Commerce, Consumerism, and Christianity in America

Abstract

American Christianity and commerce are bound together by their mutual history. In colonial America, Puritans excelled at the skills of capitalism, and in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, Christian corporations have tied together religious and corporate culture. Even when corporations and churches have maintained a distinct boundary between faith and the market, American religion and capitalism seem to be uniquely compatible. Ministers and gurus use mass media to disseminate their message (via TV, radio, bookstores). Religious folk in the United States tend to act like consumers, choosing their theologies and churches based on their individual needs and desires, rather than relying on tradition to dictate their religious practices. Selling and buying in the American marketplace share many similarities with Christian categories of piety and evangelization. Further, corporations and religious communities have since the early 20th century collaborated in politics and social movements. In much of the scholarship on Christianity and commerce in the United States, this relationship is discussed as a strategic partnership between two distinct spheres of life: religion and the market. Recent scholarship, however, has questioned this neat division, arguing that the fluid relationship among commerce, consumption, and Christianity in the United States emerges from the historical co-development of capitalism and religion. If Christianity and the market in the United States look very similar, or are particularly friendly, it is because they were never separate to begin with.

Political economy of Catholicism: The case of the sacred-market network at World Youth Day in Panama

“…Multiple studies have shown how the market dominates other spheres, including the religious one (most recently, the comprehensive monograph by McCarraher, 2019). The argument of this article is different as it shows that the market logic and the religious logic might not be as opposed as is often believed (Logan, 2017). From the point of view of the everyday religious practices, the two logics are often neither contradictory nor exclusive.…”