Consuming Religion

Kathryn Lofton

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780226482095, 9780226481937
• eBook ISBN: 9780226482125
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: North American History

What are you drawn to like, to watch, or even to binge? What are you free to consume, and what do you become through consumption? These questions of desire and value, Kathryn Lofton argues, are questions for the study of religion. In eleven essays exploring soap and office cubicles, Britney Spears and the Kardashians, corporate culture and Goldman Sachs, Lofton shows the conceptual levers of religion in thinking about social modes of encounter, use, and longing. Wherever we see people articulate their dreams of and for the world, wherever we see those dreams organized into protocols, images, manuals, and contracts, we glimpse what the word "religion" allows us to describe and understand.

With great style and analytical acumen, Lofton offers the ultimate guide to religion and consumption in our capitalizing times.

Notes

Preface

1. Barbara Kruger, Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am) (1987), photographic silkscreen on vinyl.

2. Dearly Departed Tours website, accessed November 29, 2016, http://dearlydepartedtours.com/.

3. James Bartlett, “Moving Marilyn,” United Hemispheres (February 2015), http://old.hemimag.us/2015/02/01/moving-marilyn/.

4. Debra Kamin, “Dance History,” United Hemispheres (February 2015), http://old.hemimag.us/2015/02/01/dance-history/.

5. Ibid.

6. Bartlett, “Moving Marilyn.”

7. Here the writings of Émile Durkheim are provoking, even determining, of my arguments. Durkheim famously described religion as the central form by which morals and norms are socially reinforced. Religion provides social control, cohesion, and purpose for people, as well as another means of communication and gathering for individuals to interact and reaffirm social norms. For Durkheim, religion isn’t just one means of social control within society; it is the means. In his words: “The idea of society is the soul of religion.” Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964 ©1912), 419.

8. Nachman Ben-Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

Introduction

1. On the historical periodization of consumption and consumer culture, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, “Coming Up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 19–39; Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Frank Trentmann, “Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption,” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 3 (2004): 373–401.

2. On the role of sociality in human identity, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

3. This is an openly normative turn by me in a project that may otherwise seem relentlessly, even compulsively, descriptive. My hope is that anyone who latches on to this claim for religion realizes quickly that the normative is buried in every descriptive venture; defining the distinction between the two has been a tediously unrevelatory argumentative venture in the humanities. You may not like my normative turn. But in order to argue against it, your recourse will not be to description. And so: we enter the inevitable and important naming of stakes. Let us please do so.

4. Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 39.

5. David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

6. Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity (New York: New York University Press, 2015); John R. Presley and John Sessions, “Islamic Economics: The Emergence of a New Paradigm,” Economic Journal 104, no. 424 (1994): 584–96. See also Gordon Lynch, Understanding Theology and Popular Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005).

7. Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (London: Routledge, 2004); José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Nick Couldry, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (London: Routledge, 2003); Kim Knott, “The Secular Sacred: In-Between or Both/and?,’ in Social Identities between the Sacred and the Secular, ed. Abby Day, Giselle Vincett, and Christopher R. Cotter (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013); Gordon Lynch, The Sacred in the Modern World: A Cultural Sociological Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Johanna Sumiala, Media and Ritual: Death, Community and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2013).

8. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967); Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

9. Thomas S. Bremer, Blessed with Tourists: The Borderlands of Religion and Tourism in San Antonio (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Aliza Fleischer, “The Tourist behind the Pilgrim in the Holy Land,” International Journal of Hospitality Management 19, no. 3 (September 2000): 311–26; Aaron K. Ketchell, Holy Hills of the Ozarks: Religion and Tourism in Branson, Missouri (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Troy Messenger, Holy Leisure: Recreation and Religion in God’s Square Mile (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel Olsen, eds., Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys (New York: Routledge, 2006).

10. Chad E. Seales, “Corporate Chaplaincy and the American Workplace,” Religion Compass 6, no. 3 (2012): 195–203.

11. For three recent examples of excellent scholarship revealing this level of commiseration, see Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Jan Stievermann, Philip Goff, and Detlef Junker, with Anthony Santoro and Daniel Silliman, eds., Religion and the Marketplace in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); François Gauthier and Tuomas Martikainen, eds., Religion in Consumer Society: Brands, Consumers and Markets (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013).

12. Timothy B. Lee, “Why History Suggests That Today’s Wage Stagnation Is Temporary,” Vox.com (21 May 2015), http://www.vox.com/2015/5/21/8630771/software-slow-wage-growth.

13. “Celebrating Christmas and the Holidays, Then and Now,” Pew Research Center (18 December 2013), http://www.pewforum.org/2013/12/18/celebrating-christmas-and-the-holidays-then-and-now/.

14. Elena Holodny, “Here’s What ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PRACTICING COMMODITY
• REVISING RITUAL
• IMAGINING CELEBRITY
• VALUING FAMILY
• RETHINKING CORPORATE FREEDOM
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index