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Faith in the Market: Religion and the Rise of Urban Commercial Culture (review)
- Enterprise & Society
- Oxford University Press
- Volume 5, Number 1, March 2004
- pp. 155-157
- Review
- Additional Information
Enterprise & Society 5.1 (2004) 155-157
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John M. Giggie and Diane Winston, eds. Faith in the Market: Religion and the Rise of Urban Commercial Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. x + 259 pp. ISBN 0-8135-3098-9 $60.00 (cloth); 0-8135-3099-7 $22.00 (paper).
The authors of this courageous, inspiring, and interdisciplinary collection of essays successfully challenge long-cherished—but, as it turns out, wrong—academic assumptions that the supposedly secular urban setting dramatically weakened religious life. Instead, the editors assert in their appropriately entitled introduction, "Hidden in Plain Sight," that far from a declining or moving to the rural margins of society, religious devotion and practice have actually flowered in, adapted to, and even transformed urban commercial culture. The well-crafted chapters of this superbly edited, enjoyable book are placed in three sections. The first, "Evangelical Experimentation," offers examples of how evangelical Christianity creatively used popular entertainment to expand spiritual practices, even challenging traditional gender roles. The next, "Protestant Transformation," shows how Protestant groups used architecture and other means to secure power and even create a sense of historical memory. The final, "Minority Adaptation," discusses how African American Protestants, Black Muslims, Catholics, and Jews used commercial culture to strengthen their respective religious identities and economic power.
This brief review can offer only a glimpse at what readers will learn. Diane Winston demonstrates how the Salvation Army encouraged a "Christian feminism" in which uniformed female Salvationists enjoyed greater social mobility, personal autonomy, and professional opportunity than did most women of the 1880-1918 era. Her chapter challenges long-held notions that religion restricted women's lives. The Salvation Army engaged commercial culture to promote its faith so successfully that it became commercially able to provide needed social services, its "brand name" becoming identified with the urban [End Page 155] environment to this day. David Morgan explores how Protestant reformers in the Progressive Era used commercial culture to promote urban revivalism and a more heroic Christianity. His focus on Billy Sunday illustrates how this vibrant evangelist won popular support, even among leading capitalists, through salesmanship and advertising, promoting American capitalism, patriotism, and conservative national politics amid his salvation message.
Likewise, Fran Grace powerfully recasts Carry A. Nation as a savvy, multidimensional reformer who astutely deployed modern marketing appeals (even in her chosen name) that made revivalism and the temperance crusade appealing to a religiously diverse, commercially competitive consumer culture—ironic, because Nation also exemplified anticonsumerism. Grace's analysis of the symbolism and commercial success of Nation's souvenir hatchet pins (even her adversaries bought them!) is particularly engaging. J.Terry Todd, focusing on the New York City ministry of Rev. John Roach Straton, shows that Protestant fundamentalism, in sharp contrast to the so-called backward thinking supposedly revealed in the Scopes trial, effectively appropriated the most modern inventions of the commercial culture—the motorcar, the radio, and even the skyscraper—to convey its message, thereby capturing the attention of urbanites.
Roberto Lint Sagarena traces how Protestants in California essentially invented a regional identity for southern California by marketing, ironically, a romanticized version of the state's Catholic Spanish past, evidenced in the promotion of stylized Mission and Spanish Revival architecture, particularly in Santa Barbara. Paul Ivey similarly invokes architecture as an avenue to explain how Christian Scientists communicated core beliefs and integrated them into a variety of urban environments. Kathryn Jay uses fashion to show how Catholic adolescent girls organized to create an urban market for modesty, successfully soliciting retailers for modest but fashionable dress, which Jay convincingly asserts conveyed religious identity, spiritual commitment, and, paradoxically, consumer desires simultaneously. Her insightful portrait reveals a sharp contrast to the usual rendering of females at the mercy of a commercial, beauty- dominated, increasingly sexualized culture. Etan Diamond persuasively shows how the Orthodox Jewish community, in creating a religious consumerism dedicated to "keeping Kosher" in fine wines and baked goods, elegant restaurants, and exotic vacations, actually made it easier to maintain restrictive traditional Jewish practices while, ironically, allowing participation in mainstream consumerism...