See this imageSelling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion 1st Edition
by J. Carrette (Author), Richard King (Author)
4.9 out of 5 stars 17 ratings
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From Feng Shui to holistic medicine, from aromatherapy candles to yoga weekends, spirituality is big business. It promises to soothe away the angst of modern living and to offer an antidote to shallow materialism.
Selling Spirituality is a short, sharp, attack on this fallacy. It shows how spirituality has in fact become a powerful commodity in the global marketplace - a cultural addiction that reflects orthodox politics, curbs self-expression and colonizes Eastern beliefs.
Exposing how spirituality has today come to embody the privatization of religion in the modern West, Jeremy Carrette and Richard King reveal the people and brands who profit from this corporate hijack, and explore how spirituality can be reclaimed as a means of resistance to capitalism and its deceptions.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
'Selling Spirituality acknowledges that contemporary business ethics include a dimension of social responsibility ... In effect, the market has become God. As Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said in his Richard Dimbleby Lecture in 2002: "The very survival of the public sphere, a realm of political argument about vision and education, is going to demand that we take religion a good deal more seriously." Carrette and King show how true this is.' - New Statesman
'In sum, Selling Spirituality offers a provocative thesis ... ' - British Association for the Study of Religions
'The scholarship behind the book is carefully researched and well documented.' - Zadok
'Jeremy Carrette and Richard King break completely new ground... [They] direct our attention to potentially fruitful areas of more systematic investigation [and] illustrate the importance of contemporary religion as a research subject.' - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion
"Clearly written, passionate, and polemical, this book is sure to spark debate in the college classroom."
--Diane Jonte-Pace, Santa Clara University, Religious Studies Review
'This book is a long-needed, highly insightful critique of the spiritual supermarket, site of the prostitution of spirituality for personal profit and corporate gain. Jeremy Carrette and Richard King have provided a powerful indictment of the corporate exploitation of 'the spiritual,' using advertising and the media to distort the ethical and philosophical teachings of the world religious traditions to buttress their control of the minds of the people they wish to dominate as their loyal consumers. Serious students and teachers of spiritual thought or practice are well-advised to cultivate their self-critical alertness and hone their critical insight with the help of this hard-edged and illuminating book.' – Robert Thurman, Columbia University, USA
About the Author
Jeremy Carrette teaches Religious Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He is author of Foucault and Religion (Routledge, 2000) and editor of Michel Foucault and Religious Experience (2003), and has also co-edited the Routledge Centenary Edition of William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (2002). Richard King is a Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University. He is author of Orientalism and Religion (Routledge ,1999), Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought (1999) and Early Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism (1995).
Product details
Publisher : Routledge; 1st edition (September 16, 2004)
Language : English
Paperback : 194 pages
#338,293 in Religion & Spirituality (Books)Customer Reviews:
4.9
Richard King
Richard King was born in London in 1966 and is a scholar of Indian philosophy and religion and theories of religion. He has worked in the UK and the USA and is currently Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He has written on postcolonial approaches to the study of religion, the history of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy (especially the relationship of early Advaita Vedanta and Indian Buddhism), mysticism and spirituality and has contributed to debates on the colonial construction of modern notions of “Hinduism”.
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4.9 out of 5 stars
Elizabeth Bucar
5.0 out of 5 stars Well argued and easy to readReviewed in the United States on March 1, 2018
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Well argued and easy to read, this is a great overview of the commodification of religion in the US context.
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Ann McCann
4.0 out of 5 stars Why is religion so individualized?Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2010
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Selling Spirituality has an academic tone and a Chomskian perspective, but the issues it deals with are so relevant to today's pop-spirituality. Very thought-provoking.
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John L. Murphy
5.0 out of 5 stars In-depth review: how corporate capitalism rebrands religionReviewed in the United States on March 25, 2014
A scholar of Foucault and another of Orientalism combine to expose how deeply the market ideology of the 1980s and 1990s has infiltrated secular and economic contexts. They argue in this clearly conveyed 2004 book a necessary thesis. This "silent takeover of religion", as British critics Jeremy Carrette and Richard King demonstrate, reveals how business repackages religion, cynically or cleverly supporting the selfish motives which underlie unregulated capitalism.
But this corporate capitalist version does not need to dominate the treatment of spirituality. Anti-capitalist or revolutionary, business ethics or reformist, individualist or consumerist, as well as capitalist spirituality, defines this typological range. The nebulous term "spirituality" expresses the privatization of religion by modern secular societies. The commodification by corporate capitalism of what was religion strips that "ailing competitor" of its assets, in a hostile takeover, while rebranding its "aura of authenticity" to convey the "goodwill" of the company, which sells off the religious models of its trappings and teachings at the marketplace. (15-21) God is dead; long live God as Capital.
