![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Notes
1 See, for example, Jeremy Carrette and Richard King’s description of the evangelicals who now seek to “win people over to Sunday service through the power of advertising” in Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (London: Routledge, 2005), 125. Even when the narrative is told more sympathetically, there is still a clear rejection of utilizing consumerism as an appropriate model through which to clarify Christianity. See also Robert Wuthnow, All in Sync: How Music and Art are Revitalizing American Religion (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 44.
2 Celia Lury, Consumer Culture (Malden: Polity Press, 2011), 4.
3 As in the Amazon Alexa device purported to be a personal assistant, but which won’t stop making “by the way-ing” suggestions to sell Amazon services and products.
4 John F. Sherry Jr., “Brand Meaning,” in Kellogg on Branding: The Marketing Faculty of The Kellogg School of Management, eds. Alice M. Tybout and Tim Calkins (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005), 40.
5 Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Inc., 1997), 24.
6 François Gauthier, Linda Woodhead, and Tuomas Martikainen, “Introduction: Consumerism as the Ethos of Consumer Society,” in Religion in Consumer Society: Brands, Consumers, and Markets, eds. François Gauthier and Tuomas Martikainen (New York: Routledge, 2013), 2.
7 Slater, Consumer Culture, 24.
8 Ellingson describes these features in greater detail. See Stephen Ellingson, “New Research on Megachurches: Non-denominationalism and Sectarianism,” in The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Malden: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2010), 253.
9 This echoes the fundamental questions Roman Catholic theologian Romano Guardini wrote in his 1964 open letter in which he wondered if “modern man [sic]…is no longer capable of a liturgical act?” See Romano Guardini, “A Letter from Romano Guardini,” Herder Correspondence 1 (Special Issue 1964): 24–26. More recently, theologian John Davis, after observing worship in over thirty-five local churches of varying ecclesial and liturgical traditions, reported being left with these “disturbing question,” conveying the perceived loss of meaningful enchantment among Christian worshipers: “Where is God in all this? What are we really doing here? Is there a vivid consciousness of the presence of the living, holy God among his people at these services?” See John Jefferson Davis, Worship and the Reality of God: An Evangelical Theology of Real Presence (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2010), 9.
10 As Ellingson describes, evangelicals “often select issues surrounding personal morality (such as sexuality) and lifestyle (such as parenting) as a means of distancing themselves” from parts of culture. In so doing, they have retained “the benefits of consumer capitalism but avoid their alleged polluting effects.” See Ellingson, “New Research,” 262–263.
11 Gauthier, et al., “Introduction: Consumerism,” 9.
12 Gauthier.
13 Slater describes such views as operating within the “modern” period. Today, though, we have moved on to postmodernity, an era in which these practices operate differently, and to more symbolic (spiritual) ends. See Slater, Consumer Culture, 2 and 6.
14 Adam Arvidsson, Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006), 59.
15 Tom Wagner argues as such in the case of Hillsong. “Hillsong’s brand,” he explains, “is more than just a series of clever marketing techniques; it is a collection of media through which meaning is communicated and a medium through which meaning is experienced.” See Wagner, “The ‘Powerful’ Hillsong Brand,” in The Hillsong Movement Explained (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 254.
16 Roberta Sassatelli, Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2007), 195.
17 George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson, “Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer,’” Journal of Consumer Culture 10, no. 1 (2010): 14.
18 Gauthier, et al., “Introduction: Consumerism,” 12.
19 Gauthier, 13.
20 For a more extensive overview of the evangelical megachurch tradition, see Ellingson, “New Research.”
21 “Heaven Come Conference,” Bethel Music, https://bethelmusic.com/heavencome.
22 “Bethel Music Worship School,” Bethel Music, https://bethelmusic.com/worshipschool.
23 It is beyond the scope here to more comprehensively detail the theological vision which corresponds to Bethel Music’s branding-intentions. Ruth and Lim provide a comprehensive telling of the broader theological vision affirmed in much of contemporary worship. See Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong, A History of Contemporary Praise & Worship (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). Elsewhere, I have explored Bethel’s particular theology of worship in Emily Snider Andrews, “Exploring Evangelical Sacramentality: Modern Worship Music and the Possibility of Divine-Human Encounter,” Ph.D. diss., Fuller Theological Seminary, 2019.
24 Birgit Meyer, “Material Mediations and Religious Practices of World-Making,” in Religion Across Media: From Early Antiquity to Late Modernity, ed. Knut Lundby (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2013), 7.
25 Meyer, 7–8.
26 Twitchell has argued that the megachurch’s use of this product, “edutainment,” directly contributes to their rapid rise and further situates them within consumer culture’s ethos of therapeutic and self-growth goals, entertainment and consumption, and popular culture. See James B. Twitchell, Branded Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 76.
27 “Bethel.TV Equip,” Bethel.TV, https://bethel.tv/equip.
28 Chris Shilling and Philip A. Mellor, “Retheorising Emile Durkheim on Society and Religion: Embodiment, Intoxication and Collective Life,” The Sociological Review 59, no. 1 (2011): 17 and 20.
29 Shilling and Mellor, 22.
30 Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics, trans. Andrew Inkpin (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications Inc., 1997), 47.
31 “Revival” and “revivalist” are terms pervasive across the Bethel platform. Bethel’s stated mission “is revival—the personal, regional, and global expansion of God’s kingdom through His manifest presence.” See “About,” Bethel Church, https://www.bethel.com/.
32 Matthew Wade, “At Hillsong, Religious Expression is a Global Corporate Brand,” The Conversation, July 3, 2014, https://theconversation.com/at-hillsong-religious-expression-is-a-global-corporate-brand-28765.
33 Todd E. Johnson, “Recent American Protestant Sacramental Theology: Two Decades On,” in In Spirit and Truth, eds. Philip Anderson and Michelle Clifton Soderstrom (Chicago: Covenant, 2006), 128. In his description of four “general epochs of Christian sacramental thought,” Johnson describes the current paradigm as rooted in communication theory, which has explicit resonances with the symbolic nature and function of consumer culture’s operations of marketing and branding.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Emily Snider Andrews
Emily Snider Andrews is an assistant professor of music and worship and Executive Director of the Center for Worship and the Arts at Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama.