Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture

5. Branding Religion: “I’m Like Totally Saved”

|| 165 5 BRANDING RELIGION “I’M LIKE TOTALLY SAVED” Genuine. Real. For You. —Slogan for Jesus Christ TV If there’s one thing that trumps religion, it’s capitalism. —The Easy A The Church of Latter-Day Saints launched a new ad campaign in August 2010. The ads, which were aired in nine cities around the US, featured young, energetic people surfing, skateboarding, and engaging in everyday—yet hip and cool—activities. In one ad, a young white woman spends almost the entire minute and a half of the video describing her life as the 2008 national longboard surfing champion. The ad ends with the woman saying, “My name is Joy Monahan, I’m a professional longboard surfer, and I’m a Mormon.” Another ad features a young white skateboarder describing his love of the sport; he introduces the fact that he’s a Mormon casually by saying, “People always wonder why I don’t drink.” The ads proclaim that Mormons are like everyone else, that Mormonism is not exotic or odd, but rather part of the vaguely defined, though ideologically powerful, “Middle America.”1 The campaign is intended to resonate with a broad, populist audience and obliquely addresses widely publicized stories of Mormons as both polygamists and antigay by positioning them as “normal” and depicting Mormons as everyday Americans doing everyday things, portraying them as “not weird.”2 166 || BrAnding religion Mormons have been running ads on television since the 1980s. Creating television advertising to sell and promote a particular faith is by no means a new tactic in the commercialization of religion. Spiritual organizations such as Scientology have used TV ads to disseminate their messages, as have more formalized religions, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses. This new ad campaign, however, is an example of the way in which the Mormon religion (as well as Mormons themselves) can be branded in everyday contemporary culture. In his work on promotional culture, Andrew Wernick explores a variety of ways in which the traditional components of branding—advertising, marketing, commodity signs—are only a part of a more general ethos wherein culture becomes brand culture, as I have discussed throughout this book.3 The material presence of brands in everyday life is a significant part not only of the symbolic world but also of the communicative and ideological presence of brands—how branding becomes the way we tell stories to ourselves about ourselves and our identities—performs important work within what Stuart Hall would call circuits of culture.4 One of the more lasting and powerful symbolic worlds in the US is the world of religion. In this chapter, I explore some of the ways religions are branded. Religion has been largely positioned and experienced in modernism—by both individuals and social institutions—as a symbolic world. The symbolic world of religion provides a moral guide for individuals through formal institutions, iconography, and signs, and through the use of religious metaphors and themes. Despite deep historical relations with other social systems , especially political and economic structures (manifest in centuries of war and in economic practices such as tithing), religion has been powerfully, though not wholly, culturally defined by the content of its beliefs rather than its social, economic, or commercial purposes. As Vincent Miller describes, “We can readily list any number of Christian theological themes that run counter to the implicit anthropology of consumerism: creation, unmerited grace, the paschal mystery, charity, sacramentality, the preferential option for the poor, forgiveness, denial of the flesh, and so on.”5 The “authentic” values of religious beliefs are in contrast to the banal and base practices of consumerism —in fact, religion is often the place one turns to for escape from these materialist practices. However, as Miller points out, religious values and themes are often incorporated within consumption practices, changing individuals’ relationship with religious beliefs, narratives, and symbols. Miller, like Marx, sees the commodification of religion as a practice of corporate appropriation, one that manipulates consumers and religious individuals. Indeed, this is precisely the root of Marx’s problem with religion, which he understood BrAnding religion || 167 as a kind of illusion that alienated individuals just as capitalism did. Religion , for Marx, disguised “real” happiness; it is, in his words, “the sigh of the oppressed creature.”6 In this view, convincing individuals of the authenticity and uniqueness of religion is one of the triumphs of modernism: even if political and economic mechanisms play an...