RELIGION151 writing assignment

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Read the selection for Loy's article and the article by Folz. Next, using 400-500 words, and drawing from both Loy’s and Folz’s article, explain what kind of salvation the Market offers to people? Would you describe this salvation as limited or absolute, this-worldly or other-worldly, and individualistic or non-individualistic? Support your answer to this question with properly cited examples from the texts. Next, (whether you agree or not) describe some other ways the Market acts as a religion. Again, properly cite your sources. Lastly, do you agree with the conclusion that the Market is the new religion. Why or why not?

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American Academy of Religion The Religion of the Market Author(s): David R. Loy Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 275-290 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1465766 Accessed: 10-08-2016 23:41 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Oxford University Press, American Academy of Religion are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Academy of Religion This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65/2 AAR The Religion of the Market David R. Loy RELIGION IS NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT to define. If, however, we adopt a functionalist view and understand religion as what grounds us by teaching us what the world is, and what our r6le in the world is, then it becomes obvious that traditional religions are fulfilling this role less and less, because that function is being supplanted-or overwhelmed-by other belief-systems and value-systems. Today the most powerful alternative explanation of the world is science, and the most attractive valuesystem has become consumerism. Their academic offspring is economics, probably the most influential of the "social sciences." In response, this paper will argue that our present economic system should also be understood as our religion, because it has come to fulfill a religious function for us. The discipline of economics is less a science than the theology of that religion, and its god, the Market, has become a vicious circle of everincreasing production and consumption by pretending to offer a secular salvation. The collapse of communism-best understood as a capitalist "heresy"-makes it more apparent that the Market is becoming the first truly world religion, binding all corners of the globe more and more tightly into a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as "secular." So it is no coincidence that our time of ecological catastrophe also happens to be a time of extraordinary challenge to more traditional religions. Although it may offend our vanity, it is somewhat ludicrous to think of conventional religious institutions as we know them today serving David R. Loy is Professor in the Faculty of International Studies, Bunkyo University, Chigasaki 253, Japan (email: loy@shonan.bunkyo.ac.jp). 275 This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 276 Journal of the American Academy of Religion a significant role in solving the environmental crisis. Their more immediate problem is whether they, like the rain forests we anxiously monitor, will survive in any recognizable form the onslaught of this new religion. The major religions are not yet moribund, but when they are not already in bed with the economic and political powers that be, they tend to be so preoccupied with past problems and outmoded perspectives (e.g., pronatalism) that they are increasingly irrelevant (e.g., fundamentalism) or trivialized (e.g., television evangelism). The result is that up to now they have been unable to offer what is most needed, a meaningful challenge to the aggressive proselytizing of market capitalism, which has already become the most successful religion of all time, winning more converts more quickly than any previous belief system or value-system in human history. The situation of religions today is becoming so critical that the environmental crisis may actually turn out to be a positive thing for religion. This is because ecological catastrophe is awakening us not only to the fact that we need a deeper source of values and meaning than market capitalism can provide but also to the realization that contemporary religion is not meeting this need either. ECONOMICS AS THEOLOGY It is intolerable that the most important issues about human livelihood will be decided solely on the basis of profit for transnational corporations (Daly and Cobb: 178).' In 1960 countries of the North were about twenty times richer than those of the South. In 1990-after vast amounts of aid, trade, loans, and catch-up industrialization by the South-North countries had become fifty times richer. The richest twenty percent of the world's population now have an income about 150 times that of the poorest twenty percent, a gap that continues to grow (Korten:107-108). According to the UN Development Report for 1996, the world's 358 billionaires are wealthier than the combined annual income of countries with 45% of the world's people. As a result, a quarter million children die of malnutrition or infection every week, while hundreds of millions more survive in a limbo of hunger and deteriorating health .... Why do we acquiesce in this social injustice? What rationalization allows us to sleep peacefully at night? ' This essay is much indebted Daly and Cobb, who present a detailed critique of modern economic theory and demonstrate how our environmental and social problems can be solved if we have the will to do so. This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Loy: The Religion of the Market 277 [T]he explanation lies largely in our embrace of a peculiarly European or Western [but now global] religion, an individualistic religion of economics and markets, which explains all of these outcomes as the inevitable results of an objective system in which ... intervention is counterproductive. Employment is simply a cost of doing business, and Nature is merely a pool of resources for use in production. In this calculus, the world of business is so fundamental and so separate from the environment.., that intervention in the ongoing economic system is a threat to the natural order of things, and hence to future human welfare. In this way of thinking, that outcome is just (or at least inevitable) which emerges from the natural workings of this economic system, and the "wisdom of the market" on which it is based. The hegemony achieved by this particular intel- lectual construct-a "European religion" or economic religion-is remarkable; it has become a dogma of almost universal application, the dominant religion of our time, shoring up and justifying what would appear to be a patently inequitable status quo. It has achieved an immense influence which dominates contemporary human activity. (Dobell:232) According to Dobell, this theology is based on two counterintuitive but widely accepted propositions: that it is right and just (which is why "the market made me do it" is acceptable as a defense of many morally questionable activities); and that value can be adequately signaled by prices. Since natural resources are unpriced, harvesting techniques such as drift nets and clear cuts are not only acceptable but necessary in order to be competitive, despite the fact that "more or less everybody now knows that market systems are profoundly flawed, in the sense that, left on their own with present pricing and practices, they will lead inevitably to environmental damage and destruction of irreplaceable ecological systems" (237). The basic assumption of both propositions is that such a system is "natural." If market capitalism does operate according to economic laws as natural as those of physics or chemistry-if economics were a genuine science-its consequences seem unavoidable, despite the fact that they have led to extreme social inequity and are leading to environmental catastrophe. Yet there is nothing inevitable about our economic relationships. That misunderstanding is precisely what needs to be addressed-and this is also where religion comes in, since with the increasing prostitution of universities and the media to these same market forces there seems to be no other moral perspective left from which to challenge them. Fortunately, the alternative worldviews that religions offer can still help us realize that the global victory of market capitalism is something other than the simple attainment of economic freedom: rather, it is the ascendancy of one par- This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 278 Journal of the American Academy of Religion ticular way of understanding and valuing the world that need not be taken for granted. Far from being inevitable, this economic system is one historically-conditioned way of organizing/reorganizing the world; it is a worldview, with ontology and ethics, in competition with other understandings of what the world is and how we should live in it. What is most impressive about market values from a religious perspective is not their "naturalness" but how extraordinarily effective and persuasive their conversion techniques are. As a philosophy teacher, I know that whatever I can do with my students a few hours during a week is practically useless against the proselytizing influences that assail them outside class-the attractive (often hypnotic) advertising messages on television and radio and in magazines and buses, etc., which constantly urge them to "buy me if you want to be happy". If we are not blinded by the distinction usually made between secular and sacred, we can see that this promises another kind of salvation, i.e., another way to solve our unhappiness. Insofar as this strikes at the heart of the truly reli- gious perspective-which offers an alternative explanation for our inability to be happy and a very different path to become happyreligions are not fulfilling their responsibility if they ignore this religious dimension of capitalism, if they do not emphasize that this seduction is deceptive, because this solution to our unhappiness leads only to greater dissatisfaction. Instead of demonstrating their inevitability, the history of economic systems reveals the contingency of the market relationships we now take for granted. Although we tend to view the profit motive as universal and rational (the benevolent "invisible hand" of Adam Smith), anthropologists have discovered that it is not traditional to traditional societies. Insofar as it is found among them, it plays a very circumscribed role, viewed warily because of its tendency to disrupt social relations. Most premodern societies make no clear distinction between the economic sphere and the social sphere, with the result that economic roles are subsumed into more general social relationships. Pre-capitalist man "does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this end." But in capitalist society "instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system" (Polanyi:46, 57). Tawney discovered the same perspective on market forces in the preRenaissance West: "There is no place in medieval theory for economic activity which is not related to a moral end, and to found a science of society upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Loy: The Religion of the Market 279 constant and measurable force, to be accepted like other natural forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum, would have appeared to the medieval thinker as hardly less irrational and less immoral than to make the premise of social philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary human attributes as pugnacity and the sexual instinct" (31). The crucial transformation evidently began in the late Middle Ageswhich, by no coincidence, is when the prevailing religious interpretation of the world began to lose its hold on people's lives. As profit gradually became the engine of the economic process, the tendency was for gradual reorganization of the entire social system and not