Undeniably, the dominant discourse today in both popular and academic writing on congregations and especially megachurches focuses unequivocally on the spiritual marketplace—that is, the open market on religion formed since the 1960s when the established church’s cultural hegemony was significantly weakened by baby boomer quests for spirituality, waves of new immigrants from other
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49 George Packer’s (2008) contrasting portraits of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama offers a good illustration, respectively speaking, of the difference between executive and charismatic images of leadership.
religious traditions, and competitive upstart evangelical groups. While Weber feared the rationalization of cultural life by bureaucratic forms, rationalization in religious institutions became more deeply shaped by this competitive spiritual marketplace and its consumer-focused culture (Berger 1967; Wuthnow 1998; Roof 2001; Einstein 2007; Lee and Sinitiere 2009; Slagle 2011).
The original question for this study of TMH was “Why do such crowds attend here, given the lack of cultural reinforcement for church attendance?” Those operating within a marketplace framework generally answer that megachurch leaders are shrewd entrepreneurs who create and market an experience that resonates with broader commercial culture. There are five currents of contemporary literature which employ such economic language for their examination of the current situation for Christian congregations—many directly investigating the megachurch and evangelical celebrity pastors as their prime examples.
The first stream of such literature directly links megachurches to the image and logic of the commercial enterprise, often pejoratively labelled as “McChurch.” The link between commercial culture and Weber’s notion of rationalization was made explicit in George Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society (1982/2010). He argues that the contemporary fast food restaurant, epitomized by McDonalds, functions as an apt analogy for modern rationalized behaviour as it cultivates four specific values: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. These values engender processes that allow for mass production and distribution, but they simultaneously depersonalize human interaction, becoming irrational arrangements: the products are of lower quality, the work less satisfying, and the culture less creative. When applied to the megachurch—a church defined by growth and scale—these large corporate religious structures become evidence of Weber’s worst fears for human civilization.
Drane (2009:198) directly applies Ritzer’s theory to the modern church, maintaining that the
“four marks of McDonaldization [are] present in the structures and attitudes of most churches” but are epitomized in megachurches. The McDonald analogy is echoed by other writers, but other large culturally hegemonic companies have similarly served as analogies of the megachurch including the retail giants Home Depot (Cimino 1999) and Walmart (Wollschleger and Porter 2011; McGee 2012), as well as the family theme park Disneyland (Aycock 2003; Twitchell 2004, 2007; Crowe, McWilliams, and Beienburg 2010). These studies emphasize megachurches as the evangelical equivalent of large corporations, drawing attention to such things as scale, merchandizing, competition, branding, and entertainment.50
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50 The various commercial images highlight different sociological features of megachurches. I would argue there are distinct advantages to the Disneyland metaphor over the other options with regards to megachurch research, as
A second overlapping stream employs similar economic language while suggesting sympathies with critical theory: these scholars deplore what they perceive as the crass commercialization of religious institutions at the expense of human flourishing (Ellingson 2007;
Maddox 2012, 2013). They insist that competitive markets fragment, isolate, and break down the social fabric of community life and reinforce structural inequalities. Tradition forms communities of memory that provide people with an identity and a sense of solidarity, says Ellingson, but megachurches, with their superficially attractive evangelical resources, are “colonizing mainline Protestantism,” reducing congregations to communities of shared interest (2007:178).
Critical theorist Maddox (2012, 2013) intensifies Ellingson’s critique by arguing that many megachurches are better described as “growth churches” because of their “relentless emphasis on growth” (2012:148) and their “theology of guilt-free—indeed, obligatory—consumption” which mirrors and reinforces the structures of late capitalism (2013:108). “They are the corporations that sell the religion of corporations,” she declares, as “they reproduce, naturalize, enlarge, enchant and, to some degree, civilize [capitalism]” (2013:108). Maddox collapses the diversity of megachurches across the globe into “capitalism’s cathedrals” because she narrows the definition of megachurch to those that espouse a prosperity theology (based on her research of the Hillsong megachurch in Australia). As shown in the previous chapter, this does represent the majority of megachurches outside North America. Nevertheless, such critical approaches reduce megachurch religiosity to an alienated cultural reflection and extension of neoliberal economics, which while highlighting isomorphic tendencies with capitalism overlooks other cultural aspects of the megachurch, some of which resist such alienating social forces.
These critiques find sympathetic company with theological critiques of the commercialized church—a third stream of economically-framed church literature. These Christian writers directly critique the megachurch for its preoccupation with method, metrics, marketing, therapeutic faith, and, in some instances, a prosperity theology (Guinness 1993; Packer et al. 1997; Wells 2005; Tucker 2006; Horton 2008; White and Yeats 2009; MacArthur 2010). Others direct their analysis towards church marketing more generally, toward consumer culture in the church, or seeker-sensitive orientations that lacks a depth of commitment (Webster 1992; Shelley and Shelley 1992; Dawn 1995;
Kenneson and Street 1997; Cimino and Lattin 1998; Gilley 2002; Middelmann 2004; Wells 2008;
MacDonald 2010). “The church isn’t a business,” says MacDonald, and it “needs to serve the higher purpose of transforming what it ‘customers’ want” (2010:xiii italics in original). Some of this literature contains prophetic critiques of the crass efforts of manipulation through marketing and the
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Disneyland suggests more attention to image, narratives, performances, and technologies of late modern cultural life (Lyon 2000; Bryman 2004).
idolizing of matters of scale, but little if any of the writing contains qualitative research. Some of the writing simply reflects a common false dichotomy which pits the supposed essential holiness of prayer, clergy, scripture, ancient traditions, and churches against the assumed mundane, or even profane, character of markets, advertising, celebrities, brands, entertainment and the shopping mall, its symbolic centre. This presumed dualism suggests that religion ought to transcend cultural life—
that it is too precious or pure to be sullied by the work-a-day world of everyday consumer life. What is academically assumed in religious economy theory and enthusiastically championed in church marketing literature is decried by critical theorists, McDonaldization critics, and theological writers as evidence of secularization.
