After Heroism: Religion vs. Consumerism - Preliminaries for an Investigation of Protestantism and Islam under Consumer Culture
Varul, M.Z.
Date: 1 April 2008
Journal
Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations
Publisher
Taylor and Francis
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Using Protestantism and Islam as examples, the intricate relation between consumerism and religion is examined. Beyond the opposition of religious 'heroic' anti-consumerism and secular 'romantic' consumerism, it will be argued, there is mutual accommodation and even convergence. On the one hand consumerism challenges religion by taking ...
Using Protestantism and Islam as examples, the intricate relation between consumerism and religion is examined. Beyond the opposition of religious 'heroic' anti-consumerism and secular 'romantic' consumerism, it will be argued, there is mutual accommodation and even convergence. On the one hand consumerism challenges religion by taking over some genuinely religious functions; on the other hand it exacerbates and accelerates a religious dynamics of probation and, thereby, invites religion to a specifically consumerist revival. The condition for such a revival, however, is that friend/enemy distinctions based on religion are transformed into a variant of the decidedly unheroic 'war of shopping'. Religious commitment is assimilated to consumer preferences, and becomes reversible.
Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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