Communicating the Sacred
Varieties of Religious Marketing
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the editors
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: All Religion is Marketing (Miloš Hubina)
- Chapter One: Religion on a Placard: A Study on Advertising New Religious Movements in Contemporary Poland (Adam Anczyk and Halina Grzymała-Moszczyńska)
- Chapter Two: A Disappeared Leader: Falun Gong and Its Advertisement Outside China (Jana Benická)
- Chapter Three: ‘Failure’ of Catholic Propaganda: The Case of Evangelization in Thailand (Francis S.M. Chan)
- Chapter Four: Communicating Devotion: Sharing Experience and Calling for Participation Among Muslim Varkaris in India (Dušan Deák)
- Chapter Five: Yaśovarman I, a Master Propagandist in 9th CE Cambodia (Julia Estève and Dominique Soutif)
- Chapter Six: The Forest for the Trees: Some Systemic Features of Buddhist Advertising and Propaganda (Miloš Hubina)
- Chapter Seven: Jihadi Marketing: Reasons for the Success of Islamic State Propaganda (Pavol Kosnáč)
- Chapter Eight: Visual Propaganda in the Maya Proto-Writing Period: The Example of Stucco Frieze from Palace H-Sub 2, Uaxactun, Guatemala (Milan Kováč)
- Chapter Nine: Forward-Looking Statements: How Mediums and Charismatics Make Their Publics (R. Jeremy Saul)
- Chapter Ten: Were Miracles and Martyrdoms Means of Christian Mass Marketing? (Andrej Zeman)
- About the Authors
- Index
List of Illustrations
Figure 4.1A Simple Printed Poster.
Figure 4.2A Large Poster Made for Special Occasions.
Figure 4.3A Poster on Bhakti Events.
Figure 5.2Foundation steles from the āśramas of Angkor (from left to right: K. 290, K. 701, K. 1228; end of the 9th c. CE; © EFEO).←vii | viii→
Figure 7.1The Proper Islamic Behaviour, ISIS Textbook for 5th Grade.
Figure 7.3A Mathematical Exercise in a Textbook.
Figure 8.1Frieze H-Sub 2 of Group H South at Uaxactun in Original Context.
Figure 8.2Details from Frieze H-Sub 2, “swimmers” and Severed Heads.
Figure 8.3Frieze of the Great Central Acropolis at El Mirador.
Figure 8.4Details of the “swimmers” from the frieze of the Great Central Acropolis at El Mirador.
List of Abbreviations
Act. |
Acts |
AN. |
Aṅguttara Nikāya |
1 Cor. |
1 Corinthians |
2 Cor. |
2 Corinthians |
DN. |
Dīgha Nikāya |
Eccl. Hist. |
Historia Ecclesiastica |
Gal. |
Galatians |
Heb. |
Hebrews |
Jn. |
John |
Mk. |
Mark |
MN. |
Majjhima Nikāya |
Mt. |
Matthew |
Mv. |
Mahāvagga |
Skt. |
Sanskrit |
SN. |
Saṃyutta Nikāya |
SV. |
Introduction
All Religion is Marketing
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
1. The Sacred Marketed
This constitutes investigations into the marketing strategies of religious institutions, which are seen as the result of consumerism and the commercialization of religion. There are two competing theoretical framings of the debate. The “demand-side” framing presumes that in modern cultural, social, and political conditions, religious demand has decreased. Religion has lost much of its allure and function, as well as state-guaranteed social prerogatives, and has become one among many cultural items in the market, competing for attention with many (other religious and secular) alternatives. It “must be ‘sold’ to a clientele that is no longer constrained to ‘buy’ … the religious institutions become marketing agencies and the religious traditions become consumer commodities.”15 The 1960s are typically identified as the turning point when religion lost its sway over people’s minds and “no-religion became a realistic option.”16
The “supply-side” approach presumes that religious demand remains constant, and the religions’ competing on a cultural market reflects their embracing new ways of communication as they adapt to conditions saturated with intensive information flow and alternative ways of living.←3 | 4→
Details
- Pages
- XII, 288
- Publication Year
- 2022
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781433187131
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781433187148
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781433187155
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433187124
- DOI
- 10.3726/b18245
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2022 (April)
- Keywords
- Religion marketing religion communication advertising propaganda branding religious transmission commercialization of religion commodification of religion Miloš Hubina Francis S.M. Chan Communicating the Sacred
- Published
- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2022. XII, 288 pp., 26 b/w ill., 1 table.
- Product Safety
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