Music, Branding and the Hegemonic Prosumption of Values of an Evangelical Growth Church (original) (raw)
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Music, Branding, and the Hegemonic Prosumption of Values of an Evangelical Growth Church (PrePrint)
Religion and the Social Order vol. 24: Religion in Times of Crisis, 2014
The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the ways in which scholars of growth-oriented forms of evangelical Christianity can think about those forms’ relationships to Protestant thought, late-capitalism and neoliberal subjectivity. Specifically, this chapter focuses on prosumption: the hegemonic, co-productive process through which branding informs participants’ meaning-making and self-making activities−and the role of values in this process.
In the Goofy Parking Lot: Growth Churches as a Novel Religious Form for Late Capitalism
Social Compass, 2012
Literature on megachurches (Protestant churches with attendance over 2000) concentrates on numbers at the expense of an associated, but more instructive, characteristic: an overriding commitment to growth. Churches of any size can adopt a growth-oriented theology, style and organisational structure. In such churches, the growth imperative is likely to apply not only to congregational membership but also to church buildings and collection receipts; to the television ministry and other forms of outreach; to the pastor’s book and CD sales; and to individual members’ businesses, incomes, houses and possessions. In each dimension of religious life, at both individual and corporate level, the gospel of growth demarcates a novel Christian form, attuned to the ethos of late capitalism.
The Emerging Church grew in prominence in the United States in the 1990's as a reaction to seeker-sensitive approaches of nondenominational evangeli-cal megachurches. These megachurches are known for the commodification of religion and the conception of church members as consumers, and are thus prime examples of the neoliberalization of the American religious landscape. In contrast, the Emerging Church opposes institutionalized and neoliberalized religious practices and structures, instead emphasizing local and contextual organization and practice as a basis for more " authentically Christian " lives. Nevertheless , the Emerging Church itself displays characteristics of neoliberalization, which I disclose using Wendy Brown's definition of neoliberal rationality. This raises the question whether a lived critique of neoliberalization is possible in the late modern era.
EVANGELICALISM AND CAPITALISM: A reparative account and diagnosis of pathogeneses in the relationship, 2018
No sustained examination and diagnosis of problems inherent to the relationship of Evangeli- calism with capitalism currently exists. Where assessments of the relationship have been un- dertaken, they are often built upon a lack of understanding of Evangelicalism, and an uncritical reliance both on Max Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic and on David Bebbington’s Quadrilateral of Evangelical priorities. This then gives rise to misunderstandings and faulty prescriptions for the future of Evangelicalism. This thesis seeks to remedy this situation by providing a robust diagnostic, not to refute Evangelicalism, but as a reparative. This reparative attends to the faulty responses of either over-dichotomising capitalist markets against ecclesial life, or the further capitulation of ecclesial life to the deforming forces of capitalism. It also allows for an alternative proposal for the future of Evangelicalism. To achieve this, the thesis makes use of some methodological innovations and proposals, and also extends them. First, the thesis proposes and deploys its own 'map-making’ method as a kind of heuristic concept map to trace correspondence between church acts and beliefs. This 'map-making' ensures that the thesis provides evaluation and resourcing for deployment to current and related Evangelical contexts. Second, the thesis proposes that, contrary to methodological worries by others, it is possible to talk about and make an account of the two broad domains of Evangelicalism and capitalism. Third, in order to provide a reading of ecclesial life, the main accounts for this thesis draw upon and deploy the ‘binocular dialectic’ and method of Martyn Percy, by reading theology with social science. This ‘binocular' method establishes the thesis in two parts. Part one is an account of Evangelicalism and capitalism constructed from social science sources; part two follows with theological explication of this account. Chapter one establishes the research problem, method and research design. Following chapter two’s review and modulation of Bebbington’s quadrilateral, chapters three and four make an account and reading from social science, drawing upon both with an ‘ideal type account’ with Max Weber, and a ‘materialist account’ with Karl Polanyi. Here, Evangelicalism is revealed to be both a creature of and response to capitalism, where Evangelical anxieties around assurance migrated into anxieties about providence. Where Evangelicals initially used the disciplined ascetics of the market for identity and relationships, these market ascetics ultimately deformed and replaced Christian social imaginaries, with market imaginations around Providence. Chapter five constructs a theological reading of the ascetics of that account, using Neo-Augustinian sources, in particular, Vincent Miller, Daniel Bell and William Cavanaugh. From this, the thesis problematises capitalist markets as rival schools of desire to ecclesial life, not as a dichotomy, but rather as modes of resistance, resonance and co-creation. Drawing on the work of Graham Ward and James K. A Smith, chapter 6 shows how the ascetics of commodification leverage the nature of human agency around imaginations for Providence. This results in weakened resistance to, and further co-option to, the deforming forces of capitalism by Evangelicalism. The thesis reveals that producing more effective worship curricula is insufficient to the task of resisting the deforming forces of capitalism. Ultimately the thesis functions as a 'minority report' proposing that Evangelicalism, armed with the findings from this thesis, is uniquely situated to respond to the problems it has caused. Understanding how Evangelicalism has lost its resistance to the deforming forces of capitalism, and in some ways perfected those forces, is the beginning of understanding how it might then respond constructively to the problems it has caused, and with its own internal re- sources.
