Commercialization / Commodification, VSR

in: R. Segal, K. von Stuckrad (eds.), Vocabulary for the Study of Religion Vol. 1-3 (VSR), Leiden, Boston: Brill 2015. http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/vocabulary-for-the-study-ofreligion Commercialization / Commodification To speak of “commercialization of religion” sounds as if there were a genuinely non-commercial form of religion. This impression is reinforced by public debates and discussions among religious experts who speak derogatively of the commercialization of religion, or even of “consumer religion” (Miller 2003). The same concern is expressed with regard to a wide range of different religious subcultures, from traditional to New Age (Zaidman 2003; Gauthier and Martikainen 2013). Here we will use the term as a key concept in the economics of religion, referring to a manifold, but also very specific array of processes and strategies in religious markets. The commercialization and commodification of religion is not only a modern phenomenon. The Medieval Latin Church, for instance, invented a franchise system for indulgences, a new product that shortened the time to be spent in purgatory. The pope established a parallel distribution structure involving newly-licensed mendicant orders alongside the parochial structure. The resulting competition not only solved the principal-agent problem in respect of agents who were difficult to control when they were far away from Rome, but also maximized the profit for the principal, the papacy (Schmidtchen and Mayer 1997). And yet commercialization, as part of the economization of modern life, has reached new dimensions in the industrialized and post-industrialized era. Consumer culture is regularly referred to in the debates of religious experts, and is the focus of this entry. With regard to the difference between commercialization and commodification, the latter term tends to be used more for processes involving the distribution of goods, whereas commercialization is a more general term, if indeed there is a difference in their usage. The marketization of religion, another terminological option, has a slightly different and more limited use: the market as a place for producing, distributing, and consuming products is seen to be the only and Koch A_Commercialization_Commodification.indd 1 central place of these changes. But this neglects alternative societal coordination systems like nonmarket symbolic exchanges, alliances, and habits, and religious household production for its own consumption. Re-enchanted Identities? As a part of material culture, religious commodities mediate between consumers and the values, promises, and attached supernatural forces of theses commodities (McDannell 1995). As such religious commodities may be seen as a form of enchantment, giving attractiveness and prospects to products, and unlocking new sentiments and ways of self-realization. This process is part of the integral magic of modernity. But in this sense sales organizations may also be enchanted, like the North American direct-sales corporation Amway, which promises the reintegration of work, family, and politics through the creation of family businesses that interlink with bigger social networks (Bromley 1995). One might also think of the Church of Scientology, which sells selfimprovement training with the promise of cosmic self-realization. According to recent modernity theories, lifestyle and consumer habits are a primary source of social identification within the broader political economy (Cosgel and Minkler 2004). Think of evangelical “witness wear” for example (Hendershot 2004). This process of developing an identity deeply alters the consumers’ subjectivity in a popular consumer culture. But this alteration does not necessarily lead to social alienation (Kline 2007) among the consumers, nor should it be coopted by theology as the worship of consumer culture (deChant 2002). The expression “Divinity, Inc.” has been coined to express the commodification of the “numinous essence of faith,” as in the case of “proper” Muslim-ness (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009: 136). This presupposes the 2/9/2015 7:05:40 PM 2 commercialization / commodification naturalization of cultural property as something given, and not as something negotiated. Identity constructions are the result of ethnic and national branding, intellectual property, and cultural heritage discourses. Identity is transformed into property. In this context, there are plenty of cross-connections with law (property law, commercial law, trademark law) which emerge in court proceedings and which affect the actions, claims, and organizational structure of religious institutions. We may think here for instance of the attempt by the Indian government to protect certain yoga positions as Indian cultural property, the US trademark of Iyengar Yoga, the changing of yogic self-representations from being a sport to being a religion (and a form of healthcare) after the introduction of a tax on “recreation, games and athletic events” in the US state of Missouri, or the battle of the chipmaker Intel against a yoga program in schools named “Yoga inside” because it claimed that this violated the component brand “Intel inside.” Once recognized as property in a legal sense—that is, as distinctive signs—religious symbols, practices, body postures, melodies, and wordings may also be subject to exclusion or restriction of use. Prosperity Religions Correlating with the economic boom at the end of the twentieth century, some East Asian countries in particular were characterized by the emergence of so-called prosperity religions. These are religious movements that are based on wealth, and which aim at increasing wealth, as much as at obtaining salvation. Prosperity religions combining spiritual symbolism with consumerism are mostly very innovative in their rituals, and often reflect a new national confidence. In Thailand, for example, one movement worships the spirit of a king, and more generally monarchy as such, while others venerate ascetic monks or bodhisattvas because of their supernatural powers (Jackson Koch A_Commercialization_Commodification.indd 2 1999). Practitioners use innovative