Church, Market, and Media

Book excerpt: Marcus Moberg offers a new model of religion and religious life in the post-war era, through focusing on the role of markets and media as vectors of contemporary social and cultural change – and therefore institutional religious change. While there is wide agreement among sociologists of religion that there this area is transforming on a global scale, there is less agreement about how these changes should best be approached and conceptualized. In a time of accelerating institutional religious decline, institutional Churches have become ever more susceptible to market-associated discourse and language and are ever more compelled to adapt to the demands of the present-day media environment. Using discourse analysis, Marcus Moberg tracks how new media and marketing language and concepts have entered Christian thinking and discourse. Church, Market, and Media develops a framework that approaches changes in the contemporary religious field in direct relation to the changing socioeconomic makeup of contemporary societies on the whole. Through focusing on the impact of markets and media within the contemporary religious setting of mainline institutional Christian churches in the Western world, the book outlines new avenues for further theorizing the study of religious change.