just of the economic element, since there is no natural distinction between them.2 "Capital had ceased to be a servant and had become a master. Assuming a separate and independent vitality it claimed the right of a predominant partner to dic- tate economic organization in accordance with its own exacting requirements" (Tawney:86). It is another example of the technological paradox: we create complex systems to make our lives more comfortable, only to find ourselves caught within the inexorable logic of their own development. The monster in Shelley's Frankenstein expresses it more brutally: "You are my creator, but I am your master." The scholar who did the most to uncover the religious roots of market capitalism was Max Weber. His controversial theory not only locates the origins of capitalism in the "this-worldly asceticism" of Puritan ethics but suggests that capitalism remains essentially religious in its psychological structure. According to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Calvinist belief in predestination encouraged what became an irresistible need to determine whether one was among the chosen. Such predestination made sacraments unnecessary and led to devaluation of the sacred. In its place economic success in this world came to be accepted as the demonstration of God's favor. This created the psychological and sociological conditions for importing ascetic values from the monastery into worldly vocations, as one labored to prove oneself saved by reinvesting any surplus rather than consuming it. Gradually this original goal became attenuated, yet inner-worldly asceticism did not disappear as God became more distant and heaven less relevant. In our modern world the original motivation has evaporated, but our preoccupation with capital and profit has not disappeared with it; on the contrary, it has become our main obsession. Since we no longer have any other goal, there being no other final salvation to believe in, we allow the means to be, in effect, our end. 2 This implies that an alternative to the market religion would not require eliminating the market (and the failure of twentieth-century socialism suggests that it should not be eliminated) but restoring market forces to their proper delimited place within community social relations. This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 280 Journal of the American Academy of Religion The crux of Weber's essay reflects on how the original intention behind an activity may eventually be transformed into something quite different: "The Puritan wanted to work in a vocation; we must do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into vocational life and began to dominate inner-worldly morality, it helped to build the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic presuppositions of mechanical, machinelike production, which today determines with irresistible force the life-style of all individuals born into this mechanism, not only those directly engaged in economic enterprise, and perhaps will determine it until the last ton of fossil fuel is burned. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint 'like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.' But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage" (in Scaff:88). We are a long way from Adam Smith's invisible hand. Weber's metaphor is less sanguine: the original Calvinist vocational ethos now "prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs," conquered by a rationalized civilization of large-scale production and ravenous consumption that today rests on merely mechanical foundations (in Scaff:89).3 Weber's sociology of religion distinguishes more ritualistic and legalistic religions, which adapt themselves to the world, from salvation religions more hostile to it. Salvation religions are often revolutionary due to the prophecy and charisma that motivate them and missionary because they seek to inject a new message or promise into everyday life. Their efforts to ensure the perpetuation of grace in the world ultimately require a reordering of the economic system. Weber noticed that adherents of this type of religion usually "do not enjoy inner repose because they are in the grip of inner tensions." This last point, which not only describes the Puritans discussed in The Protestant Ethic but also reminds us of our own situation, suggests that market capitalism began as, and may still be understood as, a form of salvation religion: dissatisfied with the world as it is and compelled to inject a new promise into it, motivated (and justifying itself) by faith in the grace of profit and concerned to perpetuate that grace, with a missionary zeal to expand and reorder (rationalize) the economic system. Weber's arguments imply that although we think of the modern world as secularized, its values (e.g., economic rationalization) are not only derived from religious ones (salvation from injecting a revolutionary new promise into daily life), they are largely the same values, although transformed by the loss of refer3I am not in a position to evaluate the scholarly debate that Weber's thesis has provoked; for an early overview, see Eisenstadt (1968), especially 67-86. This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Loy: The Religion of the Market 281 ence to an other-wordly dimension. Or, more precisely, these values have been distorted by the fact that our no longer other-worldly yet still futureoriented motivation has become unconscious. Weber emphasized that the ascetic vocational ethos may have lost its original meaning but that does not make it any the less powerful. Our type of salvation still requires a future orientation. As Norman Brown put it, "We no longer give our surplus to God; the process of producing an ever-expanding surplus is in itself our God" (261). In contrast to the cyclic time of pre-modern societies, with their seasonal rituals of atonement, our economic time is linear and future-directed, since it reaches for an atonement that can no longer be achieved because it has disappeared as a conscious motivation. As an unconscious motivation, however, it still functions, for we continue to reach for an end that is perpetually postponed. So our collective reaction has become the need for growth: the never-satisfied desire for an ever-higher "standard of living" (because once we define ourselves as consumers we can never have too much) and the gospel of sustained economic expansion (because corporations and the GNP are never big enough).4 THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION Engels tells the story of remarking to a Manchester manufacturer that he had never seen so ill-built and filthy a city: "The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: 'And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir."' (Sale:58) The critical stage in the development of market capitalism occurred during the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century, when new technology created an unprecedented improvement in the tools of production. This led to the "liberation" of a critical mass of land, labor, and capital, which most people experienced as an unprecedented catastrophe because it destroyed the community fabric-a catastrophe that is recurring today throughout much of the "developing" world. Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944) is an expression of outrage at these social consequences as well as an insightful explanation of the basis of this disfiguration: the way that the world became converted into exchangeable market commodities. In order for market forces to interact freely and pro- ductively, the natural world had to become commodified into land, life commodified into labor, and patrimony commodified into capital. Earlier the commercialization of English agriculture had led to enclosure of the SSince every God needs a Devil and every religion a theory of evil, members of the market religion find evil in that which threatens one's ever-expanding surplus, especially taxes, inflation, and governmental regulation, e.g., trade barriers. This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 282 Journal of the American Academy of Religion commons, the pasturage land that traditionally belonged to the whole community. The plague of industrial commodification proved to be much worse. The earth (our mother as well as our home) became objectified into a collection of resources to be exploited. Human life became objectified into labor, or work time, valued according to supply and demand. The social patrimony, the cherished inheritance laboriously accumulated and preserved for one's descendants, became objectified into fungible capital, also something to be bought and sold, a source of unearned income for the lucky few and a source of crushing debt for the rest. The interaction among these commodifications led to an almost miraculous accumulation of capital and an equally amazing collapse of traditional community life, as villagers were driven off their land by these new economic forces. "To separate labor from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one," emphasizes Polanyi. Such a system "could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society." The laissez-faire principle, that government should not interfere with the operations of the economic system, was applied quite selectively: although government was admonished not to get in the way of industry, its laws and policies were needed to help reduce labor to a commodity. What was called non-interference was actually interference to "destroy noncontractual relations between individuals and prevent their spontaneous re-formation" (163). Is it a coincidence that the same doublespeak continues today? While so-called conservatives preach about liberating the free enterprise system from the restraining hand of government, federal subsidies are sought to support uneconomic industries (e.g., nuclear power) and underwrite economic failures (the savings-and-loan scandal), while international policies are now designed to make the world safe for our multinational corporations (GATT, NAFTA, and the Gulf War). Until the last few centuries there has been little genuine distinction between church and state, between sacred authority and secular power, and their cozy relationship has recurred today. Far from maintaining an effective regulatory or even neutral position, the U.S. government has become the most powerful proponent of the religion of market capitalism as the way to live, and indeed it may have little choice insofar as it is now a pimp dependent upon skimming the cream off market profits. A direct line runs from the commodification of land, life, and patrimony during the eighteenth century to the ozone holes and global warming of today. Yet those commodifications have also led to another kind of environmental destruction that, in a very different way, is just as problem- This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Loy: The Religion of the Market 283 atic: the depletion of "moral capital," a horrible term that could only have been devised by economists to describe another horrific social consequence of market forces. As Adam Smith emphasized in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, the market is a dangerous system because it corrodes the very shared community values it needs to restrain its excesses. "However much driven by self-interest, the market still depends absolutely on a community that shares such values as honesty, freedom, initiative, thrift, and other virtues whose authority will not long withstand the reduction to the level of personal tastes that is explicit in the positivistic, individualistic phi- losophy of value on which modern economic theory is based" (Daly and Cobb:50). A basic contradiction of the market is that it requires character traits such as trust in order to work efficiently, but its own workings tend to erode such personal responsibility for others. This contradiction tends toward a breakdown that is already quite advanced in many corporations. Massive "downsizing" and a shift to part-time workers demonstrate diminishing corporate concern for employees, while at the top astronomical salary increases (with lucrative stock options) and other unsavory practices such as management buy-outs reveal that the executives entrusted with managing corporations are becoming more adept at exploiting or cannibalizing them for their own personal benefit. Between 1980 and 1993 Fortune 500 firms increased their assets 2.3 times but shed 4.4 million jobs, while C.E.O. compensation increased more than sixfold, so that the average C.E.O. of a large corporation now receives a compensation package of more than $3.7 million a year (Korten:218). In such ways the market shows that it does not accumulate "moral capital"; it "depletes" it and, therefore, depends upon the community to regenerate it, in much the same way it depends upon the biosphere to regenerate natural capital. Unsurprisingly, the long-range consequences have been much the same: even as we have reached the point where the ability of the biosphere to recover has been damaged, our collective moral capital has become so exhausted that our communities (or rather, our collections of now-atomized individuals each looking out for "num- ber one") are less able to regenerate it-with disturbing social consequences apparent all around us. This point bears repetition because the economic support system that was created to correct the failures of capitalism is now blamed for the failures of capitalism. But the social rot affecting so many "developed" societies is not something that can be corrected by a more efficient application of market values (such as getting unmarried mothers off welfare so their work will contribute to society); rather, it is a direct consequence of those market values. The commodification that is still destroying the biosphere, the value of human life, and the inheritance we should leave for future generations, also continues to This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 284 Journal of the American Academy of Religion destroy the local communities that maintain the moral fiber of their members. The degradation of the earth and the degradation of our own societies must both be seen as results of the same market process of commodification-which continues to rationalize its operation as nat- ural and inevitable. The cumulative depletion of "moral capital" forcefully reminds us that a community is greater than the sum of its parts, that the well-being of the whole is necessary for the well-being of each member. This, however, is something that contemporary economic theory cannot factor into its equations. Why not? The answer brings us back to the origins of economic thought in the eighteenth century, origins that were embedded in the individualistic philosophy of utilitarianism prevalent at that time. Philosophy has developed considerably since then, yet economic theory remains in thrall to utilitarian values, all the more for being ignorant of its debt.5 According to utilitarianism, society is composed of discrete individuals seeking their own personal ends. Human values are reduced to a calculus that maximizes pleasures (with no qualitative distinctions between them) and minimizes discomfort. Rationality becomes defined as the intelligent pursuit of one's private gain. In Adam Smith's understanding of this, "individuals are viewed as capable of relating themselves to others in diverse ways, basically either in benevolence or in self-love, but they are not constituted by these relationships or by any others. They exist in fundamental separation from one another, and from this position of separateness they relate. Their relations are external to their own iden- tities" (Daly and Cobb:160). Inasmuch as the discipline of economics seems to have attained priority among the social sciences (there is no Nobel Prize for sociology or political science, much less for philosophy or religion), this view of our humanity has come to prevail at the same time that its presuppositions have been thoroughly discredited by contemporary philosophy, psychology, and sociology-not to mention religion, which has always offered a very different understanding of what it means to be a human being. Nonetheless, as market values lead to a decline in the quality of our social relationships, " [s]ociety becomes more like the aggregate of individuals that economic theory pictures it as being. The 'positive' model inevitably begins to function as a norm to which reality is made to conform by the very policies derived from the model" (Daly and Cobb:162). We have learned to play the roles that fit both the jobs we now have to do and the commercial images that constantly assail us. 5"Economics sprang at least half-grown from the head of Adam Smith, who may very properly be regarded as the founder of economics as a unified abstract realm of discourse, and it still, almost without knowing it, breathes a good deal of the air of the eighteenth-century rationalism and Deism" (Boulding:187). This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Loy: The Religion of the Market 285 Given the influence today of Neo-Malthusian thinking about population, it is important to notice that Malthus stands within this tradition. His Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) argued for an iron law of wages: a subsistence wage is the just wage, because higher wages can lead only to rapid population growth until that growth is checked by poverty. It follows that poverty is not a product of human institutions but the natural condition of life for most people. The influence of this way of thinking has been in inverse proportion to the (lack of) empirical evidence for it, for world demographic trends have provided little. The rapid population increase that occurred in nineteenth century England, which occurred after many people had been driven off their land and into factory work, supports the contrary conclusion, that people are not poor because they have large families but require large families because they are poor (there was a great demand for child labor). Morally, Malthusianism tends to gloss over the issue of who is actually consuming the earth's resources. Theoretically, its major propositions-that population grows geometrically while food increases arithmetically-arbitrarily isolate two causal variables from the complexity of historical factors, while assuming as constant perhaps the most important variables of all: the "naturalness" of an unfettered market and the type of person who corresponds to itthe competitive, self-seeking "rational" individual that neoclassical economics still presupposes.6 Like all modern Western philosophy, the utilitarianism that Smith and Malthus took for granted was itself indebted to Rene Descartes. His metaphysical dualism distinguished the purposes of human beings from all other things that exist, with the effect of devaluing them into means for the ends of humans. Despite the preoccupation of twentieth-century philosophy with critiquing Cartesian subject-object dualism, contemporary economic theory still presupposes such a subjectivist theory of value, which can perceive value only in fulfilling human desires. Our humanity is reduced to a source of labor and a collection of insatiable desires; our communities disintegrate into aggregates of individuals competing to attain private ends; the earth and all its creatures are commodified into a pool of resources to be exploited to satisfy those desires. Does this radical dualism leave any place for the sacred? for wonder and awe before the mysteries of creation? Whether or not we believe in God, we may suspect that something is missing. Here we are reminded of the crucial role that religions can serve: to raise fundamental questions about this diminished understanding of what the world is and what our life can be. 6 For an incisive critique of Malthusianism, see Rao. This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 286 Journal of the American Academy of Religion THE ENDLESS HUNGER ... ARE WE HAPPY YET? It is not the proletariat today whose transformation of consciousness would liberate the world, but the consumer. (Miller: 19) From a religious perspective the problem with market capitalism and its values is twofold: greed and delusion. On the one hand, the unrestrained market emphasizes and indeed requires greed in at least two ways. Desire for profit is necessary to fuel the engine of the economic sys- tem, and an insatiable desire to consume ever more must be generated to create markets for what can be produced. Within economic theory, and increasingly within the market it promotes, the moral dimension of greed is inevitably lost; today it seems left to religion to preserve what is problematic about a human trait that is unsavory at best and unambiguously evil at its worst. Religious understandings of the world have tended to perceive greed as natural to some extent; yet rather than liberate it, they have seen a need to control it. The spiritual problem with greed-both the greed for profit and the greed to consume-is due not only to the consequent maldistribution of worldly goods (although a more equitable distribution is, of course, essential), or to its effect on the biosphere, but even more fundamentally because greed is based on a delusion: the delusion that happiness is to be found this way. Trying to find fulfillment through profit, or by making consumption the meaning of one's life, amounts to idolatry, i.e., a demonic perversion of true religion; and any religious institution that makes its peace with the priority of such market values does not deserve the name of genuine religion. In other words, greed is part of a defective value-system (the way to live in this world) based on an erroneous belief-system (what the world is). The extreme subjectivism of Cartesianism and the atomistic individualism of utilitarianism, which "naturalize" such greed, must be challenged and refuted-not just intellectually but especially in the way we live our lives. The great sensitivity to social justice in the Semitic religions (for whom sin is a moral failure of will) needs to be supplemented by the emphasis that the Asian enlightenment traditions place upon seeingthrough and dispelling delusion (ignorance as a failure to understand). Moreover, I suspect that the former without the latter is doomed to be ineffective in our cynical age. We are unlikely ever to solve the problem of distributive social justice without also overcoming the value-delusion of happiness through individualistic accumulation and consumption, if only because of the ability of those who control the world's resources to manipulate things to their own perceived advantage; and, as the twentieth century has shown, violent revolutions to overthrow such elites merely replace them with others. This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Loy: The Religion of the Market 287 According to the French historian Fernand Braudel, the industrial revolution was "in the end a revolution in demand"-or, more precisely, "a transformation of desires" (183). Since we have come to look upon our own insatiable desires as "natural," it is necessary to remember how much our present mode-of-desiring is also one particular, historically- conditioned system of values-a set of habits as manufactured as the goods supplied to satisfy it. According to the trade journal Advertising Age, which should know, in 1994 the U.S. spent $147 billion for advertising-far more than on all higher education. This translated into a barrage of 21,000 television commercials, a million magazine advertising pages, 14 billion mail-order catalogues, 38 billion junk-mail ads, and another billion signs, posters, and billboards. That does not include various related industries affecting consumer taste and spending, such as promotion, public relations, marketing, design, and, most of all, fashion (not only clothes), which amounted to another $100 billion a year (Durning:122). Put together, this constitutes probably the greatest effort in mental manipulation that humanity has ever