Religion in Consumer Society : Brands, Consumers and Markets.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (269 pages)
- AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Series .
- AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Series .
Cover -- Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- Notes on Contributors -- Preface -- Introduction: Consumerism as the Ethos of Consumer Society -- Part I: Changing World Religions -- 1 Religion, Individualisation and Consumerism -- 2 From Standardised Offer to Consumer Adaptation: Challenges to the Church of Sweden's Identity -- 3 Packaging Religious Experience, Selling Modular Religion -- 4 The Paradoxes of New Monasticism in the Consumer Society -- 5 'Find your Inner God and Breathe': Buddhism, Pop Culture, and Contemporary Metamorphoses -- 6 Shopping for a Church? Choice and Commitment in Religious Behaviour -- Part II: Commoditised Spiritualities -- 7 Entangled Modernity and Commodified Religion: Alternative Spirituality and the 'New Middle Class' -- 8 The Enchantments of Consumer Capitalism: Beyond Belief at the Burning Man Festival -- 9 Buddha for Sale! The Commoditisation of Tibetan Buddhism in Scotland -- 10 Mutual Interests? Neoliberalism and New Age During the 1980s -- 11 Healing or Dealing? Neospiritual Therapies and Coaching -- 12 Valuing Spirituality: Commodification, Consumption and Community in Glastonbury -- Bibliography -- Index.
Presenting an overview of an emerging field in the study of contemporary religion, this book explores religion as both shaped by consumer culture and as shaping consumer culture. Following an introduction which critically analyses studies on consumer culture and integrates scholarship in the sociology of religion, this book explores religion, neoliberalism and consumer society. Claiming that we have entered a new phase that implies more than the recasting of state-religion relations, the authors examine how religious changes are historically anchored in modernity but affected by the commoditization, mediatization, neoliberalization and globalization of society and social life.