Enjoying Your Worship Experience: Consumerist Religious Discourse in the Late 1990s
1998
Readers of Anvil might be expected to be attentive to the words of Scripture, but how attentive are we to the words that we use around the words of Scripture? E. M. Forster's dictum 'Only conned', if taken too much to heart, may leave the contemporary church heavily indebted to language that expresses values and commitments very much at variance with the faith. We might think, warns Noel Heather, that we left the pick'n mix of postmodernity at the church entrance, but its traces are all too apparent in the culture of contemporary Evangelicalism.
Evangelicalism and Late Capitalist Markets
My paper questions current diagnoses of the relationship of the present-day Evangelical church movements with late-capitalist market social realities. I contrast and respond to two current and prevalent diagnoses of this relationship. The first diagnoses Evangelicalism as largely intrinsic to and as having produced the social relationships and realities of late capitalism. This account is unable and unwilling to see the possibility of any countermovement by Evangelicalism. In contrast the second suggests that Evangelicalism, in order to be relevant, must embed itself deeper into market realities, baptising the socio-logic of market practices as a spiritual practice.
Religious Studies Review, 2013
revision of former beliefs. However, good tethers are like strong belief systems: their formulations have been calculated to absorb a reasonable range of anticipated alternatives that warrant the reliability of the original set of beliefs. Yet during true peer disagreement, even experts (with equivalent skills and knowledge) would be less epistemically confident regarding the adequacy of their formulations, although this does not necessarily lead to the abandonment of beliefs. Kraft applies this process of epistemic adjudication observable in ordinary disagreement to religious disagreements, and argues that religious diversity compels one to draw from internal and external sources of knowledge to maintain justified belief while negotiating legitimate challenges. This book is a must read for especially epistemologists, analytic philosophers, and ecumenists interested in the dynamics underlying religious disagreements.
American Journal of Sociology, 2009
Stephen Ellingson ambitiously attempts to account for the influence that the megachurch phenomenon, and the church growth industry in general, have exerted on nine Lutheran (ELCA) churches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through the careful ethnographic study of these congregations, Ellingson explores whether these churches have been able to implement evangelical techniques and methods without affecting traditional Lutheran content. As case studies these churches enliven the theoretical investigation of three interrelated processes: first, "how and why a particular religious tradition is changed"; second, "the more general process of religious and cultural change"; and, finally, "the relationships among religious tradition, community, and moral authority" (4, 5). Ellingson rejects an exclusive adherence to either cultural, ecological, or market theories of religious change that explain religious modifi cation as a simple reaction to outside infl uences. Instead, he proposes a new "constructivist approach" of religious change as arising from congregational leaders' careful consideration of perceived threats, as well as possible solutions, to the primary tasks of providing a coherent sense of meaning and viable membership within the congregation. Th us, change "is not a sudden response to the onset of 'unsettled times' but a response to a socially constructed crisis of meaning and organizational survival that is tailored to articulate with a congregation's history and extant tradition, as well as the religious needs and interests of members who govern the organization" (13). Key to understanding this theory is Ellingson's insistence that (1) its impetus comes from within the tradition, (2) the method of change is altered to fi t the unique needs of congregations, and (3) change is primarily orchestrated by the leadership rather than the congregational membership. Th rough the process of "selective isomorphism," congregational leaders hybridize their traditions in order to respond to the narratives they themselves have constructed to address what traditional elements must be changed to meet the crises of meaning and membership. Changes to form, he concludes, will necessarily result in the transformation of a religious tradition's content. Despite Ellingson's lack of awareness of and obvious bias against evangelicalism-which he characterizes as generally emotive, homogeneous, self-interested, therapeutic, utilitarian, and jejune, in addition to comprising a seemingly conspiratorial attempt to "colonize" mainline Protestantism-this book is valuable for a Pentecostal/Charismatic audience. Ellingson provides a fresh perspective on the infl uence that a growing form of "generic evangelicalism" is exerting not only on Pentecostal/Charismatic churches but also on mainline Protestantism. Th is book should cause denominational leaders to think long and hard about the implications that seemingly innocent alterations to the form may have on the content and even survival, of their traditions. Wuthnow describes a very diff erent but no less disturbing trend aff ecting religious denominations in the United States. Based on compelling quantitative and qualitative data,