A fourth stream takes the opposite tack, exemplified by writers and consultants eager to promote this new technology of church marketing and growth—often assuming an insider Christian perspective (Barna 1988; Barna 1992; Reising 2006; Cooke 2008; Meyer 2009; Hutchins and Stielstra 2009; Dixit 2010). “A way to best describe the Christian faith in the West is as a brand,” writes Dixit (2010:10), arguing that church branding is a form of cultural contextualization. “God uses marketing to build his church,” argues Barna (1992:12), and even Jesus’ ministry becomes an example of savvy promotional practises (Reising 2006:25). In this context, megachurches become the exemplars of successfully marketed and strategically organized Christian entrepreneurialism. While more instrumental and opportunistic in focus, these books build on the insights of branding gurus, popularizing commercial strategies for congregational growth with little sense of how the language and techniques of the market re-shape religious groups and their practises.
A final and prominent stream of literature in this vein reflects a similar endorsement of market economies. It has been called the “new paradigm” in the sociology of religion (Warner 1997) and has close ties to religious economy and rational choice theories (Stark and Finke 2000). Their distinctive language of churches as “firms” or “faith brands” that sell religion as a “product” to impressionable
“consumers” has become its own tradition with its own terminology (Iannaccone 1994; Stark and Finke 2000; Twitchell 2007; Einstein 2007; Stark 2008; S. Lee and Sinitiere 2009). They assume that growing churches such as megachurches are “winners” on the religious market because they are savvy cultural leaders that know how to address the religious needs of modern North Americans. While at times bordering on tautology (successful churches are those that appeal to the largest share of the market), this approach offers explanations on a macro-scale that have ignited fierce debates and expanded significant research programs (Young 1997; Bruce 2000, 2002; Jelen 2003; Imber 2007;
Foltz 2007; L. Clark 2007; Ekelund, Hébert, and Tollison 2008; Kitiarsa 2008; Janes 2008; Witham 2010; Gauthier and Martikainen 2013; Usunier and Stolz 2014).
The volume of this spiritual marketplace literature suggests a dominant discourse in academic, journalistic, and Christian literature. While the first three streams assume some version of secularization theory, the last two suggest other possibilities. While religious economy perspectives, for example, imply a view of human nature that is too weighted towards a calculating rationality, their view of a competitive spiritual marketplace allows for views of modern culture that include both secularizing and sacralising trends (Stark 1999). In other words, they challenge the inevitabilities of the older notions of secularization theory (Bruce 2002). A spiritual marketplace need not assume totalizing secularization patterns.
This notion of institutional secularization is a significant assumption for megachurch study that requires further comment. Pattana Kitiarsa explains that to commercialize something means to take it out of its given context and put it into the context of a market, which re-contextualizes the entity as a commodity. Commodities are, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ordinary or commonplace. Religion, on the other hand, suggests something special, set apart, and this transformation “has brought many religious traditions into trouble” (2010:565). Yet she goes on to say that religious commodification and the mixing of money and religion are perennial, and the growing “worldliness” of religion has become only more evident in the last two hundred years due to advances in electronic media. This commercializing of faith traditions, she insists, has not secularized as much as proliferated religiosity across the globe. Megachurches are one example of such
“worldliness,” especially in the globally prevalent form of prosperity theology (Bowler 2013).
Kathryn Lofton similarly writes: “The secular is not an absence of religion; rather, the secular is religion’s kaleidoscopic buffet” (Lofton 2011:209). She resists approaches that speak of popular culture in, as or in dialogue with religion because they pit religion against culture. “If only we didn’t imagine culture and religion as neatly divided, we may be less surprised by their ceaseless commingling” (2011:10). While careful not to annihilate traditional understandings of the “the religions,” Lofton contends that “to force a division between [religious and consumer culture] is to compel a false distillation from a quagmire of commingling processes… we demonstrate just how enfolded we’ve become in the supposition that we are, somehow, without [religion]; that we are, somehow, apart from it; that we can, somehow, separate ourselves from it” (2011:12).
It is the working assumption of this thesis that “religion” is a multi-layered phenomenon and any boundaries between it and broader culture are blurred at best. That is to say that not all religion is good, decent, and hermetically-sealed away from the hustle and bustle of the street or plaza (Cowan 2008:8) and neither is all religion bad, repugnant and poisonous (Hitchens 2009). Religious activity itself can be “profane” (to use a classical religious studies term) or even playful (Berger 1997;
Drooger 2011), but more often than not, it simply integrates with the everyday mundane. In fact, as
historian R. Laurence Moore has said, “Either religion keeps up with other cultural aspects of national life, including the commercial forms, or it has no importance” (Moore 1995:65). This means challenging the inevitable equation of religious competition, commercialization, and entertainment with secularization—a refusal championed in the “new paradigm” in the sociology of religion (Warner 2005). To reiterate, commercializing religion—including the sacralization of popular culture and celebrities—may be its primary means of global proliferation today (Kitiarsa 2010).51 While some global megachurches may exemplify this commercialization of religion, it is by no means isolated to megachurches: the language of consumer preferences and markets has even permeated Eastern Orthodox churches in North America (Slagle 2011).