experienced-all of it to no other end than defining and creating consumerist needs. No wonder a child in the developed countries has an environmental impact as much as thirty times that of a child in the third world. If the market is simply the most efficient way to meet our economic needs, why are such enormous industries necessary? Economic theory, like the market itself, makes no distinction between genuine needs and the most dubious manufactured desires. Both are treated as normative. It makes no difference why one wants something. The consequences of this approach, however, continue to make a great difference. The pattern of consumption that now seems natural to us provides a sobering context to the rapid deterioration of ecological systems over the last half-century: according to the Worldwatch Institute, more goods and services have been consumed by the people living between 1950 and 1990 (measured in con- stant dollars) than by all the previous generations in human history (Durning:38). If this is not disturbing enough, add to it the social consequences of our shift to consumption values, which, in the U.S. at least, has revolutionized the way we relate to each other. "With the breakdown of com- munity at all levels, human beings have become more like what the traditional model of Homo economicus described. Shopping has become the great national pastime .... On the basis of massive borrowing and massive sales of national assets, Americans have been squandering their heritage and impoverishing their children" (Daly and Cobb:373). So much for their patrimony. Our extraordinary wealth has not been enough for us, so we have supplemented it by accumulating extraordi- This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 288 Journal of the American Academy of Religion nary amounts of debt. How ingenious we have been to devise an economic system that allows us to steal from the future assets of our descen- dants! Our commodifications have enabled us to achieve something usually believed impossible, time-travel: we now have ways to colonize and exploit even the future. The final irony in this near-complete commodification of the world comes as little surprise to anyone familiar with what has become addictive behavior for 59 million people in the U.S (Dominguez and Robin:171). Comparisons that have been made over time and between societies show that there is little difference in self-reported happiness. The fact that we in the developed world are now consuming so much more does not seem to be having much effect on our happiness (Durning:38-40). This comes as no surprise to those with a more religious orientation to the world. The best critique of this greed for consumption continues to be provided by traditional religious teachings, which not only serve to ground us but show us how our lives can be transformed. In Buddhism, to cite the example of my own religion, the insatiable desires of the egoself are the source of the frustration and lack of peace that we experience in our daily lives. Overconsumption, which distracts and intoxicates us, is one of the main symptoms of this problem. Unfortunately for us, such compulsiveness does not allay our anxiety but feeds it. In answer, Buddhism teaches renunciation and generosity. As Shunryu Suzuki-roshi put it, renunciation does not mean giving up the things of this world but accepting that they go away. To see and accept that everything goes away-including ourselves-is necessary in order to live serenely. Only someone whose identity is not tied to acquisition and consumption can truly renounce the world. The sign of renunciation is gen- erosity, which is deeply honored in Buddhism as in all the major religions.' True generosity demonstrates not only moral development but insight: "As the need to define and present ourselves diminishes, so do possessiveness and acquisitiveness. Eventually we may come to see that the experience of possessiveness itself rests on delusion. Something is mine only if it is not yours. Yet if we can see that there is no me apart from you, as well as no us apart from the phenomena of the world, the idea of ownership begins to lose its meaning. Fundamentally there can be no acquisitiveness, for nothing is lacking" (Jeffrey:12). Consumerism not only overlooks the superior joy of giving to others, it forecloses the onto- logical realization of nonduality between myself and others. Such a realization leads to the transformative insight that there is no need to be acquisitive if nothing is lacking. 7Generosity (Sanskrit, dana) is considered the first and most important of the Mahayana pa ramitas ("transcendental virtues") because it implies all the others. This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Loy: The Religion of the Market 289 Other religions find other ways to express the importance of generosity, but I believe that their different paths work toward a similar realiza- tion of our interconnectedness. If we contrast this approach with market indoctrination about the importance of acquisition and consumptionan indoctrination that is necessary for the market to thrive-the battle lines become clear. All genuine religions are natural allies against what amounts to an idolatry that undermines their most important teachings. In conclusion, the market is not just an economic system but a religion-yet not a very good one, for it can thrive only by promising a secu- lar salvation that it never quite supplies. Its academic discipline, the "social science" of economics, is better understood as a theology pretending to be a science. This suggests that any solution to the problems thus created must also have a religious dimension. This is a matter not of turning from secular to sacred values but of the need to discover how our sec- ular obsessions have become symptomatic of a spiritual need that they cannot meet. As we have consciously or unconsciously turned away from a religious understanding of the world, we have come to pursue thisworldly goals with a religious zeal all the greater because they can never be fulfilled." The solution to the environmental catastrophe that has already begun and to the social deterioration we are already suffering from will occur when we redirect this repressed spiritual urge back into its true path. For the time being, that path includes struggling against the false religion of our age. REFERENCES Boulding, Kenneth E. Beyond Economics. Ann Arbor: University of 1968 Michigan Press. Braudel, Fernand The Wheels of Commerce. Trans. by Sian 1982 Reynolds. New York: Harper & Row. Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Mean1961 ing of History. New York: Vintage. Daly, Herman E., and For the Common Good. 2d ed. Boston: Beacon John B. Cobb, Jr. Press. 1994 Dobell, A. Rodney "Environmental Degradation and the Reli1995 gion of the Market." In Population, Consumption, and the Environment, 229-250. Ed. by Harold Coward. Albany: State University of New York Press. 8 This is discussed further in Loy. This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 290 Journal of the American Academy of Religion Dominguez, Joe, and Your Money Or Your Life. Harmondsworth: Vicki Robin Penguin. 1993 Durning, Alan How Much Is Enough? New York: Norton. 1992 Eisenstadt, S.N., ed. The Protestant Ethic and Modernization: A 1968 Comparative View. New York: Basic Books. Jeffrey, Meg "Consumerism in the Monastery." Turning 1995 Wheel Summer 1995: 11-13. Korten, David When Corporations Rule the World. West 1995 Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press. Loy, David Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death 1996 and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Miller, Daniel "Consumption as the Vanguard of History." 1995 In Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, 1-57. London: Routledge. Polanyi, Karl The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon 1957 Press. Rao, Mohan "An Imagined Reality: Malthusianism, Neo- 1994 Malthusianism and Population Myth." In Economic and Political Weekly January 29, 1994: 40-52. Sale, Kirkpatrick Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and 1995 Their War on the Industrial Revolution. Read- ing, MA: Addison-Wellesley. Scaff, Lawrence Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and 1989 Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tawney, R.H. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. New York: 1926 Harcourt, Brace. This content downloaded from 134.114.138.130 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 23:41:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms WORLDVIEWS Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 www.brill.nl/wo The Religion of the Market: Reflections on a Decade of Discussion* Richard Foltz Department of Religion, Concordia University, Montreal, 1455 DeMaisonneuve Blvd. W, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1M8 rcfoltz@gmail.com Abstract By the mid-1990s scholars of religion had begun to analyze the ideologies associated with global capitalism as a new, hegemonic world faith system, which some referred to as the Religion of the Market. Many have taken polemical positions, either arguing that it is a “false faith” which needs to be exposed, or that it is the appropriate faith for our times. Still others refuse to see global capitalism as a religion and reject the analytical paradigm altogether. This essay argues that describing the ideologies of global capitalism as the dominant faith system in the world today is indeed appropriate, and even necessary if one is fully to understand the role of religious belief and behavior in contemporary society. Moreover, since discussions of global capitalism as a faith system currently lack a coherent or widely recognized framework, adopting and refining the Religion of the Market paradigm will facilitate and improve future scholarly analysis of the faith dimensions of global economics. Keywords global capitalism, marketplace religion, economics, consumerism, David Loy The Jewish and Christian bibles foretell one outcome of history. If economics foresees another, it is in effect offering a competing religious vision. The prophecies of economics would then be a substitute for the traditional messages of the Bible. Perhaps the biblical God has reconsidered. Perhaps, instead of Jesus, he has now chosen economists to be a new bearer of his message, replacing the word of the Old and New Testaments that has now become outdated for *) Commemorating the tenth anniversary of the publication of David Loy’s “The Religion of the Market,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65/2 (1997): 275-290. