If one were to summarize Marxist notions of religion, it would be uncontroversial to say some immediate themes spring to mind. Religion as a phenomenon would be considered socially; religion would not have an independent reality in its own right, but could be explained through social relations. Religion would be economically determined; there would be an economic explanation for why productive forces lead to the formation of religious beliefs and practices. Religion would be ideological in the pejorative sense; religion is the opium of the people. Social manifestations of religion are self-serving tools of the economically secure for perpetuating social inequality. Additionally, we would have to think of religious individualism as false consciousness and alienation, religion as the product of capitalist accumulation, religion as a contributor to commodity fetishism, religion as a subterranean driver of class division, and religion as an easy bedfellow of rampant consumerism. Craig Martin's Capitalizing Religion is very deeply embedded in Marxism, and the success of its original contribution to our understanding of popular religion depends on the extent to which Martin deviates from or develops this line of thought. It is fair to say that Martin's work is a success, bringing a wonderful melange of personal, philosophical, and sociological wisdom to bear on the very particular form of religion which is popular spirituality.
The main aim of Capitalizing Religion is to offer a coherent account of popular spirituality as consumerist ideology. Martin ultimately presents a fairly conventional Marxist account of popular spirituality, and yet it remains a reading that is perceptive and original in the manner in which Martin applies insights from the Marxist and sociological tradition to questions of New Age religion. This work is important for challenging the unphilosophical, apolitical, and unhistorical assumptions of the commonplace discourse of ‘I am spiritual not religious’, and the preference for ‘individual religion’ over ‘institutional religion’. Here religion ought to be a person's autonomous choice, stitched together from a postmodern collage of religious styles. For Martin, these expressions are wide-ranging trends socially, culturally, and politically. However, they remain under-investigated. This is especially the case with regard to the discourse of popular religion, which always remains an expression of the heart. Thus, for Martin, the primary route to spiritual enlightenment remains bereft of the material and historical conditions which make such choices possible.
Capitalizing Religion argues that the ideology of spiritual individualism masks the social, economic, and political extent to which ‘individuals’ are ‘collectively constituted’ (6). Furthermore, such ideological blindness promotes capitalist economics. The discourse of ‘individual religion’ or ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR) is a silent spur for consumerism, productivity, and political quietism (157). There are four basic strands to Martin's argument which classify the essentially capitalistic nature of SBNR. First, ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ are tantamount to political quietism; the purpose of spirituality is to help one to cope with the stresses and anxieties of life in the capitalist workforce. While this may not be a bad thing in itself, it becomes problematic when the aim of spirituality is not to challenge existing economic arrangements or social hierarchies. Second, the silent engine of spirituality and religion is consumerism. Individual freedom of choice is sacralized. Third, and Martin provides numerous examples of this, spirituality engenders increased productivity. Especially in the workplace, spiritual practices align themselves with both material success and creeping accommodation to corporate competition. Fourth, if the individual is all, then so too are individuals’ failures. If individuals can tap into the divine, then it is their own responsibility if they fail, and never the fault of any existing corporate arrangements. Suffering is only ever the fault of individuals rather than social structures. In the more poignant and touching aspects of this narrative – those concerning the death of Martin's father – we see the spiritual but not religious discourse, inadequate for coming to terms with the economic and political origins of their own tragedy.
All of the aforementioned strands lead us to Martin's subtitle: ‘the ideology of the bourgeoisie’. SBNR accommodates upper- and middle-class labourers to consumer culture in late capitalism (157). This is where Martin's analysis deserves to be praised for its originality. SBNR is a yearning for fellow feeling and collective identity. If, as is commonly argued, the neo-liberal economics of late capitalism lead to the increased atomization of the individual, then Martin ought to be commended for identifying more precisely how the abundance of discourse on SBNR and ‘individual religion’ give evidence not for an increase in the pursuit of autonomous forms of religious life and practices, but for an explanation of religion as the collective identity of middle-class anxieties. Martin's contribution is his theorization of SBNR as the opium of the bourgeoisie. The ubiquity of discourses on ‘individual religion’, and their global reach within consumer culture, becomes a somewhat distorted substitute for meaningful social relations and communal belonging. As one would expect with a Marxist analysis, there is nothing distinct or different about personal religion or spirituality. Any purportedly idiosyncratic religious styles and individualism are replicated in innumerable contexts, revealing nothing more than the social and cultural homogeneity of capitalized religion.
The book is divided into two sections. The first section offers a clear, thorough, and detailed theorization of the relations between ideology, capitalism, and sociology. Here the argument draws on sociological theories of distinction and difference to elaborate on a theory of popular spirituality. Augmenting the Marxist examination at the core of the text, Martin draws on a variety of thinkers like Émile Durkheim, Thomas Luckmann, Zygmunt Bauman, and Michel Foucault to provide an account of how capitalist individualism has emerged as the main impetus for religion, and to explain how the immediacy of intuition and experience hold pre-eminence over more traditional institutional forms of religion.
