American Religion and Commercial Culture

Why do more Americans than Europeans identify themselves as religious? Given that a central tenet of the Constitution is the separation of church and state, how has religion nevertheless managed to pervade American culture, politics, and identity? And why, in a nation of believers, has religion taken the kitschy forms of Christian theme parks, Hollywood Bible epics, and New Age crystal shops? Does the pervasiveness of commercialized religion in America indicate that, despite the protestations of the vast majority of Americans that they are religious, Americans’ practice of religion has become so entwined with leisure and consumption that true religion in America is dead?

In Selling God, R. Laurence Moore explains the pervasiveness of religious self-identification among Americans, and the intense commodification of religion that characterizes the American landscape in terms of the absence of a state-supported religious establishment in the United States. Because American religious leaders have been unable to rely on state sanctions to bring in congregants, they have had to compete for followers, not only against each other, but also against a full array of worldly snares and amusements.

The results of religious leaders’ neck-to-neck competition in the “marketplace of culture” have been the excesses that some feel are characteristic of American religious practice. If American religion appears barely distinguishable from the larger commercial world, it is because American religious leaders, desperate to attract the attention of new audiences, have frequently drawn upon the very worldly pleasures their doctrines condemned. Early-nineteenth-century evangelicals may have been suspicious of leisure, but they provided music, action, and spectacle at their revival meetings on a scale that dwarfed all competing amusements in rural America. Preachers who condemned the theater for its artificiality nevertheless studied the arts of performance and oratory in order to keep their own audiences spellbound. And some Christian authors attempted to promote chaste behavior by writing lurid tales of the evils of sex and violence that, but for the tacked-on tale of redemption at the end, could easily be mistaken for the racier literature they overtly condemned.

Moore does not view these compromises as evidence of American religion’s victimization at the hands of commercial culture, as some would argue, nor as evidence of its triumphant sacralization of culture, as an earlier school of historians might claim. Instead, Moore depicts American religious leaders deeply engaged with popular culture as both innovators and incorporators. Protestant leaders (and Mormons, to a lesser extent) not only incorporated the tactics of their worldly competitors, but also led the way in new market techniques that would later be copied in the larger marketplace. Protestants’ market innovations were most dramatic in the early to mid-nineteenth century, when Methodist circuit riders pioneered new methods of door-to-door communication, and the American Tract Society and American Bible Society instituted methods of mass production and distribution of printed material that would later be picked up by salesmen and political campaigners of all persuasions.

American religion affected American culture in ways more profound than blazing a trail of persuasion for later advertisers to follow. Moore argues that religious leaders’ competitive energies left an imprint on numerous aspects of American life. American denominations’ intense but orderly competition with each other both provided a pattern for and helped to legitimate the competitive energies of American political parties. The scandal sheets recounting “true tales” of polygamous Mormons, suicidal Millerites or lecherous ministers served as “serialized best-sellers” and provided Americans with a forum to discuss issues of sexuality as well as physical and mental sickness and health. And pressure from religious leaders led to elevated moral tones (and prices) in those popular amusements religious organizations could not stifle or incorporate, from boxing and saloons to movies and vaudeville. These shifts in tone, Moore argues, ultimately made these pleasures more amenable to both working-class and middle-class audiences.

Moore recognizes the negative aspects of religious leaders’ eagerness to market their “product.” When religions are marketed to...