In my previous post, “A Free Market for Religion,” I chided the Acton Institute’s Dylan Pahman for endorsing a market-based approach to religion which, on its face, appears agnostic about the truth of any religion. By a pure market measure, the religion which best supplies the spiritual-existential demands of the most people at the lowest “cost” (however defined) would presumably be the best (or the most “efficient” — which is typically the measure of “best” for most economists). Whether Pahman himself is agnostic about the true religion is another matter. My suspicion is that he isn’t, though I base that assumption on nothing more than the fact he belongs to an ancient Christian communion — the Orthodox Church — which certainly is not indifferent to its own claim to be the “one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” identified in the Creed. Still, it rings strange that a self-identified Orthodox Christian would want to measure religion through a market lens. After all, the Orthodox Church in the United States is smaller today than it was fifty years ago and, if the figures are true, worldwide attendance at Orthodox parishes is, at best, nominal. Would any Orthodox Christian claim that these empirical measures impinges the truth of Orthodoxy? I doubt it. In fact, whenever a Catholic plays the “numbers game” with the Orthodox, the latter are instantly indignant — and rightfully so. As we already know, it’s neither logically nor empirically impossible for over a billion and a half human souls to be ensnared by falsehood.