Abstract
Papers presented at a conference devoted to the title subject, organized by the Center for American Studies at Germany’s Heidelberg University, constitute the content of this book, devoted to various perspectives on how the market paradigm has invaded the sphere of religion in the U.S. Authors are a mix of Americans and Europeans (all but one, German) and represent a range of disciplines: cultural anthropology, religious studies, history, and literature. At the risk of oversimplifying its diversity (11 authors/papers in addition to a lengthy editorial introduction), the primary focus of the book is on the emergence of evangelical mega-churches during the past century. Their adoption and application of marketing concepts and methods are explored, while the more recent emergence of a theology that endorses and encourages materialism, that is, a consumerist culture is recognized and analyzed.
The book is organized into five sections. The first takes up the question of explaining the religiosity of Americans. The next section is devoted to the rise of evangelism in the late 19th to mid 20th century. The third section considers the religion/market interface from a literary perspective. The fourth section is comprised of papers that explicitly study how religious organizations have borrowed strategic marketing concepts and methods such as branding to effectively commercialize the religious enterprise. The final section provides a detailed speculation regarding the religious meaning and significance of consumption.
The editors, in their introduction, identify two competing meta-narratives of religious development. One is essentially Marxist: religion is a predictable response to uncertainties that arise from fundamentally material and economic motivations. Thus, members of primitive cultures, fearing for hunger and shelter, made sacrifices and prayed to gods that presumably had power over weather events and the outcomes of battles with neighboring tribes. Contemporary prayers and actions that worship, thank, request, and atone reflect similar motivations.
The counter-narrative is widely described as Weberian, after early 20th century sociologist, Max Weber, who saw the roots of economic concerns with thrift and efficiency in religion, that is, the “Protestant ethic” expressed through Calvinism and, in the United States, Puritanism. It is important to explain consumer culture in that context as a reflection of predestination, the doctrine where the fruits of material success signal that one is saved. Today, while some of the churches examined have significant outreach programs that respond to poverty in their communities, others see high fashion and luxury cars as the just reward for faithful virtuous lives.
The editors, along with most of the studies on offer in this volume, recognize both of these understandings as oversimplifications of complex phenomena. The framing of most papers tends to criticize one or the other of these conflicting perspectives, establishing the explanatory power of its opposite. At the same time, the interplay between religious perspectives and lived experience through modern history is understood.
In the opening section, Brooks Holifield, a church historian at Emory University, argues that the vitality and diversity of the religious landscape in the U.S. can only be explained with contingency theories based on circumstances and events that deny the domination of either of the meta-narratives discussed above.
In Part II, religious historians Mark Valeri (Washington University in St. Louis), Grant Wacker (Duke Divinity School), and Hilde Stephens (University of Oslo) explain and illustrate those Weberian and Marxist narratives, respectively, the influence of religion on market values and behavior (Valeri) and, conversely, how economic values and concerns shape the religious culture (Stephens). Wacker’s mediating work examines how market-based values and methods, viz., muscularity and preaching in crowd settings, came to invade the world of evangelization, notably in the person of Billy Graham.
Part III turns to the world of publishing, whereby spiritual commodification and the profit motive came to dominate the realm of popular literature. Matthew Hedstrom (University of Virginia) notes that American literature was originally a literature of religious-based (or at least in harmony with religion) values and virtue. Overtime, the development of a “middlebrow” market and the economic demands of commercial publishing provided the impetus for a more liberal, less challenging, product range. Next, Gunter Leypoldt (Heidelberg University) examines the literary market for high culture, finding it inconsistent with publishing economics. He, thus, agrees with Hedstrom, while calling for a kind of “sacrality” that might bring greater readership to literature that is more authentically religious as opposed to merely reflecting the economic essence of supply and demand. Finally, Daniel Silliman (Heidelberg University) closes this section with an analysis of the exemplification of the Hedstrom-Leypoldt thesis, the LaHaye and Jenkins Left Behind series of apocalyptic stories, published first in book form, then selectively transposed to movies and a computer game. Left Behind was originally conceived as a commercial venture, a Christian response to Stephen King (p. 168) that envisioned and ultimately realized a position in both fiction and religion markets for literature that included children as well as older consumers. Silliman’s article goes into considerable detail on what it took to actualize that commercial vision. The result has been a franchise of significant economic value that also clearly espouses a moral approach to conflict.