The role of Durkheim is particularly important within the context of the book, since this clarifies its contribution to the sociology of religion. For Martin, there are two Durkheims. First, there is Durkheim the sociologist who sees progress and social differentiation as imperative in a move from an undifferentiated tribal culture to a ‘civilized’ differentiated one. This Durkheim does not see the individual as a metaphysical monad, impervious to the play of social forces. This is decisive in understanding how we can approach SBNR sociologically. However, the second Durkheim is more problematic, and brings us to an ethnocentric position. Martin rightly chastises Durkheim's sense of ethnocentric superiority. However, the problem is more profound than this, where Durkheim's method remains tied to some entrenched binary oppositions: mechanical solidarity/organic solidarity, low division of labour/high division of labour, homogeneous collective conscience/heterogeneous conscience, less free will/more free will, closer to instinct/freer from instinct, closer to matter/closer to spirit (27–28). These binaries ultimately contribute to a limited sociological understanding of how we can approach the popular religions as they create an opposition between the material/historical and the immaterial/spiritual. The force of Martin's argument, it is important to note, relies on how his two versions of Durkheim continue to be relevant versions of contemporary spirituality. Durkheim, unwittingly or otherwise, has left us with a basically liberal interpretation of the new spiritual movements, as taken up, for example, by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead in the The Spiritual Revolution (2005). Here we see reproduced Durkheim's distinction between an organized religion which implies conformity, hierarchy, and strict adherence to traditional values, and contemporary forms of spiritualism which are individualistic, free-floating, open, and tolerant.
The second section of the book is markedly different, applying theoretical analysis to case studies of what Martin takes to be exemplars of ‘spiritual but not religious’. First, he analyses Christopher Moore's novel Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal (2002), which Martin takes as an exemplar of political quietism. Second, he examines the inherent individualistic consumerism of Randa Abdel-Fattah's novel Does My Head Look Big in This? (2005). Third, he looks at the intersection of labour, production, and religion with regard to spiritual self-help manuals. Here he looks at Richmond Lewis's Work as a Spiritual Practice: A Practical Buddhist Approach to Inner Growth and Satisfaction on the Job (2000). This is particularly noteworthy for its disavowing of the social in favour of corporate accommodationism. Fourth, in one of his more philosophical readings, Martin traces the lineage of the Protestant work ethic in works such as Karen Berg's God Wears Lipstick: Kabbalah for Women (2005) and Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1999). Here Martin argues that there is a capitalist theodicy present in works of popular spirituality. In what is ultimately a contemporary version of Augustinian free will mapped on to Weberian economics, the existence of economic suffering is the fault of those who do not take responsibility for taking up the divinely preordained economic prosperity equally available to all. Of course, for Martin, such a position ultimately avoids challenging, critiquing, and transforming existing social and economic inequities.
In terms of scholarship, one intellectual strength of the text is that Martin offers a detailed and reflective genealogy of popular spirituality. One cannot have Eckhart Tolle without William James; one cannot understand Richmond Lewis without Max Weber. Indeed, a subject that betrays particular ire, and one of the most fascinating aspects of the book, is Martin's excoriation of American pragmatist William James. James's classic Varieties of Religious Experience lends faux intellectual credibility to popular spirituality. James's philosophy of religion favours intuition and experience over religious institutions. Like Durkheim, James subscribes to one side of some asocial binaries in order to express religious experience qua personal experience. With James, for example, we have inner/outer, faith/works, true religion/false religion, soul/body, spiritual/temporal, religion/civil society, religious experience/institutional religion, personal religion/organized religion, and spirituality/religion (57–58). James, in his very popular Varieties, is guilty of mystification of the social origins of religion within ‘time, space and history’ (60). Moreover, there is something humorous in Martin's critique of the pious James as a paradigm of liberal paranoia bordering on conspiracy theory. With James we get a predominantly naïve account of religion where bad, grubby dogmatic institutional religions are organized to take away the true personal religion. While a Jamesian scholar would undoubtedly argue that Martin oversimplifies James on religion, it is difficult not to be swayed by his argument, at least in terms of its explanation of James's account of religion as just another form of SBNR. James's religion is a paragon of the intellectual naïveté which undermines a proper sociological theory of religion. James endorses a ‘return to origins narrative’ that delimits the possibility of any coherent analysis of religious phenomena or religious traditions (60). This is accompanied by a superficial narrative in which all religions begin with a charismatic leader tapping into the divine, then disciples and followers pervert the original innocence of the essence of ‘true religion’ with dogma, authoritarianism, power, rules, and hypocrisy (60). Such an over-universalization of religious experience is, for Martin, unhelpful and inaccurate. The consequence of James's view for the philosophy of religion is indeed very superficial: personal religious experience and all religious institutions remain outside of history, since ‘no matter where one looks in time and space, religious institutions will be the same’ (60). James's work amounts to no more than a folk theory of religion, one where there are good guys and bad guys, and the possibility of objective social change can only ever be played out against the backdrop of a personal religion without socio-political context.
Overall, Capitalizing Religion makes a welcome contribution to the philosophy of religion. It is a valuable alternative to atheistic accounts of religion as a purely natural phenomenon, espoused by Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, and Dworkin. Martin presents a cogent Marxist materialist account which situates popular religion firmly as a material and economic phenomenon. Martin provides us with an excellent text that is both engaging and scholarly. There are of course many questions that can be put to Martin, which he does not take up directly. To what extent could his analysis be extended to traditional religions? Do neo-liberal rationality and efficiency contribute to the emergence of personal religion? Is there something distinct about the historical mutations of capitalism which lead to the contemporary proliferation of popular religion? To what extent does this analysis respond to Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach? Having said this, Martin's book presents a challenge to those who complacently think of religion as good in itself, because at the core of popular religion is inequality. Martin draws attention here to the inherent smugness and self-confidence of the religious. This is a timely reminder that ‘weak’ adherents of popular religions are ultimately self-serving, narcissistic, and venal. At the core of some very new versions of spirituality there are some good old-fashioned class prejudices about who should be drowned and who shall be saved, in the form of a contemporary version of the deserving and undeserving poor. Martin's text is only a beginning. We can look forward to further reflections on these issues.