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 135 DOI: 10.1163/156853507X204914 7/10/07 10:37:45 AM 136 R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 the modern age—as Islam advertised the Koran as a later and more accurate statement of God’s real plans for the world. Perhaps God has decided that the underlying ordering forces of the world, the ultimate reality that will shape the future outcome of history, will be truly economic. (Nelson 2001: 23) Introduction At what point can a system of beliefs and practices be referred to as a “religion”? Many definitions exist, and both wide and narrow approaches alike have the potential to be misleading. Even when one clearly spells out what one means by the term, others will disagree and perhaps refuse to continue the discussion. Jay McDaniel, a professor of religion at Hendrix College in Arkansas, suggested in a 1997 book chapter that the dominant faith system of our times is rarely recognized as such, although it contains the complete ecclesiastical apparatus: a priesthood—the economists—whose formulaic mumbo-jumbo nobody really understands but almost everyone trusts to be effective, a missionary organization in the form of the advertising industry, preaching the gospel of salvation through consumption, and a church—the shopping mall—where the rituals of the faith are carried out. The ethics of this faith system are summed up by the belief that the highest virtue is to shop (McDaniel 1997: 105). Most people, on being presented with this paradigm, will respond with a smile of both recognition and amused dismissal; though charming, such an analysis can hardly be more than a metaphor, since common wisdom knows intuitively what is “really” a religion and what is not. While it would seem that in recent years more and more individuals—scholars and laypersons alike—are coming to perceive the religious dimensions of globalizing consumerist ideologies associated with so-called “free-market” capitalism, more common is the instinctive reaction that this is not religion but something else. In conceptual terms, the Religion of the Market is still a hard sell. This may be partly due to the fact that religion scholars themselves have not yet developed a coherent framework for analyzing the faith-based aspects of global economics and consumer capitalism. Indeed, to date there has been no scholarly consensus on what to call this faith system, or whether it even exists. This essay takes the position that approaching economics and consumerism from a religious studies perspective is both valid and potentially helpful. To reach that potential, however, scholars of religion will have to do more to clarify, articulate, and disseminate an appro- WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 136 7/10/07 10:37:45 AM R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 137 priate framework of analysis. A good starting point would be to agree on a name for this aggressively-proselytizing faith system which has rapidly become global in scope. The term “Religion of the Market” has the advantage of already being familiar to some, as well as succinctly capturing the nature of the subject in question. An Evident Reality It may be wondered why so many are still reluctant to see the new global ideology as a faith system, when even its most enthusiastic advocates often describe it in religious terms. The Wall Street Journal frequently employs religious language when discussing the market, as in an article that implied that the “globalization gospel” was on the verge of winning over the Vatican (McGurn 2000). American journalist and cultural historian Thomas Frank, in a 2000 book entitled One Market under God, mentions an advertisement in which IBM appropriates Yahweh’s self-identification from the Hebrew Bible: “I Am.” Frank then goes on to comment that: If there was something breathtaking about the presumption of this particular bit of corporate autodeification, this conflation of God, IBM, and the People, there was something remarkably normal about it as well. Americans had already made best-sellers of books like God Wants You to be Rich and Jesus, CEO. The paintings of Thomas Kincade, the [1990s’] greatest master of kitsch . . . freely mixed heavy-handed religious symbolism with the accoutrements of great wealth, plunking Bible references down alongside glowing mansions and colorful gazebos. “The Market’s Will Be Done” was the title Tom Peters, guru of gurus, chose for a chapter of his best-selling 1992 management book, while techno-ecstatic Kevin Kelly, whose 1994 book, Out of Control, was a sustained effort to confuse divinity with technology, referred quite confidently to a list of New Economy pointers he had come up with as “The Nine Laws of God.” (Frank 2001: 3-4) Frank gives a special measure of attention to the work of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a breathless advocate of economic globalization, who concludes his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree by musing over how an ideal world created by “a visionary geo-architect” (i.e., God) would no doubt closely resemble the American system we have today (Friedman: 298). Frank suggests that Friedman, in making such a bold assertion, “was virtually asking us to imagine that God was somehow WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 137 7/10/07 10:37:45 AM 138 R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 behind the reengineering programs at AT&T or GE, that God stood in solidarity with strikebreakers everywhere, that it was God who told American managers to outsource the job . . .” (Frank 2001: 67).1 David Loy Spells It Out Jay McDaniel was not the first scholar of religion to describe the structure of consumer society in religious terms, though he did so with greater clarity than most. Among those who preceded him one may cite Rodney Dobell (1995) and Michel Beaudin (1995), among others. But perhaps the strongest articulation of this argument was provided by Buddhist philosopher David Loy in his 1997 essay entitled simply, “The Religion of the Market.”2 Loy begins his essay by offering a functionalist definition of religion, as that which “grounds us by teaching us what the world is, and what our role in the world is” (Loy 1997: 275). He then goes on to point out that “traditional religions are fulfilling this role less and less, because that function is being supplanted—or overwhelmed—by other belief-systems and valuesystems.” Loy suggests that the first function is performed today mainly by science, and the second by consumerism. The latter, he argues, is guided by an economic theory that is more theological than scientific, and as such, Loy claims that the Market should properly be understood as a religion, indeed, as “the first truly world religion, binding all corners of the globe more and more tightly into a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist upon seeing them as ‘secular.’” Signaling the aggressive challenge presented to traditional religions by this new global faith system, Loy wonders whether the former will even survive “in any recognizable form.” This, he says, is because the world’s traditional religions are so overly preoccupied with “outmoded perspectives” (he cites pro-natalism), or so “irrelevant” or “trivialized,” or simply Later, in a New York Times op-ed piece the day after George W. Bush’s second election victory in November 2004, Frank listed among the Democrats’ failings that they “declare themselves converts to the Republican religion of the market” (Thomas Frank, “Why They Won,” New York Times (November 5, 2004). 2) According to Harold Coward, the term appears to have been coined by economist Rodney Dobell. Coward was the organizer of the colloquia that resulted in both Dobell’s and Loy’s papers (Harold Coward, personal discussion, May 28, 2006). 1) WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 138 7/10/07 10:37:45 AM R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 139 “in bed with the economic and political powers that be,” that they are unable to respond effectively to the proselytizing campaigns being waged by adepts of the Religion of the Market, which Loy claims has “already become the most successful religion of all time, winning more converts more quickly than any previous belief system or value-system in human history” (Loy 1997: 276). Loy’s analysis is hardly neutral. He sees the Religion of the Market as “the false religion of our age” (Loy 1997: 289), and argues vigorously for replacing it with “a deeper source of values and meaning than market capitalism can provide” (Loy 1997: 276), suggesting in passing that Buddhism offers some viable alternative views. Among those scholars of religion who have taken up Loy’s framework in their recent writings, most have been similarly polemical. It is interesting to note that in an academic discipline that has tended over the past few decades to favor a non-judgmental, phenomenological approach, scholars who adopt a neutral stance when discussing the Religion of the Market are a small minority. The Market God The Religion of the Market as an analytical framework received its broadest public exposure through a 1999 article published by Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox in The Atlantic Monthly, entitled “The Market as God” (Cox 1999). Cox notes that the vocabulary and symbolism of contemporary economics seem quite familiar to one acquainted with the study of religion. “The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek,” he writes, “bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine’s City of God ” (Cox 1999: 18). He likens “chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets” to the “myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption” known to theologians. He refers to the market as a “postmodern deity—believed in despite the evidence,” and likens apostles such as Alan Greenspan to Paul of Tarsus, telling us that “true faith is the evidence of things unseen.” Cox goes on to note the market religion’s salvific sacraments, its calendar of entrepreneurial saints, and its eschatology, in short, “an entire theology, which is comparable in scope if not in profundity to that of Thomas WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 139 7/10/07 5:19:03 PM 140 R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 Aquinas or Karl Barth” (Cox 1999: 18, 20). Comparing it to Christianity, he notes that both systems call upon believers to accept on faith what is obscured from human eyes, promising that by exercising this faith then true understanding will eventually come. In both systems, future promise is held out as an explanation and compensation for present suffering. While Cox acknowledges that historically speaking markets are nothing new, the elevation of the market to divine status is. Previously “there were other centers of value and meaning,” so the market “operated within a plethora of other institutions that restrained it” (Cox 1999: 20). He follows Karl Polanyi in attributing the market’s rise in status to a “Great Transformation” that began only during the past two centuries or so (Polanyi 1957), an analysis also supported by Loy (1997: 278). Once a somewhat “insecure” deity, like Zeus, the market has come to resemble the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible, “not just one superior deity contending with others but the Supreme Deity, the only true God, whose reign must now be universally accepted and who allows for no rivals” (Cox 1999: 20). Cox cites the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and suggests that the market religion has maintained the sacrament while reversing it: sacred things (like land, water, air, and even the human body) are transformed into profane ones so that they can be commodified and put up for sale. Critics of this trend (such as those who oppose the commercialization of genetic material) are labeled as followers of “old religions,” doomed to obsolescence just like the pagans of medieval Europe. Musing that were the True Cross to be discovered today, “it would eventually find its way to Sotheby’s,” Cox notes that the Market “is not omnipotent—yet. But the process is underway and gaining momentum” (Cox 1999: 22). The market religion is, in Cox’s analysis, properly categorized as one of the revealed religions. Prophecy is carried out by the financial media which keep us informed of the market deity’s mood swings—whether it is “jubilant,” “apprehensive,” etc. “On the basis of this revelation,” then, “awed adepts make critical decisions about whether to buy or sell” (Cox 1999: 22). Anyone who questions or fails to go along with these decisions, whether individuals or governments, risks marginalization as a heretic and is threatened with damnation. (And in most cases, one might add, bullied into compliance and submission by the powers that be.) Cox shares Loy’s skepticism that the traditional religions will rise to meet the challenge posed by this new faith. “Most of them seem content to become its acolytes or to be absorbed into its pantheon,” he writes, WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 140 7/10/07 10:37:46 AM R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 141 “much as the old Nordic deities, after putting up a game fight, eventually settled for a diminished but secure status as Christian saints” (Cox 1999: 23). Like other analysts mentioned below, however, Cox does not see the new market religion as necessarily either invincible or enduring. Economic Theology Loy and McDaniel