ABOUT THIS BOOK
What are you drawn to like, to watch, or even to binge? What are you free to consume, and what do you become through consumption? These questions of desire and value, Kathryn Lofton argues, are questions for the study of religion. In eleven essays exploring soap and office cubicles, Britney Spears and the Kardashians, corporate culture and Goldman Sachs, Lofton shows the conceptual levers of religion in thinking about social modes of encounter, use, and longing. Wherever we see people articulate their dreams of and for the world, wherever we see those dreams organized into protocols, images, manuals, and contracts, we glimpse what the word “religion” allows us to describe and understand.
With great style and analytical acumen, Lofton offers the ultimate guide to religion and consumption in our capitalizing times.
REVIEWS
“There is no more perspicacious observer of the relentless religious innovation of contemporary consumer culture than Kathryn Lofton. With restless brilliance and erudition, she takes us on a chilling tour of the American marketplace figured as religion. Having revealed the sacrificial violence at the heart of our common life, Lofton urges us to commit ourselves to making religion ‘do something different’—to ‘freedom from the primal horde.’”
— Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, author of A Ministry of Presence
“In a critical voice recognizably hers and only hers, Lofton brilliantly probes the most cunning junctures of contemporary neoliberal religion. Ranging over corporate cubicles; the advertising industry; finance; the dark arts of the creation, promotion, and destruction of celebrity; and much, much more, Lofton shows how at the deepest levels of imagination, desire, and discipline the modern histories of neoliberalism and religion—and the contemporary practices of both—have been and remain utterly entwined. Consuming Religion is a learned, incisive, often revelatory work; it is also deeply humane and compassionate. With this book, Lofton not only emerges clearly as the contemporary study of religion’s Walter Benjamin; she also helps restore the social critical voice of religious studies. Such a project was never more urgent than it is today.”
— Robert A. Orsi, author of History and Presence
"Kathryn Lofton breaks wide the definition of religion, and in so doing, redefines the interplay between the sacred and the so-called secular—whether it's pop icons or parenting, the Kardashians or corporate culture. We have been waiting for a book that elevates the discourse about how marketing and faith collide and co-mingle. Consuming Religion is that book."
— Mara Einstein, author of Black Ops Advertising and Brands of Faith
“Not only are Lofton's definitions of religion alone worth the price of admission to this text, but they should also remind us of previous studies that chose to foreground religion's less-than-liberative characteristics within the field of American religion. . . . Its strength as an edited collection manifests most strongly through its method of analysis across scale and academic subject matter. . . We may all be consuming this text for the foreseeable future in order to understand better its claims, but we are also, at the same time, being consumed by it and its various methodological seductions.”
— H-Net Reviews
"Lofton’s Consuming Religion takes us through the Kardashians, cubicle design, and Goldman Sachs, among other phenomena, to reveal the relationship of religion and popular culture. At its best, this book feels like an exciting revelation about who and what we should be addressing in religious studies."
— Reading Religion
"In sum Consuming Religion is an elegant, critical, wide-ranging and thought-provoking account of religion and spirituality in America today."
— Times Higher Education
The separation of her research into examinations of niches within neo-liberal and late capitalist practices diffuses as well as sharpens her analytical and erudite examination of corporate cubicles, the Kardashians, soap advertising, parenting, ritualism debates in the 19th century and Britney Spears, to name but a few of her diverse and detailed examples packaged as Consuming Religion. . . seeing her media coverage through the filters of Georges Bataille, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sigmund Freud and René Girard deepens relevance.”
— Spectrum Culture
“Lofton’s intellectually dizzying and absolutely brilliant book calls our attention to the fundamentals of our consuming religion. . .[a] field-defining study. . . . In the age of selfie sticks, Lofton thus brings the study of religion up close and personal with its own ‘othered’ and refracted reflection in the mirror.”
— The Revealer
"With big data and mass customization changing marketing strategies and transforming patterns of consumption at warp speed, Consuming Religion is a timely exploration of a world in which reality is branded. Unexpected connections and juxtapositions reveal religion in unexpected places and practices. To follow Kathryn Lofton’s romp through today’s mediascape is to discover the superficiality of pop culture to be surprisingly profound."
— Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University
"Kathryn Lofton’s Consuming Religion is a modern classic. It is the sequel to Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life and is destined to be as enduring. Moving beyond stale debates on secularism, pressing us to see religion in new forms of modernity, Lofton takes us on a lively tour of religion in the everyday practices and institutions of consumer society. In the end, this tour de force leaves us with both a new respect for, and critique of, religion as consumerism and consumerism as religion."
— Mark S. Cladis, Brown University
“Lofton revitalizes academic definitions of religion, putting them to work in the midst of the limitations and possibilities of organizing life, attending to how people configure their lives as religious, but also amplifying the recurring patterns and processes of organization that have been examined in the academic study of religion as elementary forms of religious life.”
— Sociology of Religion
"This book explores the 'hermeneutic territory' that opens up when scholars accept the 'commonalities' of consumer popular culture and traditional religions (xi). It is, ultimately, not a book about consumer culture’s effects on traditional religions, but about how corporate discourse, consumer marketing, and media celebrity themselves constitute forms of sociality that demand analysis by scholars of religion."
— Journal of the American Academy of Religion
"Lofton's Consuming Religion is a refreshing and thought-provoking collection of essays in which she aims to illuminate the relationship with modern consumption culture. Breaking down this extensive endeavor into remarkable sub-themes, Lofton explores the category of religion as 'a category of law and learning, as a description of social movements, and as a summary of identity or claim of belief,' and the ways in which consumer culture illuminates what individuals value."
— Numen
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction - Kathryn Lofton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.003.0001
[capitalism;neoliberalism;descriptive;normative;religion;consumption]
The introduction establishes the relationship between definitions of religion and definitions of consumption, describes the archive of popular culture, and situates the work in the history of capitalism. (pages 1 - 14)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1/ Binge Religion: Social Life in Extremity - Kathryn Lofton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.003.0002
[fundamentalism;wireless;Netflix;binge viewing]
This chapter asks whether the study of religion has anything to say about apparently irreligious things. It specifically explores the practice of binge viewing television through a comparison with the history of fundamentalism in order to consider extremity as an end to human practice. This chapter refers to the history of wireless communication, Muzak, Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915), The Fundamentals (1910-15), Mohamed Atta, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). (pages 17 - 33)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2/ The Spirit in the Cubicle: A Religious History of the American Office - Kathryn Lofton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.003.0003
[office cubicle;office landscaping;Action Office;Herman Miller;modernism;aesthetics;Robert Propst;utopian communities]
This chapter thinks about the spiritually hopeful origins of mass-produced commodities. In the annals of modern design, it is difficult to imagine a more spiritless object than that of the office cubicle. Yet its origin is full of spiritual hope. Starting in the 1930s under the direction of Gilbert Rohde, Herman Miller mass-produced modernism through understated furniture designed for living rooms and offices. When George Nelson took over as head of Herman Miller design, the research offices focused on reimagining the organization and circulation of information in professional contexts. An innovative designer named Robert Propst sought to revolutionize the workplace from a place where “workers performed meaningless, cog-turning activities.” His innovation, the so-called “Action Office,” was supposed to counter bleak workplace occupation through a spatial strategy of mobility, mutability, and communal exchange. This chapter describes the utopian hope and subsequent failure of the cubicle to achieve these egalitarian ambitions. (pages 34 - 58)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3/ Ritualism Revived: From Scientia Ritus to Consumer Rites - Kathryn Lofton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.003.0004
[Ritualism;Anglo-Catholicism;purity balls;evangelicalism;Public Worship Regulation Bill;Michel Foucault;scientia ritus;Gothic Revival;Gilded Age]
