Religion in the Neoliberal Age and Religion in a Consumer Society are timely and insightful collections. Their first accomplishment is to bring order to the maelstrom of change that constitutes (mainly European) modernity by drawing out three interlocking axes of analysis: Neoliberalism, Consumerism, and Religion. Their second accomplishment is to give these axes a kaleidoscopic twist such that the familiar elements they combine are re-arranged and re-connected in new patterns that disclose unfamiliar pictures of modernity. The contributors to these volumes share a conception of our moment as qualitatively different from recent history — a “second modernity,” a “liquid modernity,” a “late modernity” in which transformation is the dominant tendency, and in which transformations are continuously accelerating. They all agree that a “new form of political economy” that has emerged in recent decades “has had, and continues to have, profound consequences on religious organizations and on religious belief, practice and expression worldwide” (1). Where theories of secularization have long dominated analyses of modern religions, these texts establish a new perspective by focusing on the role of economics — more specifically the ethos of consumerism and the ideology of neoliberalism — in engaging and remaking religion. The analysis that results is more modest in its aims than earlier theories of modernization and secularization. Allowing that “there can no longer be a single answer or a single metanarrative,” the editors maintain that “a fruitful approach is to probe for structural shifts and towing undercurrents” in order to discern the continuities within this shifting terrain (3). Although these are not necessarily groundbreaking studies, their cumulative effect renders clear a broad and important range of connections between economic and religious development that might otherwise have remained relatively obscure.
The majority of contributors to Neoliberal Age and Consumer Society are sociologists — although religious studies, legal studies, and various other branches of the social sciences are represented as well. The dominant sociological perspective has its advantages and disadvantages. From the time it was defined by Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, much to its credit modern sociology has been continuously and deeply concerned with the study of religion. It has evolved theories of social transformation — modernization, secularization, differentiation — that have been formative within the social sciences and continue to be hotly contested and debated. Sociology has also sustained a formative commitment to the notion of secularization as the differentiation of institutional spheres coextensive with modernization; although these volumes remain situated within that rich tradition, they press back against the assumption that differentiation lies at the core of modernity. They place “a de-differentiating focus” focus on religion, seeking to show how it has been profoundly engaged by economic development (5). Such a careful reconsideration of the links among religion, politics, and economics is a quite welcome development.
If Weber's Protestant Ethic set the sociology of religion in motion by examining the underpinnings of early industrial capitalism, the editors rightly note that one of today's challenges is coming to terms with the shift to finance and consumer capitalism. There is a variety of existing scholarship on the articulation of economics and religion — a literature tracing the corrosion of religion by consumerism (Daniel Bell); a literature tracing how religions are remade through market forces (from Peter Berger to rational choice theory); a literature on prosperity gospels and the re-vitalization of religion as a rudiment of production; a literature on faith-based organizations and the neoliberal devolution of welfare functions to religious institutions (5–9). These volumes seek to synthesize and transcend those fractured perspectives. Without articulating “a new totalizing and uni-factorial, all-encompassing and uber-explanatory theory pledging the understanding of social reality with respect to economics,” they nonetheless seek to map two large scale coherent movements that produce consistent changes in religion across disparate contexts (9). On the one hand, they trace the decentralization and reconstitution of political and religious power and authority through a managerial discourse endemic to neoliberalism. On the other, they trace a broad cultural shift toward a consumer society. Insofar as the landscapes of religion, consumerism, and neoliberalism are variegated and shifting, the variety of perspectives collected in these volumes usefully reflects the dissonance, discontinuity, and variety of the field they survey.
