Religion and the Marketplace in the United States

Alexis de Tocqueville once described the national character of Americans as one question insistently asked: “How much money will it bring in?” G.K. Chesterton, a century later, described America as a “nation with a soul of a church.” At first glance, the two observations might appear to be diametrically opposed, but this volume shows the ways in which American religion and American business overlap and interact with one another, defining the US in terms of religion, and religion in terms of economics. Bringing together original contributions by leading experts and rising scholars from both America and Europe, the volume pushes this field of study forward by examining the ways religions and markets in relationship can provide powerful insights and open unseen aspects into both. In essays ranging from colonial American mercantilism to modern megachurches, from literary markets to popular festivals, the authors explore how religious behavior is shaped by commerce, and how commercial practices are informed by religion. By focusing on what historians often use off-handedly as a metaphor or analogy, the volume offers new insights into three varieties of relationships: religion and the marketplace, religion in the marketplace, and religion as the marketplace. Using these categories, the contributors test the assumptions scholars have come to hold, and offer deeper insights into religion and the marketplace in America. Available in OSO: Contributors to this volume – Philip Goff is Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture and Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at Indiana University Indianapolis. The author or editor of over thirty volumes and nearly 200 articles or papers on religion in North America, he has since 2000 been co-editor of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. His most recent edited volume, with Brian Steensland, is The New Evangelical Social Engagement (Oxford, 2013). Matthew S. Hedstrom is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (2013). A former postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, he is currently preparing a book on race and the search for religious authenticity in modernizing America. E. Brooks Holifield is Charles Howard Candler Professor of American Church History, emeritus, at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. He is the author of numerous books on the history of American religion, on topics ranging from the history of the American clergy to the development of Puritan sacramental theology, including the landmark work Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Detlef Junker is the Founding Director of the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, a former Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. (1994 – 1991) and a former Curt Engelhorn Chair in American History at Heidelberg University. He has published and edited books on American History, Transatlantic Relations, German History and on Theory of History in English and in German. Gunter Leypoldt is a Professor of American Literature at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, the author of Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective (2009) and editor of American Cultural Icons: The Production of Representative Lives (2010). He is presently working on a study of literary and cultural charisma. Kathryn Lofton is a professor of religious studies and American studies at Yale University. She is a historian of religion with a particular focus on the cultural and intellectual history of the United States. Her book, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011) used the example of Oprah Winfrey’s multimedia productions to analyze the nature of religion in contemporary America. Recent essays have explored the relationship between religious history and religious studies; the office cubicle as a religious artifact; the modernist-fundamentalist controversies; and the challenges attendant to the religious studies classroom. She is currently researching several subjects, including the sexual and theological culture of early Protestant fundamentalism; the culture concept of the Goldman Sachs Group; and the religious contexts of Bob Dylan. Sarah M. Pike is Professor of Comparative Religion and Director of the Humanities Center at California State University, Chico. Pike is the author of Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and The Search for Community (2001) and New Age and Neopagan Religions in America (2004) and has written extensively on contemporary Paganism, the New Age movement, the Burning Man festival, new religions in the media, environmentalism, and youth culture. She is currently writing a book about spirituality, youth culture, and radical environmental and animal rights activism. Katja Rakow currently leads a research group on Pentecostal megachurches in a global context at the Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from Heidelberg University in 2010. Her research interests focus on the transcultural dynamics of religious history and the interrelation of religious discourses and practices with broader cultural patterns. Her fields of study are Tibetan Buddhism in the West and contemporary forms of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. Based on her research in the US, she has co-authored Religiose Erlebniswelten in den USA on the material culture of Lakewood Church in Houston, TX. Anthony Santoro teaches American religious, legal, and sport history at Heidelberg University (where he recieved his Ph.D) and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. He is the author of several articles on religion and slave revolts, the links between religion and capital punishment, and on professional football. He is also the author of Exile and Embrace: Contemporary Religious Discourse on the Death Penalty (2013). Daniel Silliman teaches American religion and culture at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His research interests include American evangelicals and Pentecostals, book history, atheism and secularity. He is currently writing his doctoral dissertation at the University of Heidelberg on representations of belief in American evangelical fiction. Hilde Lovdal Stephens holds a PhD in North American Area Studies from the University of Oslo (2012) with a dissertation on James Dobson and Focus on the Family. Her primary research interest is post-1945 American evangelicalism in national and transnational contexts. She has published articles in American Studies in Scandinavia and Fides et Historia, and also writes for a wider audience, including teaching material for high school students. Jan Stievermann is Professor of the History of Christianity in North America at the University of Heidelberg. He has written on a broad range of topics in the fields of American religious history and American literature, including articles for Early American Literature, William and Mary Quarterly, and Church History. His book Der Sundenfall der Nachahmung: Zum Problem der Mittelbarkeit im Werk Ralph Waldo Emersons (Schoningh, 2007; The Original Fall of Imitation: The Problem of Mediacy in the Works of R.W.E.) is a comprehensive study of the co-evolution of Emerson’s religious and aesthetic thought. Together with Reiner Smolinski, he edited Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana-America’s First Bible Commentary (Mohr Siebeck & Baker Academic, 2010). Most recently, he published with Oliver Scheiding A Peculiar Mixture: German-Language Cultures and Identities in Eighteenth-Century North America (Pennsylvania State UP, 2013). Currently, he leads a team transcribing and editing vol. 5 of Cotton Mather’s hitherto unpublished Biblia Americana, the first comprehensive Bible commentary produced in British North America. For the Biblia-project as a whole (10 vols.) he also serves as the executive editor. Mark Valeri recieved his PhD from Princeton University and is the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. He previously was the Ernest Trice Thompson Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. His publications include Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy’s New England (1995) and Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (2010). Grant Wacker is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Christian History at Duke Divinity School. He is the author of Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture, and the forthcoming cultural biography of Billy Graham, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Christian Nation. Wacker taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for fifteen years, served as an editor of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, and is past president of the Society for Pentecostal Studies and of the American Society of Church History.