Your current mortgage rate and even your religious beliefs might have been decided by a glacier moving across the earth millions of years ago.
April 13, 2026
Original Paper
Soil, Soul, and Solvency: How Glacial Endowments Shaped Religion, Finance, and Social Capital in America
SSRN · 6451484
The Takeaway
Areas of America once covered by glaciers have more fertile soil, which historically made farming less risky. This safety net reduced the need for religious participation and created a culture of lower debt that has persisted for over a century.
From the abstract
Why are some societies more devout than others, and how do historical environments shape modern financial culture? While classic secularization theories predicted a linear decline of religion with industrialization, the global landscape of belief is far more complex (Iyer, 2016). This paper argues that both secularization and financial development in the United States can be traced to deep geological time. I propose a novel causal chain: Pleistocene glaciation left exceptionally fertile soil, wh