Introduction: the marketization of religion

ABSTRACT

The contributions in this volume show a balanced ratio between – highly needed – theoretical discussions and analysis of empirical material. They also more or less equally distribute according to prevalence awarded to either consumerism or neoliberalism as a driving force for religious change. Far from being exhaustive or even representative, it is a worthy and timely addition to the discussion on the rapports between marketization and religion.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• marketization
• neoliberalism
• consumerism

Where we are and where we have been

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. This does not mean that the theme is absent from our academic field. Back in 1967, already, Berger wrote that:

As a result [of pluralization, and therefore the end of religious monopolies in favour of voluntary adhesions], the religious tradition has to be marketed. It must be “sold” to a clientele that is no longer constrained to “buy”. The pluralistic situation is, above all, a market situation. In it, the religious institutions become marketing agencies, and the religious tradition become consumer commodities. And at any rate a good deal of religious activity in this situation comes to be dominated by the logic of market economics. (1990, 138; italics in original)

Yet this lead was only given continuation as of the mid-1980s in the so-called new paradigm of the Economy of Religion or Rational Choice Theory (RCT) applied to religion current which has been massively popular, especially in the US. Some years later, Roof (1999) was among the first non-RCT analysts to speak of a religious/spiritual market to characterize the contemporary religious landscape. Since, liberal economics terminology has been widespread. Yet this trend has been accompanied by very little critical, theoretical, and analytical considerations. While RCT authors and, to a perhaps lesser extent, sociologists such as Roof overtly celebrate the virtues of ‘choice’ as dynamizing religion (versus the fundamentally ‘bad’ intervention of the state in matters of regulation of religion), others have taken the symmetrically opposed standpoint and have lamented, as Carrette and King (2005), the ‘corporate takeover’ and de-naturalization of religion by market forces. Rare are the authors, unfortunately, who have denounced the profoundly normative and ideological nature of these opposed positions which only replay the classical opposition between liberal and Marx-inspired epistemologies that has structured a whole continent of social scientific production over the last century and a half.

In the midst of this polarization, what has been lost is how the present situation, in which economic terminology has become so natural, came to be, and what is meant by such notions as the commodification/commoditization, branding, and marketization of religion. With a bit of hindsight, it is not hard to see how religion and economics seemed completely heterogeneous not very long ago, and that this insolubility seemed to reach very far back in time. Until very recently, no one would even have thought that religion could even remotely be thought of in terms of ‘offer and demand’, that believers could be understood as consumers of religious products, and that religious institutions could be advantageously cast as ‘private firms’. What happened? Is it religion that has changed, or our gaze? Unless it is something like a mix of both. But what, then? Was it not the state and politics whose terminologies, concerns, and concepts that used to irrigate the bulk of the studies of religion? And what about today? Is religion to be considered as a product or a good like any other, as the proponents of RCT believe (this assumption is foundational to the very exercise of RCT), or is commoditization supposed to mean some kind of reification serving ‘corporate’ interests in the end?

The aim of this ensemble of articles is to contribute to the clarification and complexification of these questions outside of any blatantly normative stance. While if notions such as the marketization/commoditization/branding of religion and images such as ‘the religious/spiritual market/marketplace’ have become popular, some of the contributions aligned here show how this usage is mostly metaphorical, and at the very least quite problematic. What does the marketization of religion mean, then? And what does it mean to make the reverse analytical claim that thinking about religion in market terms is anything but metaphorical (RCT) and that the supposedly ‘natural law of offer and demand’ apply to one of society’s most complex and elusive manifestation of the ‘symbolic consistency of human societies’ (Mauss)? It is hard not to agree with Mauss when he wrote that humans are not calculating machines, as neoclassical economics assumes: ‘Homo oeconomicus is not behind us, he is before us’ (Mauss 1950, 273, my translation). A century later, can we not affirm that Mauss was right? Is not the fact that neoclassical economics have captured even the study of religion the proof that homo oeconomicus has deployed itself fully across our societies in a way that has no historical precedence? And what does this mean for sociology – and the sociology of religion in particular? Does this not indicate that some important transformations have affected the very morphology of modern societies, their very dynamics, even perhaps their foundations?