This chapter looks at a little-known episode in church history to think about how ritual became such a market force. In the nineteenth century, the Anglophone world was caught up in a crisis defined by a debate about right ritualization. In this elite squabble, the label “Ritualist” was deployed as an epithet to describe a revival of interest in church sacraments. Anglican and Episcopalian Ritualists advocated “High Church” ceremonialism to counter what they perceived as secularization. This secularization was not an irreligious force as much as it was—to the Ritualists—a diminished ritual force. The term scientia ritus is coined to describe the way in which the literature produced in the crisis offered a certain exacting diagnostic technology for right ritual behavior and ritual analysis. This chapter focuses on the depiction of these debates about ritual as indicative of a broader pattern of religious life in the emergent modern American consumer culture. This is not to suggest that rituals vacated their content to become commodities; rather, it is to argue that the debates about ritual became articulated through the mediated marketplace that formats religion. (pages 61 - 81)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4/ Purifying America: Rites of Salvation in the Soap Campaign - Kathryn Lofton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.003.0005
[Cleanliness Institute;Proctor and Gamble;Washington Gladden;missionary;ritual;whiteness;children;homoerotic;Jonathan Z. Smith]
This chapter considers whether consumer choice is really that: is it something we select or is it something we are forced to choose. An answer is found in the history of bathing soap promotions. With the development of vegetable oils in the mid-nineteenth century, and the concomitant founding of Proctor and Gamble in 1837, soap emerged as a widely available commodity. Yet it was only through teaching people to use soap ritually that it became requisite for everyone. This chapter analyzes the Protestant prejudices embedded in the sale of soap as well as the ritual strategies deployed to argue that soap was not a mere recommendation but a requirement of modernity. (pages 82 - 102)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5/ Sacrificing Britney: Celebrity and Religion in America - Kathryn Lofton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.003.0006
[Britney Spears;media;sacrifice;feeding frenzy;ritualization;victim;adolescence;Demi Lovato]
This chapter considers whether celebrity culture has something specific to teach ritual theorists. In American culture, is the celebrity a divine figure, or just another commodity in the marketplace? This chapter maps a series of strategies for the study of celebrities within the study of religion and America, focusing on the production of pop star Britney Spears as a religious figure, a religious sacrifice, and a consumer product. The chapter focuses on theories of sacrifice to connect the history of religions to the contemporary celebrity landscape in which starlets serve as repeated sacrificial subjects. (pages 105 - 121)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6/ The Celebrification of Religion in the Age of Infotainment - Kathryn Lofton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.003.0007
[Elizabeth Taylor;infotainment;celebrification;USA Today;Madonna;Bono;spiritualization;George Clooney]
This chapter offers an account of the emerging centrality of celebrities in public culture. Studying celebrity and religion in concert requires parsing the multiple ways these terms have become increasingly interactive, overlapping, and co-constitutive in modern America. This chapter explores how this has transpired by looking at both the forms of news reporting that have succeeded in recent years and the changed way that religion is publicly discussed. Its focus is the national daily newspaper USA Today, which provides an excellent archive for the relationship between religion and celebrity in the news via its own oft-touted (and oft-satirized) synthetic style, including short articles, cheery cartoon graphics, and intentionally “easy to read” copy. This chapter analyzes the way that entertainment news deploys religious idiom to express something inexpressibly potent in its subject and to translate democratic moral agency in an increasingly privatized corporate media structure. First, it offers a short history of the emergence of infotainment reportage and its corollary, celebrification. It then discusses news coverage of religion and celebrity in three separate periods: 1989–1996, 1997–2003, and 2004–2010. (pages 122 - 138)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
7/ Religion and the Authority in American Parenting - Kathryn Lofton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.003.0008
[parenting;lactivism;authority;democracy;parenting manuals;G. Stanley Hall;Benjamin Spock;service economy;Michel Foucault;scientia parentis]
This chapter reimagines the history of parenting as a subject for the study of religion. Through a schematic historical description of parenting in the United States, it tracks the expanded responsibilities and increased social expectations for parents in the formation of child identity. Focusing on the concept of parental authority, it argues that the relationship of authority between parent and child is an important document of religious history in a secular age, and encourages future scholars to explore parenting habits, prescriptions, and admonitions as an archive for religious studies. (pages 141 - 163)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
8/ Kardashian Nation: Work in America’s Klan - Kathryn Lofton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.003.0009
[Kardashian;Kanye West;Melissa Click;kinship;work;mediation;reality television;cosmetics;primal horde;family values]