emphatically see neo-classical economics as a false theology. (Cox, while more subtle, would seem to share their view.) Not so University of Maryland economics professor Robert Nelson, who celebrates the religious aspect of the discipline in his 2001 book Economics as Religion. An advocate of what he calls “economic theology,” Nelson states from the outset that despite his colleagues’ preference to think of themselves as scientists, they are really “more like theologians,” which in his view makes their role in society all the more important. “Economic efficiency has been the greatest source of social legitimacy in the United States for the past century,” he writes approvingly, “and economists have been the priesthood defending this core social value of our era” (Nelson 2001: xv). Acknowledging the central role religious values often play in determining economic activity, Nelson does not hesitate to distinguish between “good” and “bad” religions. “Achieving a more efficient economy may depend on having a more ‘efficient’ religion,” he suggests, adding that “the nations that grow most rapidly may be the nations with the ‘better’ religions . . .” He goes on to caution that “the defense of a market economy cannot rest on any ordinary religion. It requires a religion with the particular characteristic that it advances the pursuit of self-interest in appropriate domains but tightly restrains it in others.” Such a religion, he claims, will “ensure maximal efficiency in the use of the material resources of society, and thus rapid movement of American society along a route of economic progress . . .” which Nelson sees as “the path to the attainment of a new heaven on earth” wherein the Fall will be reversed. “Because the market of this gospel has such an exalted function,” he concludes, it is the duty of every follower of the faith to defend the market system . . .” (Nelson 2001: 8-9). Indeed, he does not hesitate to call the laws of economics “the new word of God.” Nelson does not question or problematize the basic value concepts underlying neo-classical economics—for example, “growth,” “efficiency,” “progress,” and the primacy of self-interest, and gives little attention to WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 141 7/10/07 10:37:46 AM 142 R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 alternative sources of value or interpretation other than to dismiss them. (Nor does he give much consideration to the market religion’s many victims, discussed by other writers below.) It would seem that for Nelson, religion’s proper role is merely to serve as a handmaiden to neo-classical economic orthodoxy, and “if current religious leaders are not fulfilling the religious needs of the economy, it may be that economists themselves will have to move in to fill the gap. Getting the religious aspects of an economy in working order may be too important to leave to the existing leaders of institutional churches,” he concludes (Nelson: 262). The danger, apparently, is that inadequate attention to religion on the part of economists will allow for an unacceptable plurality of competing value systems. By actively embracing their role as theologians, economists can hope more effectively to tailor the public’s values to support the market. Nor are the “outdated” traditional religions the only threat to the “efficient” religion advocated by Nelson: in fact, traditional culture of any kind (and by implication, any kind of cultural diversity) is likely to prove an obstacle. Citing the frustrations of economists who “advise” African governments by way of illustration, he argues that “In order for these countries to develop economically, they will need not only a better banking system but also a ‘better’ value system . . .” (Nelson 2001: 262). “The processes of economic development may,” he continues, “require proselytizing and religious conversion . . . as much as increased investment in physical and human capital. Economists may have to be as much priests as engineers” (Nelson 2001: 263). For all his positivist notions about the market and its centrality in human society, Nelson ends his book on a tentative note. “If in the future Americans continue to believe in the transformative power of economic progress, there will be a continuing demand for a priestly class to produce appropriate religious interpretation and symbolism . . . However, if newer religions take hold in American society . . . society may seek altogether different groups to perform in its priestly roles, and the economics profession as we know it could well disappear altogether . . .” (Nelson 2001: 333). His conclusion, that “the institutions in society that today derive their legitimacy from the various religions of economic progress are facing a crisis of authority,” may not, in the end, be so far from those of Loy or Cox. English and Advertising professor James B. Twitchell would appear to be another advocate of the Religion of the Market. Twitchell, who has written extensively on the “triumph” of materialism, sees consumerism as a force of WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 142 7/10/07 10:37:46 AM R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 143 empowerment by which humans can define themselves and their values (Twitchell 1999, forthcoming). Twitchell’s enthusiastic assessment of comsumerism’s place in modern society is even less nuanced than Nelson’s. On the more moderate side, theologian Max Stackhouse has been at the forefront of scholars attempting to identify the religious elements associated with the process of globalization (Stackhouse 2000-). Stackhouse’s pro-active approach sees in this process an opportunity to inject “positive” influences while drawing upon religious ethics to reject others. Another theologian exploring the linkage between religion, capitalism, and globalization is Peter Berger, who developed a summer course on Religion and Economic Globalization at Boston University in 2006. Schematizing the Faith One scholar who, in contrast to the opposing polemics of Loy and Nelson, has taken a purely descriptive approach to analyzing the market religion is University of South Florida religious studies professor Dell deChant in his 2002 book The Sacred Santa: Religious Dimensions of Consumer Culture. DeChant goes further than any other writer to date in schematizing this new faith system, focusing on its structural aspects such as its myths (Michael Jordan as heroic model), its rituals (shopping), and the “liturgical calendar” of major North American shopping days. His analysis is based mainly on a study of annual sales records in the United States, and the fact that he does not refer to the Religion of the Market as such or cite those religion scholars, such as Loy or McDaniel, who attempt to describe it (though he does make liberal use of such social theorists as Jean Beaudrillard, Jacques Ellul, and Juliet Schor), seems so glaring as to have been perhaps deliberate. Nevertheless, deChant’s description closely mirrors theirs, minus the value judgments. A major theme of deChant’s analysis is the contention that in departing from the transcendentalism of mainstream Christianity, the contemporary “cosmological” (i.e., worldly) religion of consumerism actually represents a return to the kind of archaic religion which infuses every aspect of daily life with ritual and sacred meaning. “As the ancients saw nature as the ultimate sacred power and worshipped it in all of its various expressions,” he writes, “so we today see the economy as the sacred power of our culture and worship it in an even wider array of manifestations” (deChant 2002: xiv). WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 143 7/10/07 10:37:46 AM 144 R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 Guided by the meta-myth of success and affluence “gained through a proper relationship with the economy” (deChant 2002: 37, 41), the postmodern culture of consumption is, according to deChant, religious in its very essence. Seen in this light, every act of acquisition is a ritual performance. The sacred experience is heightened during the collective ritual of mass shopping throughout the “high holy days” such as the day after Thanksgiving and the period leading up to Christmas. In the piously consumerist United States, as in primal societies, “religion is indistinguishable from culture itself, indistinguishable from the normative way of life and living, which it legitimates as an expression of the sacred order” (deChant 2002: 39). For those living inside the culture, the religious nature of these beliefs and rituals may not be immediately apparent; “It is just the way things are” (deChant 2002: 40). DeChant concludes his book by tracing the historical transformation of Saint Nicholas from a fourth-century Christian saint into a postmodern god of consumerism, Santa Claus. He suggests that Jesus and Santa are best understood not as representing secular versus religious expressions of the Christmas holiday, but rather as symbols of two competing religious systems. Economics as Sleight-of-Hand What exactly is the unseen reality that the Religion of the Market asks us to believe in? This mystery aspect of the market religion is explored by Mark C. Taylor in his 2004 book Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption. Taylor introduces his discussion by recalling a family dinner table conversation during the stock market crash of 1987 when his son asked the obvious question, “Where did the money go?” The point, of course, is that it was technically never there to begin with: the modern economy exists largely because we believe in it. Taylor sees a major shift dating from Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to take the US dollar off the gold standard, a standard which had previously served to anchor the US economy to some form of material reality. “It is no exaggeration, he writes, “to insist that going off the gold standard was the economic equivalent of the death of God.” However, Taylor notes, “God did not simply disappear but was reborn as the market” WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 144 7/10/07 10:37:46 AM R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 145 (Taylor 2004: 6). Within a few years, the Religion of the Market had become the new orthodoxy. Taylor describes the information age as an increasingly virtual world where “everything is a copy of a copy or a sign of a sign,” where in the world of trade transportation networks have been superseded by electronic ones. He illustrates his thesis with frequent references to the world of art, where forgeries typically create a “crisis of confidence.” In the world of finance, the shift from Keynes to Friedman which began under Ronald Reagan and the corresponding attempt to remove state intervention from the economy have resulted in a de-anchoring of economic activity from reality, with the result that overall insecurity and instability have been greatly exacerbated. Taylor makes a similar point to deChant in characterizing the tension between proponents and adversaries of market ideology as representing a conflict of competing faith systems. Observing that “the spread of global capitalism has been accompanied by the rise of global fundamentalism,” he points out that religious fundamentalism in non-Western contexts most often serves as a means to articulate resistance to the American-led imposition of market religion. By contrast, in the United States “religious fundamentalism tends to legitimize market fundamentalism and sanctify American power” (Taylor 2004: 12-13, 306). Without explicitly saying so, Taylor’s analysis seems to support Loy’s contention that the Religion of the Market is a false faith. But unlike Loy, he does not seem to find anything essentially wrong with this. Rather, he suggests that if the world we now live in is becoming increasingly a virtual one, then the kind of religion we need is one that mirrors the complexity and ambiguity of our new reality. Like Robert Nelson, he seems willing to advocate an entirely new religious vision tailored to