Religion in Consumer Society

Brands, Consumers and Markets

François Gauthier, Tuomas Martikainen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409449867
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317067566
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Presenting an overview of an emerging field in the study of contemporary religion, this book, together with a complementary volume Religion in the Neoliberal Age, explores issues of religion, neoliberalism and consumer society. Claiming that we have entered a new phase that implies more than the recasting of state-religion relations, the authors examine how religious changes are historically anchored in modernity but affected by the commoditization, mediatization, neoliberalization and globalization of society and social life. Religion in Consumer Society explores religion as both shaped by consumer culture and as shaping consumer culture. Following an introduction which critically analyses studies on consumer culture and integrates scholarship in the sociology of religion, this book explores the following topics: how consumerism and electronic media have shaped globalized culture, and how this is affecting religion; the dynamics and characteristics of often overlooked middle-class religion, and how these relate to globalization and differences between 'developed' and 'emerging' countries; emerging trends, and how we understand phenomena as different as mega churches and holistic spiritualistic journeys, and how the pressures of consumer culture act on religious traditions, indigenous and exogenous; the politics of religious phenomena in the Age of Neoliberalism; and the hybrid areas emerging from these reconfigurations of religion and the market. Outlining changes in both the political-institutional and cultural spheres, the contributors offer an international overview of developments in different countries and state of the art representation of religion in the new global political economy.

PART I
Changing World Religions

This section looks at consumerism and related issues among world religions. The chapters ask how established religious traditions are coping with consumer society and how their message to their contemporaries is changed in the process. The chapters describe varying processes of cultural creativity and conflicts arising from changing customs within some of the world’s main religious traditions.

Simon Speck delivers a more theoretical discussion on the role and social place of religion in two recent influential accounts of social theory: Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’ and Ulrich Beck’s ‘reflexive modernity’. These authors provide alternative perspectives on the role of consumerism in shaping both cosmopolitan and fundamentalist religious forms. Speck argues that Bauman idealises political citizenship and views consumerism as leading to the impotence and trivialisation of religion. Fundamentalism – cast as a religion of flawed consumers – is here understood as a reaction to postmodernity that aims to resolve the uncertainties into regularities and simple truths. Beck’s account differs. For him, religion has become freed from state control and individualised, and has become a potentially important actor along other civil society actors in ‘second modernity’s’ project of validating human dignity. Thereby, religion in its different disguises may become a positive force for a cosmopolitan future. The two theorists have a contrasting view of the power of civil society on religion; for Beck it is revitalising, and for Bauman it is trivialising.

Turning to more empirical case studies, Per Pettersson analyses the Lutheran Church of Sweden’s attempts to adapt to consumer pressures in the face of a constantly declining membership. Church members are continuing to shun the Sunday service which is still seen as the core of the Church’s identity, yet there is an afflux when it comes to life rituals and other activities offered by the Church. In a move that Pettersson views as typical of contemporary consumer societies in contrast to the standardised logics of industrial society, the Church has gradually responded to these pressures by creating novel types of activities that focus more on interaction between the participants and downplay creed and traditional authority.

Stephen Ellingson’s contribution reveals the formula for the success of megachurches in the United States. He argues that megachurches have successfully adapted to consumer society by effectively repackaging Evangelical Christianity into emotionally powerful and constantly changing and adaptable packages. Due to this success, megachurches have become highly significant producers of religious innovations which have circulated far beyond their places and contexts of origin.

Stefania Palmisano’s contribution investigates the phenomenon of New Monasticism, which emerged in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council’s attempts to renew Catholic monasticism. Using Italian case studies, Palmisano highlights the manifold paradoxes linking New Monasticism and consumer societies, namely through the simultaneous criticism of success-oriented consumer capitalism and an adaptation to its ambient, highly subjectivised culture. Palmisano exemplifies how monastic commoditisation, eclectic everyday theologies, and emotional regimes focusing on happiness and wellbeing, all of which characterise New Monasticism, are in tune with consumerist culture while steering significantly away from classical asceticism.

Mira Niculescu’s chapter examines how American Judaism is transformed by a novel opening up to popular cultural forms and experiential religion, namely in reaction to the appeals of Buddhism for ‘cultural Jews’. The dilemma for Judaism as a non-proselyte, ‘canned’ religion is to keep non-active Jews within Judaism while setting itself in competition within a pluralist and competitive religious sphere. Niculescu identifies three types of strategies adopted by Jewish communities to reach their ‘clientele’: the appropriation of Eastern spiritualities, the rebranding of Judaism via popular culture, and the ‘exotericisation’ of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.

Francesca Montemaggi further discusses the commodification and marketisation of religion, starting with a forceful critique of the rational choice approach to religion. By differentiating between ‘formal’ (the marketing of religious ideas to consumers) and ‘substantial’ (loss of value in religion) commoditisation, Montemaggi challenges the rational choice model of commoditisation while suggesting a more comprehensive and nuanced account of the impact of consumerism on religion. The notions discussed are then summoned in a case study of a Christian Evangelical Church in Wales.

