protestant”, albeit subject to ever-rising Catholic Latino influence.

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