the needs of our changed circumstances: Instead of providing certainty, clarity, and security, religion can engender creative uncertainty, which leaves things productively fuzzy. If reality turns out to be virtual, who can really be sure what is real and what is not? Far from posing a threat to be avoided, uncertainty and insecurity are traces of the openness of the future, which keeps desire in play. Life in all its complexity remains a confidence game in which the abiding challenge is not to find redemption but to learn to live without it. (Taylor 2004: 13) WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 145 7/10/07 10:37:47 AM 146 R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 At the same time, Taylor’s idealized vision, like Nelson’s, could be said to have overlooked the market religion’s sacrificial aspects of worsening global poverty and environmental degradation, which are not virtual at all but indeed are very real. For all his deep understanding of how and why confidence games work, Taylor seems largely unconcerned by the fact that such schemes benefit a very few at a very real cost to the many. Not a Uniquely Western Phenomenon The affinity between the market religion and art trafficking suggested by Mark C. Taylor is echoed by art critics Jack Miles and Douglas McLennan, who describe the Religion of the Market as being even more dangerous than the perverted Islam of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. “Sadly,” they write, “the evidence was overwhelming, even before the bombings [of the Bamiyan Buddha statues], that the most dangerous religion in the world, at least for art, remains the ‘religion’ of the market. After the fall of the Najibullah regime in 1992, the victorious mujahedeen (Muslim holy warriors) went first for the gold in the national museum and only later discovered that foreigners would also pay for pots and statuary” (Miles and McLennan, n.d.). Miles’ and McLennan’s remarks highlight the fact that the conflation of market ideology with other religious fundamentalisms is not a uniquely Western phenomenon. The case of Islam is more fully explored in a short 2005 volume by French political scientist Patrick Haenni, entitled L’islam du marché: L’autre revolution conservatrice. Focusing largely on Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, and on the youth culture of North African Muslims in France, Haenni argues that the largely unnoticed emerging trend among young Islamic activists is not towards militancy as much as towards marketing. He cites such examples as the newly thriving Islamic fashion industry (Dawahwear, Muslim By Nature, Muslim Classic), “Islamic” rap music (Kery James, Abd Al Malik, Sami Yousef ), American-style televangelists (Aa Gym, Amr Khaled), and religious talk-shows (Emad Adib, Mona Abdel-Ghani). Haenni’s hypothesis is that the Islam which is emerging as an alternative to militant extremism is not the liberal, humanist version many Westerners are hoping for, but rather a globally-networked Islamic conservatism that mirrors the American blend of piety and techno-friendly materialism. “In place of the fatalistic and parochial universe of traditional Islam,” he writes, WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 146 7/10/07 10:37:47 AM R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 147 “the new religious entrepreneurs offer a religiosity that is market-friendly, bourgeois, cosmopolitan, and pro-active, meant to ‘breathe the spirit of capitalism into the umma’” (Haenni 2005: 59-60). Haenni cites a “theology of prosperity” promoted by media stars such as the Indonesian Abdullah Gymnastiar (popularly known as “Aa Gym”) who claims “Islam teaches us to be rich . . . the Prophet Muhammad was rich, as were his companions,” and the Egyptian Amr Khaled who declares that he wants to be rich “so that people look at me and say, ‘you see, a rich religious person,’ and come to love our Lord through my wealth” (Haenni 2005: 64). Just as in the North American context perhaps the most convincing capitalist is a reformed hippie liberal, the Islam of the Market now boasts activists who have abandoned intellectualism and asceticism for material gain. In the words of a former member of Egypt’s Muslim Brothers, “Do you think they’re going to listen to you because you’ve read this or that? You have to have the signs of power, your car, cultivate your look, your income . . .” (Haenni 2005: 67). Haenni sees many similarities between pro-business religiosity in the Muslim world and that in the United States. Both seek to replace state intervention with pious philanthropy (“faith-based initiatives”), emphasize free enterprise, individual success, and personal virtue, and tend to see poverty as a moral failing. Indeed, suggests Haenni, “Converted to the virtues of privatization and the market . . . the Islam of the market would seem to be the Americans’ ideal partner, not only in their Middle East policy, but also in the conflict of modernity which places it in opposition to the European Enlightenment and statist secularism” (Haenni 2005: 108). Strong evidence, it would seem, of the Religion of the Market’s universalizing power and cross-cultural appeal. An Absolutist World Faith Indeed, Austrian theology professor Jozef Niewiadomski has characterized the market as a new “supra-religion” which subsumes all others in the context of contemporary inter-religious encounter. In an article entitled, “Encounter of Religions in the Context of World Civilization,” he writes: The most important area for the query for a successful design of life in the context of our “global village” is provided by the market and its characteristics. WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 147 7/10/07 10:37:47 AM 148 R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 The soteriology of the supermarket defines the boundaries of economic, political, cultural, and religious—in a more narrow sense of the word—pluralism. Yet it also suggests the illusion that every community and every individual can reach their own self-defined level of happiness. However, it closes our eyes to the violence of the logic of the market itself and to the fact, that this market has long since taken over the function of a supra-religion. Within its own framework, the market allows for a lot of variations; it is only when alternatives to the logic of the market itself want to assert their right of existence that the market deems them unbearable and refuses them this right. The radical nature of the confessional statement, “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus,” has therefore not vanished, it simply shifted its focus somewhere else, so that it now runs: “Extra mercatum nulla salus.” (Niewiadomski 2002: 50) Though Niewiadomski is apparently unaware of the other authors mentioned in this study, none of whom he cites, his observation that market ideology constitutes the dominant global faith system today seems perfectly in keeping with a Religion of the Market analysis. Seemingly in accord with the market religion’s opponents, he does not fail to take note of its absolutist character and its fundamental injustice. A Sacrificial Religion The rather innocuous portrayal of consumer religion found in the studies of Taylor, Nelson and deChant could strike some as incomplete. For example, Max Meyers, reviewing deChant’s book in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, notes that “His analysis never asks where the money used to purchase commodities and participate in this religion comes from, what kind of working conditions some people have to endure to earn just a little of it, or why some people have much, much more than they need while others cannot afford even such necessities as nourishing food or health care” (Meyers 2005: 1201). In fact, numerous critics have expressed the view that the Religion of the Market is at best a shallow faith system, and at worst an unjust one which causes great social and ecological harm. These damaging effects are the focus of a recent book by the FrenchCanadian writer Nelson Tardif, Au nom du marché: Regards sur une dimension méconnue du liberalisme économique: sa violence sacrificielle (Tardif 2003). Somewhat like deChant, Tardif sees in the Religion of the Market a return WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 148 7/10/07 10:37:47 AM R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 149 to ancient religiosity. However, developing an approach first articulated by his teacher Michel Beaudin at the University of Montréal, Tardif focuses specifically on this archaizing religion’s sacrificial aspect. For Tardif, a social justice activist grounded in the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff, it is precisely the sacrificial nature of the market religion—requiring that massive numbers of impoverished and disempowered humans be sacrificed at the altar of the market—that makes it unacceptable. He notes that “in the biblical tradition, sacrifice is rejected in God’s plan, given that it comes out of idolatry and that it threatens His plan for human life” (Tardif 2003: 21). Tardif thus criticizes the market religion on the basis of its sacrificial violence. “Whenever there is a process of absolutization or sacralization of certain realities, we inevitably see a ‘relativization’ or ‘sacrifice’ of other realities,” Tardif observes. “From this perspective, the flip side of the sacralization of the market and of those values deemed admissible within that paradigm will be the ‘inevitable’ sacrifices” (Tardif 2003: 64). The absolutized aspects of this new reality are therefore given a sacred status, and “the Divine is simply another term for the representation of the real that emerges from the process of absolutization-sacralization” (Tardif 2003: 65). While the new reality presents itself as being all-encompassing and inevitable, in fact “there is nothing to it,” writes Tardif. “It is an illusion.” Nevertheless, “whoever opposes this way of representing reality . . . is perceived as an enemy of the natural order since that order is seen as a divine product. Even so, we fail to see that it is a human construction and, accordingly, that what we have is a god fabricated in the image of this particular construction of reality” (Tardif 2003: 65). Tardif ’s critique of the Religion of the Market is thus two-pronged: it is a religion of idolatry (i.e., à la David Loy, a false religion), and it is a religion of violence, in that it “sacrifices” hundreds of millions of innocent victims. Christian activism, he says, must show solidarity with those being brutally sacrificed to the market religion’s system of domination. Christians who seek to legitimate the dogmas of the market have adopted an “antievangelical position,” he claims, and are bearing “false witness” whether consciously or not (Tardif 2003: 180). WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 149 7/10/07 10:37:47 AM 150 R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 Voices of Resistance In a 1999 conference speech, South African president Thabo Mbeki referred to the forcibly imposed development policies of the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO as a “new catechism . . . that will only produce enormous poverty.” Similarly, former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide writes in his book Eyes of the Heart that “Among the poor, immeasurable human suffering, among the others, the powerful, the policy makers, a poverty of spirit which has made a religion of the market and its invisible hand. A crisis of imagination so profound that the only measure of value is profit, the only measure of human progress is economic growth” (Aristide 2000). South Africa-based religion scholar David Chidester places such sentiments into the context of those seeking alternatives to the dominant globalization narrative, alternatives which are often expressed in religious terms: Often, these interventions have been explicitly religious, whether seeking to recover the indigenous integrity of a local religion or to produce a local, mixed, or hybrid