Providing insights with respect to these questions is the aim and objective of these collected essays. This thematic issue furthers the work we started almost a decade ago, in 2009, when we first joined to coordinate a panel at the ISSR conference in Santiago de Compostella on the effects of consumerism and neoliberalism on religion. Our focus was Western at first, but the amazing success of that first panel and the conferences that followed have led us to consider things globally. These endeavours have resulted in a series of co-edited publications (Gauthier, Martikainen, and Woodhead 2011; Gauthier and Martikainen 2013; Martikainen and Gauthier 2013; Nynäs, Illmann, and Martikainen 2015; Caillé, Chanial, and Gauthier 2017; as well as our forthcoming Routledge Handbook on Religion in Global Society, edited by Cornelio, Gauthier, Martikainen and Woodhead) that can be read as ‘cousins’ of the present, which is itself the by-product of a panel that we coordinated at the 2015 ISSR Conference in Louvain-la-Neuve.¹ We are very happy of having been able to accept Religion’s invitation to publish these essays in this fine and respected journal, and hope that it will give impulse to further investigations and debates. It is only fair to recognize that the last few years have seen a number of serious publications on issues related to religion and marketization, of which Rinallo, Scott, and Maclaren (2013), Usunier and Stolz (2014), Koch (2014), Jafari and Sandicki (2016), Moberg (2017) and Possamai (2018) are particularly noteworthy. While no consensus emerges from these works taken together, they do significantly refresh the ways in which issues of marketization and religion are approached, beyond the limitations and the heavily normative dimensions of the aforementioned liberal and Marxist perspectives.

Where we are going

There is no better way to begin this issue than with the ‘classical’ perspective adopted by Margit Warburg on the rapports that Danish churches abroad entertain with market economics. In this account, the distinction between Gesellschaft – associated to functional relations typical of the modern state and modern economics – and Gemeinschaft – associated to personalized relations and pre-modern forms of communities – are clear: church religion offers a space apart from the functional relationships of the market and market society, one in which community – and in this case the national community of Danish expatriates – is cared for. Yet it is not Sunday mass which is the most important moment in the Danish churches’ abroad lives, but the Christmas fairs, which are also essential events for fundraising. The fairs illustrate how voluntary work is essential in producing the event and binding the community but also inefficient in terms of market rationality. This example shows how things were not so long ago in the era when churches and nations were intimately bound. Yet the article also shows how the fair must operate increasingly under ‘pure market conditions’, as the rupture of the link between religion and nation signifies a sharpening decline in donations by Danish businesses abroad, who are becoming increasingly globalized and no longer identify as serving a national purpose which entails symbolic gestures such as funding churches.

Against this classical example, the rest of the contributions are concerned with the world that Warburg’s article announces. François Gauthier proposes a radical elevation of perspective towards the macro-level. In order to better understand the present neoliberal and consumerism-structured situation, this contribution sketches a narrative in which the advent of modernity first saw a profound remodelling of religion’s location and significance through the rise of the nation-state as the main social structuring force. The argument stresses how religion was formatted within a ‘national-statist frame’. An important aspect of the argument is to stress how this construction, which was naturalized within the secularization paradigm and modernization theories, was the result of colonial and imperial relations and was therefore not solely a Western phenomenon, but a global one. It is in contrast to this national-statist ‘regime’ that the present, ‘global-market’ regime can best be apprehended in its characteristics and importance. This heuristic frame (‘from nation-state to global-market’) is illustrated by the global transformations of Islam from the end of the nineteenth century to today’s ‘re-islamisation’ through the rise of Islamic fashion, Islamic sportswear, halal goods, Islamic banking, and Sharia-friendly vacation packages.

Marcus Moberg and Tuomas Martikainen’s contribution offers a welcome theoretical discussion on the meaning of marketization through a systematic review of literature on religion and market economics. Complementary to both the introduction to this volume and Gauthier’s contribution, the authors note the ambiguous nature of the ‘market’ in most work to date, showing how what is meant by ‘the market’, ‘capitalism’, and notions borrowed from neoclassical economics are fuzzy at best, while the question of the rapports between economics and religion remain for the most part non-thematized and kept in the background. Engaging in such a necessary discussion as to what the market signifies – whether one considers the history of social sciences or RCT – the article sketches the lineaments of how to better understand the influence of the rise of neoliberalism and consumerism on religion in a way that avoids reducing religious phenomena to neoclassical economic categories while showing how these categories have come to impose themselves on ‘religion’ as well as to its study.

