Religion and Marketing: Happy Together. Assistant Professor Dr. Milos Hubina

Marketing, propaganda, advertising, or branding do not seem to fit well with religion. They typically insinuate forms of nefarious persuasion or greedy commodification and seem to be correctly applied only in the descriptions of twisted, commercial, “fake” religions.

Traditionally, marketing and religion thus have been examined as responses to modern consumerism, mass production, and commercialization. It has been posited that in the contemporary era, religion has relinquished much of its allure, function, and state-guaranteed prerogatives. It has become one of many cultural items in the market, competing for attention with other religious and secular alternatives. Another perspective views the market 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 on seeing them as ‘secular.'” Shopping malls have transformed into pilgrimage sites; religious times are structured around major shopping events, and brand communities are the new foci of loyalty. Yet another line of research emphasizes that religious material culture, beliefs, and practices have been stripped of sanctity and sold in commercial markets as decorative objects, jewelry, fashionable identity markers, or therapeutic means. Their symbolic and associative richness is also harnessed in commercial advertising strategies.

Despite this dominant theorizing, religions’ ties to propaganda, advertising, and the market go far back in time. In the 17th century, the Catholic Church did not hesitate to name one of its departments Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith, and Jesus’s Great Commission, or the Buddha’s instruction to his monks to go and teach the Dhamma “for the good of the many, for the happiness of the many” are clear instances of the propagating programs. The ties are less visible only because religious discourses separate themselves from mundane communicative strategies like “advertising,” “propaganda,” “persuading,” “branding,” and “marketing” by calling them “proselytizing,” “interreligious encounters,” or “evangelization,” without offering much in terms of explaining the differences.

Like any other institution, religious groups and traditions vie for followers and economic support. And the dissemination of the religious message is not solely reliant on words. It is also reinforced through ‘reminders’ in the form of material objects, art, ritual practices, and celebrations. These reminders, produced, distributed, owned, shared, organized, and learned, carry a prestige value and become objects of demand with a price tag. French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu succinctly captured this dynamic, stating that religion “is an enterprise with an economic dimension which cannot admit to so being and which functions in a sort of permanent negation of its economic dimension.” Some medieval Christian monasteries were economic powerhouses. The Buddhist Saṃgha received lavish donations from early times, including land and bondmen. Wealthy families sponsored Hindu temples. Religious institutions per se were never exempt from dazzling riches.

Apart from what we can learn from the history of religion, there is a systematic reason for the close ties between religion and marketing. Religious products— rituals, soteriology, behavioral norms — are self-referential, i.e., no external criterion can confirm or disconfirm their efficacy. Whether a person has been properly ordained, an object consecrated, or impurities cleansed depends on whether the prescribed ritual was performed correctly. The survival and spread of religious practices thus depend on something other than satisfaction with their end products. And this something other, or at least a part of it, is marketing, i.e., “pervasive societal activity that does considerably beyond the selling of toothpaste, soap, and steel” and includes practices like advertising, propaganda, or branding.

There is no reason to avoid religion’s marketing and economic aspects. Recognizing their endemic presence in religion and the varieties of their historical manifestations can only help us understand the phenomenon of religion more nuancedly.