version of a global religion. In these religious initiatives, people are not merely consumers of religious signs, symbols and images; they are also acting as producers of knowledge. At the local level, therefore, religion can represent a diverse array of resources and strategies for producing alternative meanings for being human (Chidester 2000: v).3 Indeed some religious organizations have begun to take up the call to arms against the Religion of the Market, which they properly see as a rival faith system. An online publication by the World Council of Churches, while admitting that “many NGOs and also churches are tempted not to look for alternatives any more, but to accept the [market ideology] framework as such,” urges its readers not to “swim with the mainstream” but to “renounce the new religion” and “confront the ideology of the market.” The writers go on to insist that “Being insensitive to the consequences it has for the poor who are marginalised and excluded in the process, the neo-liberal model must be profoundly 3) More recently Chidester has conflated the religion of the market with money itself, suggesting that “As a system of symbols, money might be regarded as a religion, even as the ‘religion of the market” (Chidester 2005). WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 150 7/10/07 10:37:47 AM R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 151 challenged from the biblical perspective of justice and of economic, social and cultural human rights . . .” (WCC, n.d.). In a similar spirit, Australian pastor Kim Thoday writes in an online essay that “The contemporary culturally friendly religion of the market god is the same religious phenomenon that Jesus of Nazareth defined true faith against. It was this hard-boiled religion that Jesus defied. The market god and his high priests thought they’d won too as Jesus was finally executed” (Thoday, n.d.). A more humorous but no less poignant resistance to the Religion of the Market can be seen in the recent activities of New York-based performance artist Bill Talen, who for the past several years has played the role of Reverend Billy, charismatic pastor of the Church of Stop Shopping.4 Emulating the crowd-frenzying techniques of Christian evangelists and accompanied by the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, “Reverend Billy” has preached fiery anti-consumerist sermons in the mega-stores of New York’s Fifth Avenue, “exorcised” cash registers at Starbucks, and led a cross-country anti-shopping march from the day after Thanksgiving (“Black Friday”— statistically the highest volume shopping day of the year) right up to Christmas. “Americans are instructed that our way of life is shopping,” Reverend Billy notes. “That our democracy is shopping. Citizenship is shopping.” Whereas, he points out, “We can be so much more than consumers . . . Make time to spend with your loved ones that doesn’t involve shopping or corporations or logos . . . It’s like getting off alcohol and noticing that you’re not drunk anymore when you stop letting a corporation direct your desires” (Benner 2005). To date there seems to be little evidence that Reverend Billy is winning converts, but like the campaigns of Vancouver-based Adbusters, his media-friendly approach does appear to be injecting an anticonsumerist voice into the popular North American media. Whither the New Faith? The diverse sources cited above should be sufficient to quell any doubts that the Religion of the Market can be understood as a faith system in a 4) The group maintains the following website: . WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 151 7/10/07 10:37:47 AM 152 R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 very real, and not merely metaphorical sense. As such, and given its phenomenal proselytizing success throughout the world today, the Religion of the Market is surely worthy of broader attention from religion scholars than it has been getting up to now. The choices and actions of its acolytes—who include many or most of the world’s political and economic leaders—affect all of us. But for all its universalist appeal and apparent success in winning converts from all cultural backgrounds, is the Religion of the Market the inevitable dominant faith system of our collective future? The imperative of never-ending growth is one of the central dogmas of today’s globalizing market ideology. Oddly, the logical impossibility of this tenet is rarely questioned, as if the earth and all its resources were physically expanding apace with human economic activity. As with the mystery of the Christian trinity, no amount of scholarly explanation seems to obviate the need for a leap of faith; indeed, even the most sophisticated economic arguments when carefully scrutinized seem little more than variations on US President George W. Bush’s stated aim to “make the pie higher.” The most visible spokesperson for the forces seeking complete global conversion to the Religion of the Market, President Bush has on numerous occasions made clear (whether wittingly or not) the faith dimension of this world-wide evangelical enterprise. Perhaps the most striking instance was in the course of his first televised address to the US public following the tragedy of September 11, 2001. With millions of Americans waiting to hear from their leader how they should best respond to the crisis, Bush issued a clear directive in the strongest terms possible: Go out and shop! To stay home from the malls would only provide the terrorists with the outcome they sought, namely, to undermine the American way of life (a way of life Bush’s father, as President at the time of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, stated unequivocally was “not up for negotiation”). What careful listeners were able to discern was the undertone of panic underlying Bush II’s urgent plea. As Harvey Cox had noted in his article three years earlier, “The Market that stops expanding dies” (Cox 1999: 23). In fact the global economy is precisely the kind of large-scale confidence game described by Mark C. Taylor, a Ponzi scheme on a global scale. The expansion of wealth is only an illusion: its appearance is generated by continuing to find people who will pay in, and once the requisite number of contributors is not found, the entire system collapses since there is nothing WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 152 7/10/07 10:37:48 AM R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 153 really holding it up but faith. (This occurred on a national scale in Albania during the 1990s, when an estimated eighty per cent of Albanians lost their life savings to a pyramid scheme run by a few unsavory individuals.) The American President’s advisors and speech writers, if not necessarily Bush himself, implicitly understand that for the global economy to continue to function it must maintain the appearance of constant growth, which can only happen by bringing more paying members into the church. If this can only be accomplished by force, then so be it. On the other hand, the same logic that recognizes the impossibility of infinite expansion within a finite system will quickly conclude that the promises of the market religion must ultimately remain unfulfilled, and that the falling away of masses of faithful may not be far off. While the nature of religion is such that many of its most basic claims cannot be incontrovertibly proven to be true, one of the distinctive features of the Religion of the Market would seem to be that so many of its claims are demonstrably false. As more and more of the faithful become disillusioned by its unfulfilled promises, one might predict that a growing wave of skepticism could bring about the market religion’s very rapid demise. One can only speculate, however, as to what new, revived, or refashioned system of beliefs, values and rituals will arise to fill the enormous vacuum that is sure to be left in its wake. References Aristide, Jean-Bertrand. 2000. Eyes of the Heart. Boston: Common Courage Press. Beaudin, Michel. 1995. “Cette idole qui nous gouverne. Le néolibéralisme comme ‘religion’ et comme théologie’ sacrificielle”. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 24/4: 395-413. Benner, Katie. 2005. “Rev. Billy Says: Stop Shopping: Why the Church of Stop Shopping’s Evangelical Leader Wants Us to Buy Nothing This Holiday Season”. CNN Money online (November 29, 2005) . Accessed on May 2, 2006. Chidester, David. 2000. “Foreword”. In James R. Cochrane and Bastienne Klein (eds.) Sameness and Difference: Problems and Potentials in South African Civil Society. Washington, DC: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. ——. 2005. Authentic Fakes: Religion and Popular American Culture, 2. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cox, Harvey. 1999. “The Market as God: Living in the New Dispensation”. Atlantic Monthly (March): 18-23. deChant, Dell. 2002. The Sacred Santa: Religious Dimensions of Consumer Culture. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press. WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 153 7/10/07 10:37:48 AM 154 R. Foltz / Worldviews 11 (2007) 135-154 Dobell, Rodney. 1995. “Environmental Degradation and the Religion of the Market”. In Harold Coward (ed.) Population, Consumption, and the Environment. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 229-50. Frank, Thomas. 2001. One Market under God. New York: Anchor. Friedman, Thomas. 1999. The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Haenni, Patrick. 2005. L’islam du marché: L’autre revolution conservatrice. Paris: Seuil. Loy, David. 1997. “The Religion of the Market”. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65/2: 275-90. [Reprinted in Harold Coward and Daniel Maguire (eds.) Visions of a New Earth: Religious Perspectives on Population, Consumption, and Ecology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000, pp. 15-27. Also reprinted in Richard C. Foltz (ed.) Worldviews, Religion and the Environment: A Global Anthology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003, pp. 66-74.] McDaniel, Jay. 1997. “The Sacred Whole: An Ecumenical Protestant Approach”. In John E. Carroll, Paul Brockelman, and Mary Westfall (eds.) The Greening of Faith: God, the Environment, and the Good Life. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, pp. 105-23. McGurn, William. 2000. “Globalization Gospel Reaches Eternal City”. Wall Street Journal (December 23, 2000). Meyers, Max A. 2005. Review of Dell deChant, The Sacred Santa. The Journal of the American Academy of Religion (73/4): 1199-1202. Miles, Jack and Douglas McLennan. n.d. “The Most Dangerous Religion”. Arts Journal online . Accessed on May 1, 2006. Nelson, Robert. 2001. Economics as Religion. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. Niewiadomski, Jozef. 2002. “Encounter of Religions in the Context of World Civilization”. Dialog and Universalism. Metaphilosophy as the Wisdom of Science, Art, and Life 12/6-7: 49-56. Polanyi, Karl. 1957. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Stackhouse, Max, Ed. 2000-. God and Globalization. 4 vols. Harrisburg: Trinity International. Talen, Bill and Savitri Durkee. 2006. State Your Stop Shopping Church: What You Can Do to Take Back Your World by the Reverend Billy. New York: Soft Skull Press. Tardif, Nelson. 2003. Au nom du marché: Regards sur une dimension méconnue du liberalisme économique: sa violence sacrificielle. Montréal: MNH. Taylor, Mark C. 2004. Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thoday, Kim. n.d. “Hard Boiled Believers”. . Accessed on May 1, 2006. Twitchell, James B. 1999. Lead Us into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press. ——. forthcoming. Shopping for God: How Christianity Moved from in Your Heart to in Your Face. New York: Simon and Schuster. World Council of Churches. n.d. Lead Us Not into Temptation: Churches’ Response to the Policies of International Financial Institutions. . Accessed on May 1, 2006. WO 11,2_f2_135-154.indd 154 7/10/07 10:37:48 AM
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