combinations of elements, mixing prosperity rituals with luckenhancing protective ritualism, and with Chinese or Thai Buddhist practices. This has been criticized by monks, intellectuals and politicians as “commercialized Buddhism.” These commodified rituals retained their significance as a highly popular form of religious expression, even after the economic crash in the mid 1990s, and need to be seen in the context of Thai political economy. Popular religion, consumerism, movements outside the sangha hierarchy, temple-construction projects with merit-making donations, and new shrines are complex and intersecting phenomena of a commercialized religious market. Commodification through Branding Marketing and availability are important supplyside factors that steer religious commodification to some degree (Morrow Long 2001; Usunier and Stolz 2014). Sometimes religious populism may converge with marketized spirituality, especially when mass media and non-institutionalized religious structures accompany the movements. Charismatic personalities, places of power, or tinctures may be manufactured and circulated in an inflated manner by the media, only to become deflated later with the death of the worshipped person or the passing of a fashion for certain tinctures. Marketing and branding are essential processes within these multi-layered changes of commercialization and commodification in the religious field. The tools of economic market research can therefore be applied to the positioning of religious groups, their branding, mass production, and distribution systems. Marketing works as a motor of commercialization and creates new aesthetic, behavioral, and social structures. The implicit logic of growing market shares finds expression, for instance, in the need to “megasize,” as seen in the aesthetics of oversized megachurches. Most often 2/9/2015 7:05:40 PM 3 Commercialization / Commodification it is the marketing of goods that creates the religious value of products in the first place. A study of pilgrims at saints’ tombs in Israel suggests that the mediation of the authenticity of the good through a retailer is important in the context of religious consumption, and that similarity of taste on the part of the retailer and the customer is a success factor for marketing in general, and for religious goods in particular (Zaidman and Lowengart 2001). Branding is a prerequisite in order to be heard in a saturated media environment. Branding and mediatization are related dynamics in this regard. Examples of exorbitantly successful “faith brands” are Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church, the Protestant evangelical church courses called “40 Days of Purpose,” and Neo-Kaballah (Einstein 2008). And Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ was promoted by a famous spokesperson and a builtin audience. Even before the film was released, the potentially controversial theme was purposely presented by the producers as controversial. Marketing combines a product with services. In this sense, the commodification of religion includes services in the offered package. It is essential for the marketing relationship to take care of buyers, to bind them, and to personalize the relation by suggesting applications or issuing a guarantee. This interaction creates loyalty and future demand. Consumers relate to some religious commodities in terms of entertainment and fun, the fan in terms of an affective alliance. An example of the interaction between producer and consumer is charismatic worship, where the consumer has a desire to encounter God, and the liturgical and musical worship apparatus creates an affective alliance in which this desire is met (Ward 2003). Some observe a connection between commodification and privatization. The Western reception of Daoism, Buddhism, and Yoga is seen as a privatization of Asian wisdom (Carrette and King 2005). The context of this statement is the spiritual growth market, where spirituality becomes a signifier of personal development with transpersonal or humanistic psychology in the background. Koch A_Commercialization_Commodification.indd 3 Is there Specifically Religious Consumption? Much more attention should be paid to consumer behavior in order to evaluate the degree of commercialization within a religious production site, even though a lot of work has been done in this field, for example on the significance of purchasing the Bible, portraits of venerated persons or angels, or amulets at specific times and places. In the identity-related consumption approach, there might be a dynamic of becoming dependent on consuming certain products to enforce one’s social identity. The counterpart to this position stresses the power and thus the responsibility of the consumer and his consumer choice. Consumer goods substantiate categories and values around which the cultural world is organized. Current research has discussed the issue of how different users perceive religious goods, and what makes the products religious (Zaidman 2003). For some New Agers, for example, it is the effect of calmness and peacefulness. It would be important to study more thoroughly the similarities and divergences between secular cultural consumption and religious consumption. People tend to be more selective in the sphere of religious consumption than they are with regard to cultural consumption (Baker and Park 2007). But multimillion-dollar sales are made from the consumption of religious goods and not from the consumption of religious services. The buying breadth in respect of religious products and the amount of money spent is wider among young Americans. Secular consumption might be a trigger for increasing religious commodification, and creating larger production ranges, insofar as the purpose of consumption varies greatly: halal food may be purchased for reasons of animal protection, or to preserve health, or for other reasons. Religious consumption is also gendered, just like other secular sectors of consumption. It can be observed that more religious goods are bought by females, which fits in with their conservative household role as purchasers. A significant 2/9/2015 7:05:40 PM 4 commercialization / commodification nonconsumption of religious