Faith and the Farm: Why Religious Farmers in China Are More Likely to Become Entrepreneurs

In the villages of rural China, faith appears to do more than comfort the soul. A new study published in Current Psychology suggests that religiously inclined farmers are measurably more likely to start businesses than their non-religious neighbors, and the researchers behind the work believe they have identified the psychological and social machinery that makes this happen. Drawing on nationally representative data from more than 12,000 farmers, the study offers one of the most detailed portraits yet of how belief translates into entrepreneurial action in a developing rural economy.

The research team, led by Linlin Jin, Daobang Yang, Chaobang Ren and Yuping Zhao of the School of Management at Guangdong University of Technology, analyzed data from the 2018 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey, a large-scale national survey managed by the Center for Social Survey at Sun Yat-sen University. Their analytical sample comprised 12,201 farmers, a scale that lends considerable statistical weight to the findings. Using Probit regression models, a standard econometric technique for modeling binary outcomes such as whether a person does or does not engage in entrepreneurial behavior, the team estimated the relationship between religiosity and the decision to embark on an entrepreneurial journey.

The headline result is straightforward: religiosity is positively associated with farmers’ entrepreneurial behavior. Farmers who reported stronger religious inclination were more likely to have taken the plunge into self-employment or business creation than those with weaker or no religious affiliation. Crucially, the association survived a battery of robustness checks and supplementary endogeneity analyses, the statistical procedures researchers use to guard against the possibility that the observed link is an artifact of reverse causation, omitted variables, or measurement error. In observational data of this kind, such checks are essential, because it is always possible that something else, such as personality, wealth, or local economic conditions, drives both religious belief and business activity simultaneously.

What makes the study more than a simple correlation is its exploration of the pathways through which faith appears to operate. The researchers propose and test two mechanisms. The first is psychological: religiosity is linked to stronger perceived control, the belief that one’s own actions can shape outcomes rather than leaving one’s fate to luck or external forces. Perceived control has long been recognized in the entrepreneurship literature as a key ingredient of entrepreneurial intention and behavior, echoing the logic of the theory of planned behavior, in which confidence in one’s ability to execute a course of action predicts whether one actually pursues it. Religious belief, the authors argue, can supply precisely this sense of agency, offering believers a framework in which effort, discipline and self-regulation are meaningful and rewarded.

The second mechanism is social. Religious involvement is associated with greater social network resources, the web of contacts, obligations and mutual support that individuals can draw upon when they need help. For a farmer contemplating a new venture, this matters enormously. Starting a business in a rural setting typically requires access to informal credit, trusted partners, information about markets, and labor that can be mobilized at short notice. Congregations and religious communities function as dense, trust-rich networks in which reputational stakes are high and cooperation is reinforced by shared norms. Decades of research on social capital and entrepreneurship have shown that such networks lower the practical barriers to business formation, and the new study suggests that religious participation is one route through which rural residents accumulate this intangible infrastructure.

The study also reveals that the faith-entrepreneurship link is not uniform across the population. The positive association was more evident among Buddhist respondents than among other groups, a finding that resonates with scholarship on Buddhist values emphasizing mindfulness, conscious work and ethical conduct, qualities that some researchers have linked to business practice. The association was also stronger among respondents without higher education and among those without a political belief. The authors interpret these patterns through the lens of substitution: for farmers who lack the sense of control that formal education tends to confer, or who lack the institutional backing that political affiliation can provide in the Chinese context, religion may serve as an alternative source of both psychological agency and social support. In other words, faith matters most where other resources for agency and connection are scarce.

This moderating pattern carries significant implications for how we understand entrepreneurship in developing economies. Much of the classic literature on entrepreneurial psychology was built on Western, educated samples, where the levers of self-belief and network formation are assumed to be secular and individualized. The Chinese rural case shows that in settings where formal institutions are thinner and educational attainment is lower, traditional and religious institutions can step into the gap, functioning as informal engines of both self-efficacy and social capital. The finding that religiosity substitutes for political belief is particularly striking in the Chinese context, where political membership has historically been a conduit to resources and opportunities; those outside that system may find in religious communities a parallel structure of belonging and support.

Methodologically, the study is careful in ways that strengthen confidence in its conclusions. The authors controlled for a range of demographic and socioeconomic variables, following best-practice recommendations on statistical control in correlational research, and they conducted mediation analyses to assess whether perceived control and social network resources indeed carry the effect of religiosity onto entrepreneurial behavior. The data themselves come from an anonymized, de-identified national survey conducted under ethical standards consistent with the Declaration of Helsinki, meaning the study involved secondary analysis rather than direct interaction with participants. The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation, reflecting institutional investment in understanding the drivers of rural economic behavior.

Of course, the study has limits inherent to its design. It captures a snapshot from 2018, and the relationship between faith and enterprise is measured through survey self-reports, which are always vulnerable to imperfect recall and social desirability. Endogeneity can never be fully eliminated in observational data, however thorough the supplementary analyses. The authors are also careful with language: their findings describe associations and pathways, not proof that religious belief causes entrepreneurship in any individual case. A religious farmer who starts a business may be responding to market opportunities, family circumstances, or local policy shifts as much as to faith, and the study’s contribution is to show that, after accounting for these confounders, a robust religious effect remains detectable at the population level.

Even with those caveats, the research opens a compelling window onto the cultural psychology of rural enterprise. It suggests that the road from belief to business runs along two parallel tracks, one internal and one external: faith fortifies the mind’s sense of control while simultaneously thickening the social fabric from which ventures are built. As rural China continues its economic transformation, and as policymakers search for levers to stimulate grassroots entrepreneurship, the study implies that the informal institutions of belief deserve a place in the conversation alongside credit access, training and infrastructure. The power of faith, it turns out, may be partly the power of confidence and community, two of the oldest resources entrepreneurs have ever had.

Subject of Research: The relationship between religiosity and entrepreneurial behavior among farmers in rural China, mediated by perceived control and social network resources.

Article Title: The power of faith: why religiously inclined farmers are more likely to embark on entrepreneurial journeys?

Article References: Jin, L., Yang, D., Ren, C., & Zhao, Y. (2026). The power of faith: why religiously inclined farmers are more likely to embark on entrepreneurial journeys?. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1430. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09939-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09939-0

Keywords: religiosity, entrepreneurship, farmers, rural China, perceived control, social network resources, social capital, China Labor-force Dynamics Survey, Buddhism, Current Psychology, self-employment, psychology of religion