While neoclassical economics stresses autonomous and undetermined, value-free individual choices, a major area of study consists precisely in shedding light on the normative dynamics of market societies. Outside of the study of religion, a privileged means of addressing this question has been to mobilize Michel Foucault’s work on liberal governmentality. Foucault showed how liberalism (of which liberal economics are the backbone) proceeds to govern modern individuals’ behaviour by empowering them in a specific way. Marian Burchardt makes a significant contribution to this scholarship by showing how ‘diversity’, which has become a powerful normative ideal and political buzzword under neoliberal conditions, participates in practices of classification that have diverted objectives of social justice and equality into ‘diversity as an end in itself’ that supports the dissemination of free-market practices and ideologies. He furthermore maps out the variegations of the concrete actualizations, appropriations, and mobilizations of this normative frame by drawing onto two case studies: Quebec and Catalonia, two nations embedded in larger federations with active independence movements. The analysis shows how the level of integration within globalized capitalism (in economic factuality and cultural imaginary) is directly correlated with the normative pull of ‘diversity’.

Özlem Sandikci, who is an influential author in Marketing Research and has published widely on topics dealing with marketization and Islam, presents a significant contribution that turns our attention back to consumerism. The opening theoretical discussion argues that the emergence of the consumer ‘as a dominant mode of identity’ and ‘subjectivity’ is a process in which ‘marketing plays an important role’. In a rich and sweeping account, she discusses ‘three phases through which the view of Muslims as modern consumers in search of distinction and propriety comes to dominate the view of Muslims as non- or anti-consumers: exclusion, identification, and stylization’. Echoing Gauthier’s analysis of the transformation of Islam within a marketized form, Sandikci stresses how the impact of neoliberalism and consumerism are a global phenomenon that follows a coherent yet variegated and locally determined set of characteristics. The article offers precious tools for understanding how the new generations of Muslims, from Jakarta to Lahore, Cairo, and the Gulf countries, not to mention in Western diasporas, ‘have grown up with a model of identity through consumption that was not previously available in any substantial way’ (Lewis 2015, 87).

Finally, Jes Heise Rasmussen’s contribution brings us full circle back to Denmark, as he analyses the impact of neoliberal ideologies and management practices on the Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church. Echoing Marcus Moberg’s (2016, 2017) analysis of these processes in the case of Finland and Sweden, Rasmussen shows how the language used by Church officials, commissions, and committees evolved in two distinct phases: the first, stemming from the 1970s to the 1990s, modulated discourse and administrative Church reforms along the lines of state bureaucracy. The second, which starts in 1996 with the establishment of a consultative think tank, largely adopted the language and precepts of New Public Management (NPM), of which the article gives a precious synthesis. The analysis, which is a non-choreographed yet perfect illustration of Gauthier’s nation-state to global-market model, shows how the NPM categories progressively come to dominate Church discourse, even when the official policies of such traditional religious institutions attest to a certain resistance with regards to fully enacting neoliberal-type reforms, for example, as concerns church closures and parish merges for economic reasons.

All in all, the contributions in this volume show a balanced ratio between – highly needed – theoretical discussions and analysis of empirical material. They also more or less equally distribute according to prevalence awarded to either consumerism or neoliberalism as a driving force for religious change. Far from being exhaustive or even representative, it is the editors’ conviction that this issue is a worthy and timely addition to the discussion on the rapports between marketization and religion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

François Gauthier is Professor of Religious Studies at the Université de Fribourg (Switzerland), and former professor at the Religious Studies Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal, where he obtained his PhD (2007). He is the author of over 50 articles and chapters in both French and English and has co-edited a series of books, including Religion in the Neoliberal Age. Political Economy and Modes of Governance and Religion in Consumer Society. Brands, Consumers, Markets (both Ashgate, 2013, in collaboration with Tuomas Martikainen). His major research areas include the transformations of religion in modernity, alternative festivals such as Burning Man and the Rainbow Gatherings, as well as religion and gift theory. He is a member of the editorial committee of La Revue du MAUSS semestrielle.

Tuomas Martikainen received his PhD in the study of religion at Åbo Akademi University in 2004. Currently, he is the Director of the Migration Institute of Finland. His research focuses on contemporary religion, including migrant religious organizations, governance of religion, and the impact of neoliberalism on religion. His publications include Religion, Migration, Settlement (Brill, 2013). Together with François Gauthier, he has edited two volumes debating the intersection of religion, neoliberalism, and market society: Religion in the Neoliberal Age (Ashgate, 2013) and Religion in Consumer Society (Ashgate, 2013).

Notes

1 To be honest, only Marburg, Gauthier and Rasmussen’s contributions originate from that panel. Burchardt and Moberg’s are issued from presentations at the same conference but in different panels, and Sandikci’s is the result of a later invitation.