Encyclopedia of Religion, Communication, and Media

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Religious Marketplace

Religion has always depended on the availability of shared symbols, practices, and languages. Even in the historical past, religious expression and experience at the tribal or village level depended on means of symbolic articulation. Cave painting, talismans and other sacred objects, song, movement, dance, and story all depended upon the existence and ongoing development of languages useful to these expressions and interactions. Our received ideas about religious history hold these codes and modes of communication to be authentically related to experience and expression in that they are thought to be organically rooted in practice.

Religion has changed with the onrush of history. It is no longer integrated into the warp and woof of daily life in the way that it once was. What Ferdinand Tonnies described as a transition from the gemeinschaft of traditional cultural and social life to the gesellschaft of modernity has within it the gradual erosion of the traditional integration of modes of life that included what we now think of as "religion." This has traditionally been described in social theory as a process of "secularization," whereby religious worldviews play less and less of a role in social consciousness and social action. This change in the nature of religion, whether we think of it as a broad-scale secularization or not, entailed change as well on the level of the power of religious tradition and doctrine to explain the nature of reality or to legitimate social action of various kinds.

What is more significant perhaps is what happens on the level of social practice of religion, however. In late modernity, with the ongoing progress of changing relations between religion and social life, what individuals do to make their own religious meaning is as important as their relationship to received doctrines or theologies. This new approach to understanding religion has been called a "new paradigm" in an influential statement. Whereas we once would have thought of the influence of religious belief flowing from history, doctrine, clerical, and institutional authority to the behavioral sets of adherents, today it is more common to think of religion in terms of what people do to make their own religious and spiritual meanings.

Important recent works in the sociology of religion have identified this new way of doing religion as focusing on "seeking" instead of "dwelling" as modes of faith, to use terms popularized by sociologist Robert Wuthnow. The "dwelling" mode of religion stresses sacred places, while the "seeking" mode stresses sacred moments which can be transitory and are less connected with space. Further, the religious "seeker" often negotiates among "complex and often confusing meanings of spirituality" (Wuthnow 1998, 4). Wade Clark Roof, another major sociological voice in the study of contemporary religion connects these practices in what he calls "quest" culture rather directly to the media, and the provision in the media of a range of symbolic and practical resources to these processes of "seeking" and "questing." He has noted that the religion sections in bookstores are no longer there, having been replaced by "...an expanded, diversified space-beginning with angels and running through the Bible, gurus, prophecy, Buddhism, Catholicism, magic, paganism, Mary, Pentecostalism, eco-spirituality, feminist theology and spirituality, and esoterica right on down to Zoroastrianism." This is only part of the picture, though, as a range of popular media now openly deal with spiritual themes, according to Roof (1997).

What this means is that in late modernity, in the industrialized west, at least, "the media" and "religion" are converging in a fundamental way. At the same time that people are finding ways of being religious and spiritual that involve active seeking and appropriation of symbolic resources in unconventional places (most of which are mediated places) the media sphere is undergoing a transformation that has brought about an increasing diversity of channels and sources, and therefore symbolic resources. This convergence raises important questions about the nature of contemporary religion, particularly about the authenticity of these practices.

While the emergence of the media marketplace as an important site of religious practice may seem new, it in fact has some deep roots. First, it is important to see this development in the context of the history of American religion, in particular. The historian of religion Nathan Hatch has shown that in important ways, American Christianity in the 19th century evolved a vibrant non-institutional face. Whereas established religious institutions and clerical authority enjoyed status in the Colonial period, in the post-Colonial period emergent non-institutional and nonconformist religious movements began to play a larger and larger role. These movements became significant players in the frontiers of the new nation. The Wesleyan, Campbellite, and Baptist movements that dominated the frontier in the 19th Century US constituted what Hatch calls a "democratization" of Christianity. By this he means that a number of the characteristics of these movements led to the development of an approach to American religion that was less ecclesiastically bounded than the European and colonial precursors. The pluralism of so many competing movements, along with their increasing accessibility through the efforts of frontier evangelists and publishers, led to a situation where it became conventional to think of American Christianity as a kind of marketplace of faiths. It could be argued that more and more of the power and autonomy over their own faith therefore resided in the hands of individuals, a condition that came to dominate religion in the late 20th Century.

The communicational context of this era is significant. Many of these Christian movements stressed printing and publishing, producing and marketing Bibles, tracts, magazines, and other such documents. In a germinal work, David Paul Noord has described the media and religion context of the 19th Century as a time of the origins of American mass media rooted in the activities of religious publishers and distributors. The marketing of these objects along side the vibrant revivalism and evangelism of the period enhanced the democratization process Hatch describes. More important to our considerations here, though, is the fact that publishing was integrated into these movements at such an early stage. It is further significant to note Nord's argument that what we think of today as the "secular" media were in fact rooted in these sectarian contexts and movements. The media of the day left their mark on the movements, and the movements left their mark on the media, it might be argued.

A vibrant material culture of religion thus has been at the base of at least American practice ever since. Laurence Moore has shown that from the earliest days, religion and markets have been effectively intertwined. While Moore and most others would argue that this has been more a reality for Protestantism than for other religious traditions, a gradual "Protestantization" of all of religion, including the developments described by Hatch above, have left all religions, in modernity, integrated into markets. Reflecting on the nature of American (and much European) religion today reveals the extent to which this is the case. Most religions actively engage in various enterprises devoted to the promotion of their symbols and values in the broader culture. What used to be a clear divide between a "sacred" organic world of ascetic practice and a "profane" world of material concerns and markets has been erased if indeed it ever existed.

