Church, Market and Media

While there is wide agreement among sociologists of religion that the general character of religion and religious life has been undergoing significant changes and transformations on a global scale in the post-war era, there is less agreement about how these changes should best be approached and conceptualized. Marcus Moberg offers a model which highlights the role of markets and media as prime vectors of contemporary social and cultural change and, in turn, institutional religious change. In a time of accelerating institutional religious decline, institutional Churches have become ever more susceptible to market-associated discourse and language and are ever more compelled to adapt to the demands of the present-day media environment. Using discourse analysis, Marcus Moberg tracks how new media and marketing language and concepts have entered Christian thinking and discourse. Church, Market and Media develops a framework that approaches changes in the contemporary religious field in direct relation to the changing socioeconomic makeup of contemporary societies on the whole.
Through focusing on the impact of markets and media within the contemporary religious setting of mainline institutional Christian churches in the Western world, the book outlines new avenues for further theorizing the study of religious change.