They cite a 2002 interview with the late Tony Benn to telling effect: "Religions have an extraordinary capacity to develop into control mechanisms . . . If I look at the world today it seems to me that the most powerful religion of all-- much more powerful than Christianity, Judaism, Islam and so on-- is the people who worship money. That is really [the] most powerful religion. And the banks are bigger than the cathedrals, the headquarters of the multinational companies are bigger than the mosques or the synagogues. Every hour on the hour we have business news-- every hour-- it's a sort of hymn to capitalism." (23) The "religious quality of contemporary capitalism," the authors remind us, now lacks restraints of earlier societies. The market as God, as Harvey Cox herein has acknowledged, rules, and seeks a monopoly.
As the authors explain: "The 'spiritual' becomes instrumental to the market rather than oriented towards a wider social and ethical framework, and its primary function becomes the consumerist status quo rather than a critical reflection upon it." Spirituality gets harnessed to "productivity, work-efficiency and the accumulation of profit put forward as the new goals" to supplant "the more traditional emphasis upon self-sacrifice, the disciplining of desire and a recognition of community".
Over fewer than two-hundred pages, Carrette and King elaborate in four chapters the impacts of this takeover. Chapter one surveys spirituality, as it separates from religious contexts and adapts itself to individualism under liberal democracies and then corporations. Chapter two attacks the role played by psychology in "creating a privatised and individualised conception of reality" to align itself with social control and social isolation. Psychology, produced by capitalist intervention, fools people into spirituality as "an apparent cure for the isolation created by a materialistic, competitive and individualised social system." This chapter castigates James, Maslow and Jung for their compliance to cultural, political, and economic norms which fail to liberate those in pain. The sustained and potent argument advanced here indicts New Age practices linked to therapeutic cures. Carrette and King critique this as a trap for sufferers lured in to a desire for elusive remedies. Having been sold escapes from oppression, these intensify rather than ease isolation. Freedom is out of reach.
The link between New Age and esoteric teachings sold to the West and Asian traditions elaborates into Chapter three. Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist versions get sampled. The dissonance between systems advising renunciation and capitalism promoting accumulation provides logical case studies. Some of this coverage examines the careers of Osho/Baghwan Rajneesh, Deepak Chopra, and the "Barefoot Doctor" Stephen Russell. Carrette and King suggest the Socially Engaged Buddhism and related movements as alternatives, as well as a study of the Teachings of Vimalakirti as correctives (if slight taken in their original contexts where no "social revolution" or "mass mobilisation" were realistic possibilities) to the prevalent materialism.
The fourth chapter circles back to the opening critique. They find a vivid analogy to sharpen or sweeten their analysis of how "rejection of the discourse of professional 'excellence' among employees is often presented by managers as 'resistance to accountability'. What such resistance often represents however is not a rejection of accountability as such but rather a rejection of a narrow logic of accountancy with regard to such processes." (137) Similarly, they show how difficult it is amid the cult of devotion instilled in the market-driven workplace to resist "spirituality" or "excellence" as a catch-phrase repeated mantra-like by those who act as missionaries bent on preaching the bottom line.
When spirituality gets used such, it "ends up acting like a food colouring or additive that masks the less savoury ingredients in the product that is being sold to us", they demonstrate convincingly. This content throughout this short treatise remains accessible, as the authors admirably seek "to raise a series of questions in a narrative style that is more open-ended and provocative than traditional academic discourse allows," hearkening to the French "essai" to address "wider political concerns and constituencies than are usually appealed to in scholarly works." (ix-x)
This remains to my knowledge a limited area of sociological or cultural criticism, at least aimed at the masses. Since Occupy a decade after this appeared, Matthew Fox and Adam Bucko's "Occupy Spirituality" and Nathan Schneider's "Thank You, Anarchy" (both reviewed by me) covered congenial themes.
In closing, Carette and King propound Michel Foucault's strategy to resist: "move strategically and then wait for the next assertion of power," given resistance may be futile to the corporate Borg. (172) They advocate anti-capitalist, social justice, and compassion-based movements. They also realize most people who may need such movements to lessen their burdens are not secularized. Therefore, they advise strategic alliances by progressives with principled religious organizations as more practical methods of opposition to capitalist spirituality. While they remain committed to a study of religious and spiritual impacts, and never an advocacy of faith-based belief, the authors understand the limits of a lasting, convincing appeal based on only a secular disenchantment of the spirit. Instead, they seek to align radical factions to the faithful majority, who still believe, but who may be open to engagement, in solidarity against what Chomsky calls "the control of the public mind".
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Patrick
5.0 out of 5 stars How capitalism takes over religionReviewed in the United States on December 5, 2019
Carrette and King have written a convincing testament to the exploitation of religion for profit. The book is very accessible, and provides an excellent framework for spotting capitalism’s influence on our spiritual practices. I found it particularly insightful to how seemingly secular goals, like anxiety relief, have been completely taken over by spiritual marketing. This book definitely changed how I act as a consumer!
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Mrs KT Degroot
5.0 out of 5 stars Very satisfiedReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 18, 2016
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Great product, well wrapped, prompt delivery nice price. Thanks!
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Paul Goldsby
5.0 out of 5 stars A way to make money!Reviewed in Canada on February 25, 2020
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Enjoyed this book although thought the price was a little steep!
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