Religion and the Marketplace in the United States (original) (raw)
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THE MARKETPLACE AND RELIGION IN AMERICA
There is a long and complicated relationship between religious activities and marketplace activities in the United States. Despite popular expectations that these spheres of life, the sacred and profane, ought to be completely separate, the two are often intimately related. Further, the relationship is messy, multifold, and complex. In contemporary American life, the connections are readily visible. Churches employ branding experts, while tech companies forgo profit to promote disruptions that promise to save the world. Christians organize financial seminars and corporations sponsor spiritual retreats. According to the Supreme Court, some companies have religious beliefs. Meanwhile, the spiritual-butnot-religious express their spirituality with practices of ethical consumption. Advertisers promise "your best life now," as do prosperity preachers. The sacrament of marriage is worth billions, built on the belief that the special day deserves and requires special expense. Holidays are big business, and so are Bibles. This is not a new phenomenon, either. It was a religious group that invented corn flakes. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was a joint stock company before it was a model for Christian charity. The Quakers made an economic argument for religious freedom. Revivalist preachers were often as skilled in advertizing as they were in sermonizing. The leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faced religious persecution in Ohio in the 1850s, but were also opposed because of their wildcat bank. It was economic interests that brought the Catholic and Jewish immigrants, who challenged Protestant dominance of American life. End-to-end, American culture is chockfull of case studies of the manifold, mutual, and often highly contradictory forms of interaction between religion and marketplace. Religion-and-the-marketplace studies examine these interactions. The field is quite diverse, and includes a number of different disciplines that ask different questions. There are, broadly speaking, three approaches to religion-and-the-marketplace studies. One looks at the market conditions that shaped or influenced religious movements. One makes use of economic terms to explain religious diversity in America. One looks at the underlying assumptions that unite religious activity and market activity.
The Review of Religion and the Marketplace in the United States
Marburg Journal of Religion, 2017
Religion and the Marketplace in the United States is a collection of eleven essays covering a wide array of marketplace theories within the context of American religiosity from leading experts and scholars. The book touches upon a broad range of academic fields including history, literature, sports, politics and media to demonstrate how religion and the marketplace are intertwined.
The Marketization of Religion, 2020
The Marketization of Religion provides a novel theoretical understanding of the relationship between religion and economy of today’s world. A major feature of today's capitalism is ‘marketization’. While the importance that economics and economics-related phenomena have acquired in modern societies has increased since the consumer and neoliberal revolutions and their shock waves worldwide, social sciences of religion are still lagging behind acknowledging the consequences of these changes and incorporating them in their analysis of contemporary religion. Religion, as many other social realities, has been traditionally understood as being of a completely different nature than the market. Like oil and water, religion and the market have been mainly cast as indissoluble into one another. Even if notions such as the marketization, commoditization or branding of religion and images such as the religious and spiritual marketplace have become popular, some of the contributions aligned in this volume show how this usage is mostly metaphorical, and at the very least problematic. What does the marketization of religion mean? The chapters provide both theoretical and empirical discussion of the changing dynamics of economy and religion in today’s world. Through the lenses of marketization, the volume discusses the multiple, at times surprising, connections of a global religious reformation. Furthermore, in its use of empirical examples, it shows how different religions in various social contexts are reformed due to growing importance of a neoliberal and consumerist logic.
Despite the many criticisms of the empirical and theoretical adequacy of Rational Choice theory, it continues to have considerable influence and appeal in the sociological study of religion. This article examines the use of the market metaphor and its subsidiary metaphors, with a view to understanding how these metaphors work in rational choice theory, and what this might be able to tell us about its enduring influence. I suggest that the metaphor is a useful one for studying religion in a capitalist, commodity oriented society, but when we forget that the ‘religious economy’ is a metaphor, it comes to serve ideological purposes well suited to the neo-liberal agenda. The market (conceived after a neo-conservative fashion) is thereby naturalized and serves to reinforce the ideology of a one-dimensional society.
Religion-Market Theory: A Qualitative Theory Testing
Religion-Market Theory: A Qualitative Theory Testing, 2023
Despite industrialization and modernization, religion still has a significant impact on society and politics. Many theories compete to answer questions about religion, yet this paper argues that religion-market theory has superiority in explaining the failure of secularization to diminish religion even in the most developed nations such as the United States, while it succeeded in others. Relying on Mill's method of difference, this study qualitatively compares the two cases of the United States and the United Kingdom, relying on the history of religion and the economic structures of religious institutions. This study proves that Americans are far more religious than the British because since the foundation of the republic, the U.S. has not adopted any state religion while the UK has Christianity as the religion of the state since the English Reformation. Hence, religion-market theory that links between state's regulations of religion and religiosity proves its superiority again.
Religious change in market and consumer society: the current state of the field and new ways forward
Religion, 2018
This article provides a critical appraisal of how the concept of the 'market' has been understood and employed in previous scholarship on religion and religious change in market society. The discussion focuses on the respective virtues and weaknesses of approaches that view 'religious markets' in terms of a de facto empirical entity on the one hand, and approaches that instead employ the 'market' as a metaphor for how the religious field is structured and organized on the other hand. The article then proceeds to outline and argue for the adoption of a broader marketization-focused perspective that views ongoing changes in the religious field against the backdrop of wider neoliberal socioeconomic restructurings of the global political economy and social institutional fields.
“Religious Consumers” in a changing “Religious Marketplace”
Latin American Research Review
What is intriguing about the study of Latin American religion and politics today is that the field is still vibrant. Social scientists' attention first turned to religion in Latin America, Catholicism in particular, in investigating the ability of religion to foster or hinder "modernization." The central assumption-that religious beliefs and institutions are worth studying in terms of their potential impact on larger social, economic, or political processes-has guided most work since Ivan Vallier's pioneering research on Catholicism and modernization in the 1960s. The dependent variable has changed according to historical circumstances-ranging from modernization to redemocratization to democratic "deepening" to civil society. Yet today, Catholic hierarchies throughout the region are withdrawing to a more circumscribed traditional and sacramental role in society, publicly es
The Marketplace of Christianity
This startlingly original (and sure to be controversial) account of the evolution of Christianity shows that the economics of religion has little to do with counting the money in the collection basket and much to do with understanding the background of today's religious and political divisions. Since religion is a set of organized beliefs, and a church is an organized body of worshipers, it's natural to use a science that seeks to explain the behavior of organization—economics—to understand the development of organized religion. The Marketplace of Christianity applies the tools of economic theory to illuminate the emergence of Protestantism in the sixteenth century and to examine contemporary religion-influenced issues, including evolution and gay marriage. The Protestant Reformation, the authors argue, can be seen as a successful penetration of a religious market dominated by a monopoly firm—the Catholic Church. The Ninety-five Theses nailed to the church door in Wittenberg...