In the first instance, the European Enlightenment led to an increased tendency to exclude religious discourse from the public domain of politics, economics and science. In the main this was achieved by representing ‘the religious’ primarily in terms of individual choice, beliefs, and private states of mind. For philosophers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant, it was important to demarcate the precise domain in which religion should be located, in order to preserve the secular space of liberal political governance from the conflicts, intolerance and violence arising from the conflict between competing religious ideologies and groups within European societies. Religion in this context becomes a matter of personal assent to a set of beliefs, a matter of the private state of mind or personal orientation of the individual citizen in the terms set out for it by modern (i.e. Enlightenment-inspired) liberalism. A consequence of this approach is that, in different ways and variegated forms, religion has been formally separated from the business of statecraft in contemporary Northern European societies (though with different inflections and degrees of smoothness).
In the late twentieth century, however, there has been a second form of privatization, and this has been largely ignored in the sociological literature on the subject. This trend partially builds upon the previous process, but also has important discontinuities with it. It is linked to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the end of the Cold War and the global emergence of a triumphalist form of corporate-oriented capitalism, intent on spreading its influence across the globe. The second privatization that this cultural phenomenon represents partially builds upon the previous individualization of religion, but also has important discontinuities with it. Generally speaking, it can be characterized as a wholesale commodification of religion that is the selling off of religious buildings, ideas, and claims to authenticity in primary service to profit.
In the context of this unprecedented cultural bombardment of information, images, and advertising through the various mass media we are witnessing a wholesale commodification of our varied cultural histories and traditions. The practices, texts, and belief-systems of ancient traditions are now routinely exploited for their cultural capital with the purpose of increasing consumption and corporate profit. Much of the conceptual work for achieving this is carried out by the modern concept of spirituality. Marketing the spiritual allows companies and their consumers to pay lip service to the rich and historically significant religions of the world whilst at the same time distancing themselves from any engagement with the specific world-views and forms of life that they represent. Religion is re-branded as “spirituality” and the net result is the vigorous promotion of the ideology of capitalism. This emerging phenomenon is what Jeremy Carrette and I have coined “capitalist spirituality.”
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We do not need Karl Marx or Max Weber to tell us that those traditions classified as ‘religions’ in the modern consciousness have always been bound up with economics and more generally with modes of exchange. However, a fundamental ground shift has taken place in North American and British cultural politics in the last twenty years, one specifically tied to the deregulation of the markets by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and this is changing the relationship of cultural forms to the market. At the beginning of the twenty-first century what it means to be human has been increasingly influenced by a discourse of rational choice, game theory, and the notion of homo economicus. The language of the market, of competition, consumption, of built-in obsolence and auditing has exerted an influence upon more and more dimensions of life in capitalist societies. Passengers, hospital patients, students become customers, citizens become consumers, and employees become “human resources.”
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