Divine restraint: An experimental analysis of religious preference and intertemporal discounting

•The paper uses an online experiment to test the influence of religious salience on intertemporal discount rates, using both real and hypothetical rewards.•The paper extends the literature by drawing a large and heterogeneous sample that examines this relationship over multiple religious sects.•Contrary to previous studies, we do not find a significant relationship between religious salience and intertemporal discounting.•There were no systematic differences between religious sects, though some groups had weak statistical power.