This chapter uses the success of the Kardashian family to examine the present condition of women in the United States. It defines the work of that family as the repeated creation of themselves as a family: a family with a particular investment in their physicality, their ornamentation, and their reproduction as a family. On display in their transmedia empire is an endless maintenance of the body, the steady chiseling and re-crafting of eyelashes, waists, necklines, and toenails. When the Kardashians are having blush applied, when they’re rubbing in lotion, when they are deciding which tennis shoes to wear to the gym, they are working. But this work is not merely a tool of their own post-feminist reclamation of their objectification. These tasks are the requisite practices for participation in the family corporation. The definition of their family is the definition of their bodies, and the relations between them are bound in a continuous reproduction of their bodies through the claims of kinship affinity that relate them. (pages 164 - 194)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
9/ Corporation as Sect - Kathryn Lofton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.003.0010
[Sabbatarianism;Bowe Bergdahl;Kim Davis;Edward Snowden;Hobby Lobby;Goldman Sachs;corporation;Internal Revenue Service;Establishment Clause;religious freedom]
This chapter considers how work became so central to contemporary life and how the corporate workplace became a particular site of political freedom and activity. The essay begins by looking at several instances of individual acts of conscience by working people: Bowe Bergdahl, Kim Davis, and Edward Snowden, and considers how those individuals experienced punishment for their acts of workplace conscience whereas a corporation, Hobby Lobby, was awarded its religious freedom for a corporate act of conscience. Through a history of the corporation in the United States, this chapter tracks how corporations have become worthy of expanded legal protections and have become increasingly affirmed as locations for self-formation and social incorporation. The chapter points to the way corporations and religions in the US have different legal expectations yet similar conceptual terms for engagement. (pages 197 - 219)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
10/ On the Origins of Corporate Culture - Kathryn Lofton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.003.0011
[corporate culture;2008 financial crisis;Sherry Ortner;Talal Asad;Douglas McGregor;Clifford Geertz;Amazon;Goldman Sachs;overwork;financialization]
This chapter offers a history of the concept of “corporate culture.” It begins and concludes with the 2008 financial crisis because respondents to the crisis suggested it was the result of a culture problem. As they emerged from years of fines, layoffs, and reported losses, American bankers repeatedly told their customers that they were working to prevent another crisis through an improvement in their culture. Arguing that corporate culture emerged as a way to humanize the increasing role of corporations in American life, this chapter exposes the anthropological origins and persistent effects of diagnosing “culture” in US corporate life. (pages 220 - 242)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
11/ Do Not Tamper with the Clues: Notes on Goldman Sachs - Kathryn Lofton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.003.0012
[Goldman Sachs;new religious movements;investment banking;regulatory capture;financialization;German Jews;2008 financial crisis;Wall Street;Lloyd Blankfein;faith]
This chapter offers an argument for the religious work of corporations through a specific engagement with Goldman Sachs. Common sense may suggest that there is no organization perhaps less religious than Goldman Sachs, described variously by its critics in recent years as a demon, a snake pit, and a vampire squid attacking American finance, the investing public, and the good of global humanity. Yet the labeling of any agency as such a scourge ought immediately tempt the scholar of religion, since one of the grounding assumptions of our work has been that the demarcation of the profane is intimately tied to the elucidation of the sacred. To that end, this chapter considers the Goldman Sachs Group as a case for students of religion. The chapter exposes the connections between the practices of this multinational investment banking firm and accounts of religious thought and practice in the modern period, focusing in particular on the control of information, the focus on institutional survival, the maintenance of relationships, the development of alternative forms of speech, and the commitment to the group above all other identities or alternative epistemologies. (pages 243 - 282)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion - Kathryn Lofton
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226482125.003.0013
[customs;sitcoms;Sigmund Freud;family business;Hunger Games]
The book's conclusion argues that the commodification of the family is at the heart of the consumer culture of religion. In order to resist the hold of consumer life, the family must be reimagined as an assumed structure of economic, social, and ethical dependence. (pages 283 - 288)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
