The question of the relationship between religion and other phenomena that come within its conceptual and semantic field, such as values, on the one hand, and modern economic development, on the other, have occupied the minds of scholars since the last century. While the issue was first dealt with theoretically and sociologically by Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century AD, it was taken up again in systematic fashion by European classical social theorists in the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, North American, Japanese, and Indian sociologists, economists, and political scientists began to write about the work ethic and other cultural or non-economic factors of development. Since the Second World War many others have joined in the debate. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss a number of fundamental problems that underlie the media and academic discourse surrounding the question of religion and development in East Asia that have to do with problematic Orientalist constructions.

Owing to the vastness of the field, however, there is the problem of delineating my area of concern for this chapter. The field is vast, covering various world religions, numerous disciplines in the social sciences, and a multitude of topics such as industrialization, economic growth, education, and business firms. In addition, one has also to consider the budget of concepts that are related to religion such as ideology, culture, values, and the work ethic. Even if one chooses to focus on a region such as Southeast Asia, one is not left with a more manageable task.

What I propose, therefore, is to define my interest in the relationship between religion and economic development by way of limiting it with reference to a related concern, that of “Asian values”. In what follows, I take the Asian values debate as my entry point into the topic of the religious work ethic and its relationship with capitalist modernization in Southeast Asia.