More recent scholarship has demonstrated the extension of these ideas and practices into a variety of specific fields and contexts. What has come to be referred to as the "material culture" of religion has been shown to exist along a range of practices, objects, locations, and platforms. Of particular interest has been a specific type of material culture: the visual. Pictures have long been problematic for religious institutions and authorities. In Protestantism, for example, it has been common to think of faith that would attach itself to pictures as somehow less mature than faith based on the printed word. The problem of idolatry has also been invoked, based on the assumption that visual images are more likely to be objects of this sort of piety.

The idea that modes of practice such as visual communication have been under-represented in contemporary formal religious practice are at the root of some of the important waves of religious exploration that we earlier described as "seeking" or "questing." Along with the visual mode, this list could include, for example, objects, invented rituals, the body, music, and "experience" itself. As Roof and others have suggested, the seeming suppression of such practices by "traditional religion" has played an important role in practices of seeking, where these things are sought out outside of the formal bounds of religions authority.

Such sensibilities and motivations are an important element of the emerging market for the resources in the religious marketplace. Roof has explored these trends in great detail, and along with them an emerging marketplace having arisen to serve the less conventionally-religious seekers. This obviously connects with trends in what some have called "postmodern" religion. What Roof, Colleen McDannell, and others have described in an emerging commodity marketplace of supply in what we think of as "secular" contexts has arisen in response to this trend. The expansive religious, spiritual, and quasi-religious offerings of the typical bookstore are one example of this. Other examples include the ever-expanding market for "self help" programs and resources and burgeoning religious and spiritual themes across a range of popular media.

At the same time, however, Laurence and Nord would have us remember that a material culture, and particularly a mediated material culture, has always been integrated into American religion. Evangelical Protestantism and Catholicism have contained a prodigious array of material objects (many of these dismissed as "kitsch" by religious authorities). The Christian Booksellers Association has become the iconic representation of this religious marketplace. Its annual convention attracts hundreds of exhibitors and thousands of participants. The evolution of the CBA from a small association of religious publishers to a major location for the articulation of material ways of being and doing religion and spirituality is an important indicator of the extent to which religion today is rooted in commodities in a marketplace of supply. There is reason to believe, further, that even for more traditional adherents, a kind of "seeking" sensibility holds sway.

A further dimension of the religious marketplace is the underlying economic structure of the media industries. The voluble demand for religions and spiritual materials is an emergent phenomenon across the last Century. However, its expression through supply has been increasingly enabled by the ongoing concentration and restructuring of the media. Where religious materials were relatively rare in the secular media marketplace in the first half of the 20th Century, they became more and more common more recently. In television, for example, the "network era" was a time of relatively few sources of and outlets for a variety of programs and other materials, religious and otherwise. With the rise of cable television, home video and satellite services, there has been an explosion of channels, and a resultant increase in the market for a range of specialized services and programming. The religious networks that came to be known as televangelism are only part of the story. In addition to them, a range of quasi-religious programmers such as the Pax network, have been joined by other services that carry programming significant to religious and spiritual quests, including channels such as Hallmark, Lifetime and Oxygen. Increasing specialization in magazine and book publishing and marketing, and of course the proliferation of resources available on the World Wide Web, have had a parallel effect in opening up an ever wider and more diverse supply. Concentration in the media industries has added momentum to these trends through the tendency for cross-media and cross-platform marketing and promotion, and the parallel tendency for the development of "crossover" resources such as those found in Contemporary Christian Music.

These trends remain controversial on a number of levels. There is continuing resistance by some religious authorities to modes of practice that seem overly materialistic and rooted in emotional approaches to faith. More widespread are questions about the overall effects of the commodification of faith and spirituality. Can something be authentic if its provenance is the commercial marketplace? This is an important question. History tells us, though, that it is by no means a new one.

— Stewart M. Hoover

Further Reading

Berger, P. (1990). The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor.

Bruce, S. (2002). God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Hatch, N. (1989). The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Hoover, S. M. (1998). "Media Scholarship and the Question of Religion: Evolving Theory and Method," paper delivered to the International Communication Association, Jerusalem, 1998. [http://www.colorado.edu/Journalism/MEDIALYF/analysis/ica98.html].

Horton, M. S. (1995). Made in America: The Shaping of Modern American Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids: Baker books.

Making Money, Saving Souls: The First 25 Years of the Christian Booksellers Association. In L. S. Clark, (Ed.), Religion, Media, and the Marketplace (forthcoming).

McDannell, C. (1998). Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Meyers, K. (1989). All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians & Popular Culture. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.

Moore, R. L. (1994). Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Morgan, D. (1999). Visual Piety. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Morgan, D., & Promey, S. (Eds.). (2001). The Visual Culture of American Religions. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nord, D. P. (2004). Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. New York: Oxford.

Ostling, R. N. (1994). Evangelical Publishing and Broadcasting. In G. Marsden, (Ed.), Evangelicalism and Modern America. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Promey, S. (1996). Interchangeable Art: Warner Sallman and the Critics of Mass Culture. In D. Morgan, (Ed.), Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman. New Haven: Yale.

Roof, W. C. (1997). Today's Spiritual Quests. Princeton Lectures on Youth, Church, and Culture, Princeton Theological Seminary.

Roof, W. C. (1999). Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Tonnies, F. (1957). Community and Society: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, (C. P. Loomis, Trans. & Ed.). East Lansing: The Michigan State University Press.

Warner, R. S. (1993). Work in Progress Toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States. American Journal of Sociology 98, 1044-1093.

Wuthnow, R. (1998). After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Yamane, D. (1997). Secularization on Trial: In Defense of a Neo-Secularization Paradigm. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36, 107-120.

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