The Marketization of Religion

The Marketization of Religion provides a novel theoretical understanding of the relationship between religion and economy of today’s world.

A major feature of today's capitalism is ‘marketization’. While the importance that economics and economics-related phenomena have acquired in modern societies has increased since the consumer and neoliberal revolutions and their shock waves worldwide, social sciences of religion are still lagging behind acknowledging the consequences of these changes and incorporating them in their analysis of contemporary religion.

Religion, as many other social realities, has been traditionally understood as being of a completely different nature than the market. Like oil and water, religion and the market have been mainly cast as indissoluble into one another. Even if notions such as the marketization, commoditization or branding of religion and images such as the religious and spiritual marketplace have become popular, some of the contributions aligned in this volume show how this usage is mostly metaphorical, and at the very least problematic. What does the marketization of religion mean?

The chapters provide both theoretical and empirical discussion of the changing dynamics of economy and religion in today’s world. Through the lenses of marketization, the volume discusses the multiple, at times surprising, connections of a global religious reformation. Furthermore, in its use of empirical examples, it shows how different religions in various social contexts are reformed due to growing importance of a neoliberal and consumerist logic.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Religion.

François Gauthier, PhD, is professor ordinarius in Religious Studies at the Social Sciences Department of the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland. He is the author of Religion, Modernity, Globalisation. Nation-State to Market (Routledge 2020), and has worked together with Tuomas Martikainen since 2009 on a framework for understanding religion in a globalised, neoliberal world. Together they will be co-editors of the forthcoming publication, Routledge International Handbook of Religion in Global Society (Routledge, 2021).

Tuomas Martikainen, PhD, is the Director of the Migration Institute of Finland. His research has focussed on international migration, immigrant congregations, governance of religion and contemporary religion. He has worked together with François Gauthier since 2009 in order to develop a new understanding of religion in a globalised, neoliberal world. Together they will be co-editors of the forthcoming publication, Routledge International Handbook of Religion in Global Society (Routledge, 2021).