Communicating the Sacred

Miloš Hubina

The above title is not meant to imply that marketing is all there is about religion, but that its stability and transmission are functions of advertising, propaganda, and branding. Religious products can’t be evaluated on their own merit: prayers, blessings, and means of salvation evade assessment of their efficacy. What matters is the emotional response they incite and the other effects—peace of mind, moral guidance, heightened confidence, acceptance, social cohesion—they produce besides their claimed, other-worldly goals. Religions deal with ideas about danger and how to avoid it, i.e., ideas that naturally capture our attention and force us, psychologically, to spread them.¹ They are thus proselytizing in nature. Jesus’s Great Commission, or the Buddha’s instruction to his monks to go and teach the Dhamma “for the good of the many, for the happiness of the many”² are only two well-known examples of this. And though “proselytizing,” “inter-religious encounters,” and “evangelization” don’t have meanings different from “advertising,” “propaganda,” “persuading,” “branding,” “marketing,” or similar communicative strategies, they are treated as technical terms. One reason for this is that the latter terms bear negative connotations. While in the 17th century the church didn’t vacillate to name one of its departments Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith, the expressions “religious (or political or any other) propaganda” and “religious marketing” today have an unwholesome, deceptive ring. The categories are associated with cheating, self-interest, or taking from people “the will to choose.”³ Research shows ←1 | 2→that though people generally construe deception as a mark of incompetence, they in fact consider it as a competence, i.e., something desired and endemic to the occupations high in selling.⁴ And since religion is about the Truth, the realms of religion and sales (whether of salvation, amulets, or worldviews) seem incompatible. As Pierre Bourdieu famously put it, religion “is an enterprise with an economic dimension which cannot admit to so being and which functions in a sort of permanent negation of its economic dimension.”⁵ Some medieval Christian monasteries were economic powerhouses. From the early times Buddhist Saṃgha (community of monks) was a recipient of lavish donations, including land and bondmen. Hindu temples were sponsored by wealthy families. Religious institutions are not exempt from dazzling riches or vertiginous embezzlements.

It can also be argued, against marketing as a genuine part of religion, that unlike goods on the market, religion had for a long time not been a matter of choice: we were born into, took on, and died with specific religious views. This, however, would be an overstatement of the systematic theology and religious notions’ sway over people’s minds and flattening the gap between the “public transcript” and the actual dynamics of the “hidden transcript” of religious lives.⁶ A prominent Dominican writer, Humbert de Romans, for example, wrote in the 1270s—during the presumed “ecclesiastic period”—of the “poor” in France that they “‘know little of what pertains to their salvation.’ One reason why these ‘poor’ knew little of their salvation was that they rarely came to church: raro veniunt ad Ecclesiam.”⁷ Some social and cultural conditions are more favorable to stabilization and significance of a or the religious tradition. Perceived uncertainty and social instability, for example, seem to trigger the need for a supernatural intervention.⁸ But, in general, belief is hard work.⁹

People’s religious concerns are predominantly practical and fragmented, with various religious technologies and their providers competing for clientele. Also, religious ideas need material objects so that they can get successfully anchored in both individual and collective minds.¹⁰ These objects must be produced, distributed, owned, shared, and, as they are attributed variegated prestige-value, they become objects of differentiated demand with the providers’ and producers’ interest in boosting their value. Buddha statues, for which Buddhist kings plundered each other’s temples and towns, are vivid examples of this. Whether we classify this as “proper” Buddhist behavior or not changes nothing on the actual state of the affairs we investigate here.

In some areas of the scientific study of religion, the mental and public religious representations and their social roles have been studied in an objective manner without much qualms about applying terms and concepts established in communication, business, or other related academic fields.¹¹ But religion’s separating itself from these profane domains has been successful enough to make these voices sound isolated.←2 | 3→

It didn’t help also that the terminology in these disciplines is far from being consolidated: Some scholars, for example, distinguish between advertising and classified advertising, i.e., persuading and informing, respectively. Others attribute the influencing role to propaganda. They may also see the latter as different from persuasion in that propaganda seeks to satisfy the need of the propagandist only, while persuasion has the interests of both sides in mind.¹² Throughout this volume, we will understand propaganda as a technique aimed at changing one’s beliefs (values, attitudes, etc.) and behavior, while advertising will have an informing function: it announces the opportunities to apply a specific mindset in the real world. Branding, in a broad sense, refers to the means by which services and their providers are presented as unique in a large context but identical within the brand. Finally, marketing, also understood in a broad sense, is a “pervasive societal activity that does considerably beyond the selling of toothpaste, soap, and steel”¹³ and subsumes all the concepts discussed above.

Studies in this volume consider (see, for instance, the chapter by R. Jeremy Saul) but don’t limit themselves to the effects of commercialization on religion. Our scope is deliberately broader. But the analyses of religious marketing as a symptom of modern consumerism, commodification, and secularization constitute the prevailing focus of contemporary scholarship. And thus before we get to our contributions, let me review briefly the three interesting areas of research this focus has delineated:¹⁴