Part IV turns to a topic that may interest marketing scholars familiar with the extension of marketing concepts and methods beyond purely commercial purposes. (Perhaps this arena is better described as the commercialization of institutions generally thought of as cultural or, in this case, spiritual.) Capturing religion through the combination of events that appeal to pre-existing cultural demands, for example, festivals that bring hundreds, even thousands together in a rock concert atmosphere, and the adoption of branding strategies that respond to consumer needs are specifically examined in this section. In the first paper in this section, Sarah Pike (California State University, Chico) examines the role of festivals and, particularly, their appeal to youth. The second paper, by Katja Rakow (Heidelberg University) takes up the branding aspect of religious marketing, focusing her attention on televangelist Joel Osteen’s therapeutic messaging from his Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. Osteen’s ministry also includes tours and sermons, videos, books, and online media, all projecting a message that responds to the range of psychological and social consumer needs, the exemplar and personification of “pastorpreneurship” (p. 232). The third and final paper in this section, by Anthony Santoro (Heidelberg University), considers the prospect that sports fans, specifically National Football League fans, are really co-religionists, their stadiums sacred spaces in Sunday competition with actual churches. (Why else would the Detroit Lions and Cleveland Browns continue to attract standing room only to view and participate in their sorry on-field performances?) This paper effectively closes the marketing/religion circle by demonstrating that the attributes of church can be extended into other social spaces. It takes only a little imagination to see how Apple electronics, fashions by Ralph Lauren or Prada, or even groceries from Whole Foods manifest this kind of alternative religion having a devoted, though hardly devout, congregation.
The final section of the book, Part V, considers what Kathryn Lofton (Yale University) refers to as the essentially neoliberal dimension of American religion, the “detente between the history of religion and economic analysis” (p. 269). Reviewing Oprah Winfrey’s multimedia productions as well as other articles in this volume, she finds a form of “spiritual capitalism” in which (1) material goods are promoted and consumed for their spiritual consequence while (2) spiritual goods are promoted and consumed in the framework of opportunities to meet consumer needs, also employing strategies and methods borrowed from the arena of commercial marketing.
This volume should interest macromarketers for several reasons. First, the domain defined by “religion and the marketplace” clearly lies within the marketing and society domain that defines macromarketing subjects. Second, particularly those macromarketing scholars who have critically observed efforts by commercial marketers to insert their goods and services into a consumer culture that transcends merely material values will find intellectual support and evidence that reinforces their point of view. Third, the examples of religious personalities and organizations that have applied marketing principles to attracting and retaining a viable, indeed growing, congregation – well beyond the obvious value of convenient times for worship services and utilizing contemporary communications technology – demonstrate how non-commercial entities of social significance have propagated the marketing concept, perhaps to the point of universalization.
Of course, the perspectives advanced in this book have limitations and are bound to be the subject of controversy, though that in itself adds value to the advancement of knowledge in the academy. The examples that provide the resources for interpretation are selective and, thus, come up short of providing a universal overview. Certainly, people of faith do not all subscribe to the “religion is a consumer good” perspective, while those who purchase football tickets include many who do not view game attendance as a religious experience and who separate their fandom from other spiritually meaningful experience, including church attendance.
Nonetheless, the interpretations contained in these articles are probing and well written, accessible to students and others who have yet to be exposed to the line of reasoning presented here. At the same time, the extensive referencing provided is a portal to the much wider school of thought that has contributed to the debate surrounding the meta-narratives represented in this volume, a treasure chest of postmodern thinking about the religion-marketplace relationship.