Religion in the Neoliberal Age declares that “we live in the age of neoliberalism,” an age that breaks in important ways with classical liberalism and liberal democracy. If “the market appeared in modernity as an economic answer to a political question, that of social regulation within an immanent frame,” then in the editors' view “the neoliberal age is that in which” all “other social realities are said to be themselves embedded” in the market (11, 13). Neoliberalism is characterized throughout as the leading current of economic transformation in the last three decades, composed of: the movement from government to governance, networked governance, and govern-mentality; the trend toward deregulation, privatization, marketization, and public private partnerships; and the cultivation of entrepreneurship, competition, and consumption through increased efficiency, cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment, managerialism, and best practices. Neoliberal Age directs its focus toward the transformative impact of “the new neoliberal cultural economy” and the “new forms of governance and control” under neoliberalism upon religion.
The first two essays consider the current capacity of religious discourses to present viable critiques of and alternatives to neoliberalism. In a more subtle turning of the question, they explore the ways in which the potential for a progressive religious criticism can by preempted or coopted by neoliberal discourses, as well as some of the unexpected avenues of resistance to neoliberalism. Joanildo A. Burity argues, for example, that Latin American Left Ecumenical Alter-Globalism tends to converge with the very neoliberal ideologies it would oppose when it promotes a global civil society agenda. It claims conversely that Neo-Pentecostalists, though they appear to pronounce “a veritable religious expression of neoliberal discourse” in deploying “values of entrepreneurialism, self-assertiveness, and transactional spirituality” to produce “a spirituality of acquisition and consumption by an unencumbered self,” may also resist neoliberalism in affirming God's sovereignty above and beyond market transactions, and supporting “progressive (and leftist) governments” as well as “social welfare policies” (30, 31). James V. Spickard argues that religious discourses in general are disqualified by neoliberal discourses as varieties of “fundamentalism.” The claim here is that the very gesture that would establish the standing of religion in public debate — its difference from other discourses — is today used to effect its exclusion. Four essays turn to the mobilization of religious institutions within regimes of governance, looking first at how the Catholic church in Ireland has become instrumental in the project of integrating new immigrants, at the relation between welfare, faith based organizations, and the right in United States politics, and finally at the multilevel governance networks that coordinate and regulate in Finland. The last four essays trace the neoliberalization of religious regulation in Estonia, the disproportionate effects of Australia's counter-terrorism laws on Muslim communities, and the evolving position of religion in the development of Canadian constitutional law.
Jens Schlamelcher's essay on “The Rise of City Churches” stands out as a particularly lucid expression of the volume's key themes. Schlamelcher presents the somewhat paradoxical stance of the Evangelical Church of Germany: it opposes the expansion of market values and practices on theological grounds and yet demographic and macroeconomic shifts (declining population and declining revenue) constrain it to incorporate many of the neoliberal strategies it opposes in order to survive. As a result, the church is moving away from a parish model grounded in a small, local, closed community centered around pastor, liturgy, and church; it is embracing instead a city church model that takes the much larger population of the city at large as its public (potential clients) and operates through “low-threshold,” offers that minimize or eliminate doctrine and commitment in order to draw new potential members into the church. The Sunday service declines in importance as “chants of healing and power,” “tango dance classes,” and “contemplation sessions” proliferate (63). While one might be tempted to describe this as the “secularization” of the church, Neoliberal Age suggests that such developments may be more aptly framed as particular transformations of religion under the specific pressures of neoliberalism.
Arguing that “the social acceptance of neoliberalism depends on a wider shift within Western societies, one which has to do with the rise of consumerism as a dominant cultural ethos . . . one in which the abundance and the circulation of objects and the continuous appeal to desire is central” (15–16), Religion in a Consumer Society aims to dig beneath the surface of neoliberalism to expose the substrate of consumerism on which it grows. The volume's introduction presents consumerism as the culture of late capitalism: it is brought into being in the postwar world through the rampant commoditization and marketization of life and it stimulates and orchestrates desire within a collective symbolic economy. It works most effectively by creating brands that offer distinctive lifestyles and promise the realization and expression of individuals' authentic identities as well as the conferral of meaning upon their lives. The generalization of consumer culture, the argument goes, lies beneath a sea change in religious experience. “The results of this mutation are manifold: religion is made to compete with other cultural products, and is thereby forced to become more convenient, customer-oriented, relevant to everyday life, and entertaining; the divide between the sacred and profane, religious and secular, is blurred; religions can no longer demand ‘brand loyalty’, in the form of a life-time commitment, but instead must compete to ignite and reignite commitments” (17). Religions, in short, are pressed away from traditional hierarchies, doctrines, and rituals and transformed into possible lifestyle choices — spiritualties — that compete in the marketplace as branded commodities among others.
