When Faith Meets Markets: Religiosity, Capitalism and Sustainability in the United States

This study advances understanding of how Catholics and Protestants in the United States reconcile capitalist ideology, religious commitment, and sustainability orientation, a triadic relationship largely unexplored in existing scholarship. By integrating System Justification Theory with multidimensional approaches to religiosity, we demonstrate that Economic System Justification and Fair Market Ideology operate through distinct cognitive and motivational logics with divergent implications for sustainability. Religiosity emerges as a demographically contingent moderator, reshaping how market ideology translates into sustainability attitudes differently across age cohorts and income strata. The study extends System Justification Theory by establishing the theoretical independence of defensive system-preserving motivations from proactive market beliefs, while reconceptualizing religious commitment as a conditional mechanism activated under specific biographical and material circumstances rather than a uniform force. Crucially, spiritual resources retain capacity to reorient believers’ navigation of economic participation and sustainability responsibility, illuminating how moral frameworks rooted in religious tradition counterbalance market logic’s encroachment upon value systems. These insights offer pathways for faith communities, sustainability practitioners, and policymakers seeking to foster sustainable attitudes through demographically calibrated interventions that leverage the ethical scaffolding religious commitment provides.