Chapter 1
Religion, Individualisation and Consumerism: Constructions of Religiosity in ‘Liquid’ and ‘Reflexive’ Modernity

Simon Speck

Introduction

This chapter addresses contrasting accounts of contemporary religiosity in the work of two leading social theorists: Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich Beck. Their sharply divergent evaluations of religion today are particularly noteworthy in light of their common concerns and shared analytical framework. Bauman and Beck are united in conceiving of the present as constituting a ‘second’ modernity, marked primarily by the supersession of the powers of the nation state by the effects of free market capitalism, and confidence in techno-scientific rationality by the sobering consequences of its prior implementation. Both highlight the impact of these on subjective experience, describing a process of ‘individualisation’ whereby a complex of economic, social and cultural forces compel individuals to construct their own biographies without recourse to the socially integrating institutions of ‘first’ modernity (which are characterised by the nuclear family and its ascribed gender roles, full-time paid employment, and class-communal relations of production and institutions, as well as medico-technocratic expertise with its aura of infallibility, and so on). Beck and Bauman are in concord: with the passing of ‘traditional’ modernity the authentically modern promise of individual autonomy comes into its own. Where they differ is in their estimation of the prospects for success. As will become clear, their contrasting accounts of both consumerism and religious modernity are consequent upon their differing diagnoses of second modernity’s compatibility with authentic self-realisation.

In the course of what follows I trace Bauman’s and Beck’s distinctive constructions of the prevalent forms of contemporary religiosity and situate these in relation to their contrasting accounts of ‘consumerism’. This discloses not only the political stakes in the differing construal of religion but also returns us to the ‘founding moment’, so to speak, of social and political modernity with which any account of consumerism and religion must, however implicitly, treat: the emancipation of civil society from the state, the emancipation of religion into civil society. My argument is that Bauman’s anathematising of both religion and ‘consumerism’ amounts to an idealisation of political citizenship which is at odds with his description of the powerlessness of the contemporary state, whilst Beck’s dismissal of ‘consumerism’ as a ‘zombie concept’ and his celebration of the ‘cosmopolitanising’ effects of global flows of cultural goods and information revives an Enlightenment view of civil society which downplays its ‘uncivil’ aspect of inequality, instrumentalisation, and exploitation.

Religion in Liquid Modernity: ‘Fundamentalism’ and Flawed Consumers

Zygmunt Bauman’s construction of religion in the contemporary era is coterminous with his analysis of ‘liquid’ modernity: the era in which all modes of conduct and belief are patterned after the ‘consumerist syndrome’,1 giving rise to a society in which individuals, social relations, norms, and values are rendered marketfunctional. Individuals are ‘interpellated’ as consumers and the values of ‘solid’ modernity undergo a thoroughgoing reversal: in place of durability is enshrined the primacy of the transient – evident most emphatically in the rapid degradation and denigration of yesterday’s fashions – in place of possession and enjoyment comes appropriation and rapid disposal. Desire is modulated into ‘wants’ which are momentary, volatile, evanescent; and consumption is no longer the ‘conspicuous consumption’ of Veblen’s – or Bourdieu’s – aristocracy of taste, for it lacks the typically modernist ‘instrumentalism’ of this attitude and is rather autotelic; a value in its own right. The consumerist syndrome patterns all social relations and provides the framework for politics, culture, interpersonal relationships, and even ‘ideology’ itself, such that ideas or beliefs are no longer means of social manipulation and co-ordination but rather means of further boosting consumption. The message is ‘everything is or should be handled like a commodity’.2 Consumer life is one of infinite experimentation, novelty, sensation gathering, all supplied by the market with the result that the life process is ‘a succession of “resolvable” problems that however need to be and can be resolved only by such means as are not available anywhere than on the shelves of shops’.3 The uncertainty of a deregulated, privatised existence robbed of the protective shelter of the welfare state and techno-scientific certainty is ramified by the proliferation of choice among which self-cancelling, commodified solutions are to be sought. Bauman is frank about the distress to which this universe of transience gives rise: no basis for trust in the future or trust in others, abandonment to a multiplicity and perpetuity of choices. This pervasive uncertainty breeds a need for expert guidance, on the one hand, and a transformed experience of social disempowerment, on the other.

In the essay ‘Postmodern Religion?’,4 Bauman sets the analysis of religious modernity firmly within the context of consumerism and its consequences. To begin with, the account rests on Bauman’s understanding of religion as having been born out of a human sense of finitude and insufficiency in the face of mortality. Through an ‘ecclesiastical self-legitimation formula’,5 religion gains its institutional and doctrinal reality through the priestly interpellation of human beings as frail, mortal creatures in need of protection and salvation. Yet, as the advent of modernity with its project for the rational-scientific domination of nature effectively dissolves the ecclesiastical power over death, human beings are no longer defined by a constitutional ‘insufficiency’ – all problems are capable of rational solution. Now the transcendent dimension of life evaporates as the focus of concern falls on the emphatically mundane and inner-worldly and modern culture enacts an ‘anti-eschatological revolution’6 as death comes under the care of medicine, to be specialised, seq...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Consumerism as the Ethos of Consumer Society
• Part I: Changing World Religions
• Part II: Commoditised Spiritualities
• Bibliography
• Index