goods might correlate with religiously motivated anti-consumerism. Another strand of research is on intertemporal choice and risk evaluation. A consumer good is called an investment good if it can be consumed several times, or if it provides a greater benefit when saved up for future consumption. People often discount utility over time. The preference rate here indicates the size of the retarded payoff that is expected by renouncing consumption in the present. This is illustrated by apocalyptic movements (Alles 2004). The eschaton as an investment good may explain the value and decrease in value of definite and indefinite end-time payoffs better than the concept of inferior or substitutive goods from neo-classical economics. Critics and Counter-Discourses The commercialization of religion has also prompted harsh critique and counter-movements. Opposition to commercialization can be seen in the organizations and debates connected with fair trade, ethical consumption, corporate social responsibility, ecofeminism, salvation theology, and the anti-globalization movement, some of them in the tradition of Frankfurt School theories of culture industry versus resistance theories of the left. Critique of commercialization is regularly expressed by religious experts, conservative culture theorists, or democratic politicians, depending on whether this religious marketization takes place in elitist or popular, rural or urban religious milieus. Scholars sometimes consider the difference between doctrinal religious texts and commodified religious symbols as deviance. Commercialization processes in Wicca, for example, are criticized because of the underlying individualistic consumerist ideology, which is said to be incompatible with Wicca’s “Romanticist counter-modernity” (Waldron 2005). Others criticize the fact that neo-liberal corporatism and consumerism smooth out any resistance to capitalist ideologies by using the popular notion of Koch A_Commercialization_Commodification.indd 4 spirituality. This “silent takeover” of religion is said to happen in the dimension of a cultural shift (Carrette and King 2005). They aim to reconquer “spirituality” to mean social engagement and ethical responsibility. Thus, types of religion are characterized by their attitude towards capitalism: anti-capitalistic spiritual groups (engaged Buddhism, social gospel movement); business ethics or reform-spirituality, which look for profit but in an ethically-constrained market; individual and consumerist spirituality aimed at prosperity (televangelism). Some scholars refer to the immediatization of wish-fulfillment that comes with the habit of consuming religion in the form of commodities. They say that short-term desires prevail over religious traditions and facilitate their misuse by political forces. A good example of the possibility of de-contextualization of commodities is the way Gregorian chant became popular through the secular music of pop groups at the beginning of the 1990s. It is common for religious systems to assimilate symbols from other domains and vice versa. Intensified commodification and mass-mediatized goods create a hybrid and rapid dynamic in the overlapping religious and cultural markets. Bibliography Alles, G., “Speculating on the Infinite: An Economic Re-Reading of Harvey Whitehouse’s Inside the Cult,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 16: 266– 291, 2004. Baker, J., and J.Z. Park, “What Would Jesus Buy: American Consumption of Religious and Spiritual Material Goods,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46(4): 501–517, 2007. Bromley, D.G., “Quasi-Religious Corporations. A New Integration of Religion and Capitalism?” in R.H. Roberts (ed.), Religion and the Transformations of Capitalism: Comparative Approaches, 135–159, New York, 1995. Carrette, J., R. King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, London, 2005. 2/9/2015 7:05:40 PM 5 Commercialization / Commodification Clark, L.S. (ed.), Religion, Media, and the Marketplace, New Brunswick, 2007. Comaroff, J., and J.L. Comaroff, Ethnicity Inc., Chicago, 2009. Coşgel, M.M., and L. Minkler, “Religious Identity and Consumption,” Review of Social Economy 62(3): 339– 350, 2004. deChant, D., The Sacred Santa: Religious Dimensions of Consumer Culture, Cleveland, 2002. Einstein, M., Brands of Faith: Marketing Religion in a Commercial Age, London, 2008. Gauthier, F., and T. Martikainen (eds.), Religion in Consumer Society: Brands, Consumers and Markets, Farnham, 2013. Hendershot, H., Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture, Chicago, 2004. Jackson, P.A., “Royal Spirits, Chinese Gods, and Magic Monks: Thailand’s Boom-time Religions of Prosperity,” South East Asia Research 7(3): 245–320, 1999. Kline, S., “The Morality and Politics of Consumer Religion: How Consumer Religion Fuels the Culture Wars in the United States,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 17(3), 2007. McDannell, C., Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America, New Haven, 1995. Miller, V.J., Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture, New York, 2003. Morrow Long, C., Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce, Knoxville, 2001. Schmidtchen, D. and A. Mayer, “Established Clergy, Friars and the Pope: Some Institutional Economics of the Medievel Church,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 153: 122–149, 1997. Usunier, J.-C., and J. Stolz (eds.), Religions as Brands: New Perspectives on the Marketization of Religion and Spirituality, Farnham, 2014. Waldron, D., “Witchraft for Sale! Commodity versus Community in the Neopagan Movement,” Nova Religio 9(1): 32–48, 2005. Ward, P., “The Production and Consumption of Contemporary Charismatic Worship in Britain as Investment and Affective Alliance,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 5, 2003. Zaidman, N., “Commercialization of Religious Objects: A Comparison between Traditional and New Age Religions,” Social Compass 50(3): 345–360, 2003. Zaidman, N., and O. Lowengart, “The Marketing of Sacred Goods: Interaction of Consumers and Retailers,” Journal of International Consumer Marketing 13(4): 5–27, 2001. Anne Koch Koch A_Commercialization_Commodification.indd 5 2/9/2015 7:05:40 PM