Where Neoliberal Age addressed the reconfiguration of religion and politics from the perspective of institutional change by focusing on governments, parties, social movements, religious communities, and churches, Consumer Society more consistently addresses the changing quality of lived religion. It strikes an even tone; neither lamenting nor celebrating the advent of consumer culture, as it seeks to draw out the consequences of this broad pattern of change upon religious life. Two of its essays argue that leading sociological and economic theories fail to adequately come to terms with the impact of marketization and commoditization on religion (engaging Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, and rational choice theory). Four essays trace the precise changes wrought in religion when it is packaged for consumption. The cases considered include the Church of Sweden's shift in emphasis away from weekly worship and toward customer service, the dissemination of styles of worship evolved within Megachurches in the United States, the emergence of eclectic new forms of monasticism in Italy, and the incorporation of Buddhism, new age, and pop cultural elements within American Judaism. The remaining essays focus on the ways in which a new orientation toward individual self-realization through both production and consumption (“prosumption”) typical of consumer societies intersects with religious traditions reinvented as lifestyle choices. The cases considered here include the emergence of common transnational forms of spiritual practices among a new global middle class, the adaptation of Buddhism for market in Scotland, the symbiotic relation of new age spirituality and neoliberal ideology in Swedish print media, the increase in “life coaching” in Sweden, and the status of Glastonbury as a key site for spiritual tourism.
François Gauthier's essay on “The Burning Man Festival” exemplifies many of Consumer Society's key insights. Building on the volume's introduction, Gauthier argues that it is neither sufficient to frame religion in the existing language of economic theory nor to analyze economic life as a manifestation of religion. It may be true that contemporary religions are commoditized and marketed. It may also be true that economic production and consumption involve a coordination of desire, commitment, and meaning well mapped by the anthropology of religion. But Gauthier argues that both perspectives must be maintained at once in order to understand religion in the context of a consumer society. Burning Man — a yearly mass festival with prominent spiritual components that is premised in large part on the rejection of market exchanges in favor of a gift economy and collective self-enactment — dramatizes the inextricability of religion and consumer capitalism despite their apparent contradictions. It bans corporate logos during the festival, yet itself functions as a successful brand complete with distinctive logo. It takes place in a remote desert, creating a space and community distant from and opposed to capitalist life, yet it does so through the generous support and funding of Silicon Valley executives. But one can neither say that Burning Man has been commoditized nor that it is an authentic spiritual event. One must say instead that commoditization provides the grounds for spirituality as much as spirituality grounds the desire for commodities. Burning Man sells an authentic commoditized spiritual experience. Understanding religious experience today, the claim is, requires that we understand how human experience in general is conditioned by consumer culture. Conversely, to understand consumerism, newly emergent spiritual practices may present some of the best cases to study.
While these volumes deserve to be read and discussed, that is not to say that they are without fault. The essays are at times repetitive and they lean heavily on existing scholarship, offering little that is theoretically new. In addition, they cover a short time period over a relatively narrow slice of the globe, being set exclusively in postwar Europe and its settler colonies. And yet despite those shortcomings, these volumes contain a great deal of information, insight, and inspiration. Among their most important interventions are to bring to light the impact of distinctly neoliberal modes of governance on modern religions, and to suggest how deeply entwined modern religion has become with the norms and practices of consumerism. The claim that these two tendencies are widespread and of fundamental importance is persuasive and it should play an important role in directing future research.
