Religion and Economics

Last night I watched a completely useless forum where the candidates for president discussed their faith. As an economist, the private beliefs of a candidate are not that important to me as their ability to make rational decisions. However, realizing that religion, abortion and all other issues are significantly important in selecting a president, and that the policy direction implemented by a president can have significant impact on the welfare function of the entire population, I soon realized that right now religion may be an extremely significant economic factor. However, I will address the impact of religion on the economic welfare of the population at a later time. The post today will be about an economic view of religion.
To keep it simple, I would like to claim that people who are religious and follow closely the prescripts of their church should be risk loving. This view, I know disagrees with the general view, that people who are very religious tend to be risk averse.
Let's just analyze what it means to be religious from an economic perspective. Assuming rational behavior as well as keeping to some extent to the constraints of Christianity (mainly because I have no experience with any other religion) I will try to prove my claim.
To begin with, being religious, belonging to a church and following all that is required is rather like engaging in a contract. One makes sacrifices today (i.e. pays the price for the good) in order to receive salvation at a later time (i.e. obtain the good). Thus we are looking at intertemporal utility maximization, with the objective function being maximized after the agent dies. Many people view this as insurance, as I have said. I tend to view it in a different way. These people engage in a contractual agreement in lack of an established market for the product. Additionally, the pseudo market that exists (church) tends to be very monopolistic (I know that there are many religions and even more churches, however each of them claims that they are THE ONLY ONE who can guarantee your salvation). This in itself is irrational because there is no guarantee that the contract is enforcible. In other words people who are religious and accept the reduction in utility stemming from following the dictates of their religion, engage in a non enforcible contract where property rights are at best fuzzy. This increases the probability that the contract will not be delivered upon, hence it reduces their expected payoff. This in turn results either in them not being as strict as they should in following the contract, or in them getting utility from the increased risk resulting from this contract. To date there is little evidence, if any, that the contracts are enforced, as the delivery of the product is virtually impossible to observe.
So then the question remains, why do people choose to buy this insurance if the enforcement of the contract is uncertain? I do not claim to have an answer, or at least not an answer that is better than "because people also play the lottery, even though their expected return is ALWAYS negative." I think religion is the ultimate proof that people are risk loving. After all, it's like buying insurance at a high premium today for the space shuttle you MIGHT own in the future.