Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  The United States holds one set of clues to how religion has been able to turn commercial culture to its advantage. A large part of our confused thinking stems from the simple yet deep-seated error of assuming that ‘traditional’ communities must have lived in a golden age of religion from which there could only have been a fall as people became ‘modern’. In reality, the very opposite happened in America. Americans were less (not more) religious at the time of George Washington than that of Ronald Reagan. In 1776, when the United States declared its independence, Church membership in New England was a lowly 20 per cent. Religious life started to quicken only in the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1890, 45 per cent belonged to a Church, chapel or synagogue. Thirty years later, the number had climbed to 59 per cent; in the early twenty-first century, it hovers around 62 per cent. Far from retreating, religion advanced with modern commerce and consumer goods. It was an affluent society which, in 1954, put ‘In God We Trust’ on all its coins and banknotes.5

  Nor did religiosity automatically arrive with the millions of poor Irish and Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth century. As Archbishop Corrigan of New York pointed out to Cardinal Manning in 1888, there ‘are 80,000 Italians in this city, of whom only two per cent . . . have been in the habit of hearing Mass’.6 Rather, it was the result of an increasingly urban, rich and competitive marketplace in which preachers and missionaries made the most of an expanding commercial consumer culture by skilfully harnessing media, entertainment and the seductive power of fine things.

  The American Tract Society was founded in 1825. By the end of the decade, it had printed 5 million items, with snippets of the bible to make it ‘entertaining’ as well as ‘useful’. The evangelical revival on the eve of the Civil War (1861–5) pioneered a new kind of religious advertising, putting millions of mass-produced images of Christ, heaven and angels into circulation. New churches relied on fun as well as the gospel to attract disciples. Brigham Young, the ‘American Moses’, led a group of Mormons to Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Three years later, this isolated place would boast an amusement resort, soon followed by a social hall and musical concerts. On Fridays, Mormons would dance the night away. The theatre sat 7,000 people.7

  In the 1870s, the Evangelical revivalists Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey became religious pop stars on both sides of the Atlantic, with millions flocking to see them in the major cities. Their hymn books were bestsellers, and their fame encouraged a brisk trade in unauthorized porcelain statues and other memorabilia for their hungry fans. In 1875, the two rented Barnum’s Hippodrome in New York City – today’s Madison Square Garden – for $1,500 a week and made religion the greatest show on earth.8 Their services were carefully staged performances. The doors opened at 7.15, with 5,000 people rushing to find a seat in the space of ten minutes. The congregation would join the choir in the simple but memorable hymns of Moody and Sankey’s hymn book. Then Sankey, the ‘sweet singer of Methodism’, would give a solo performance on the melodeon, a reed organ. But the highlight came when Moody rose for one of his biblical lectures. ‘His voice is rough, pitched on one key, and he speaks straight before him, rarely turning to the sides,’ one listener remembered. ‘But how real he makes the men! How visibly the deceiving, scheming Jacob stands before us! And how pointedly he applies the lessons of the patriarch’s life to the men and women before him!’9 Then there was more singing and weeping. In Philadelphia, outside the tabernacle, statuettes of Moody sold for $2 a piece.

  The rapprochement between Christianity and consumption was facilitated by the tools of commerce, but, just as importantly, it involved a shift in belief and doctrine. Like the other world religions, Christianity had a strain that was deeply suspicious of material possessions, with plenty of warnings about their power to lead the faithful astray from the true path of God, as in the story of the Golden Calf, when Aaron moulded golden earrings into the idol of a calf, after Moses had gone up on Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. The mid- and late nineteenth century saw the coming of a more gentle, beautiful God who, rather than standing aloof and in judgement, was immersed in the world and in the people and things within it. This doctrinal shift was not caused by possessions or hedonism: immanentism, as one version was called, was a reaction to the crisis of faith caused by science and evolution and attracted many Victorian romantics and socialists who loathed consumer culture.10 But the idea that God was everywhere did help to make the pursuit of precious things a virtuous, even pious, path. If God’s beauty was unfolding in the world, how could it not be Christians’ duty to surround themselves with things that radiated that divine beauty?

  The coming of the railway aided the circulation of things. Diaries of the 1860s–’80s show that Mormons devoted increasing attention to stylish objects and fashion as a way of becoming tasteful people, with entries on a ‘beautiful silk china handkerchief’ or ‘a beautiful Morocco bound case lined inside with rose colored satin, while the cover contains a plate glass mirror . . . Altogether . . . most elegant’. ‘The foundation of our society has been laid,’ the Desert News announced in 1860: now ‘the work of ornamentation, adornment and more perfect development becomes a matter of judicious attention’.11 Excess continued to be frowned upon, but austerity was just as bad. A good Christian needed to cultivate the style and fashion best suited to their person.

  Of course, earlier Christians had indulged in fine living, as we have seen, notably in the Netherlands and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What was new in the late nineteenth century was that many churches lost their old qualms about material corruption and openly preached that God promised material abundance for everyone. Henry Ward Beecher, a Congregationalist social reformer and abolitionist, told American audiences that luxury was the sign of pious men. Beecher himself liked jewellery and shopping. It helped that he commanded a speaking fee of $1,000 for each of the sixty lectures he gave in eighteen states in 1876.12 For Beecher, ‘the instinct for producing wealth was God’s educating power in the world’. ‘Wealth gives culture.’13 People had a right to enjoy it for themselves, especially by creating a beautiful home, but they should also spend it on their church and community.

  None of this was peculiarly American. The idea that stylish objects radiated a spark of divine beauty also had its champions in Europe, as we have seen in earlier chapters.14 What made American churches distinctive was that they turned the moral defence of prosperity into a business model, tapping into their members’ success to finance their own expansion. The preachers of the ‘prosperity gospel’ in the 1960s and televangelism and mega-churches since need to be seen in this longer historical context, although they lost the progressive mission of the earlier ‘social gospel’ ministers. God offered believers a material– spiritual new deal: give yourself over to Him and, in exchange, He will increase your wealth. A powerful proponent of this view was Kenneth Hagin, the father of the Faith movement in the 1960s, who trained thousands of evangelists at his Rhema Bible Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, spawning 1,440 congregations; he also sold an estimated 53 million books. Hagin preached that God’s blessing of Abraham with financial prosperity in the Old Testament applied to the here and now as well: God wants his children ‘to wear the best clothing. He wants them to drive the best cars, and He wants them to have the best of everything.’15

  The televangelist Jim Bakker, a former Assemblies of God minister, raised conspicuous consumption to new heights. TV testimonials resembled shopping lists, and he flaunted his own luxurious lifestyle as a sign of God’s grace; in 1984, he bought a 1939 Rolls-Royce and a 1953 Silver Dawn Rolls-Royce, on the same day;16 his dogs enjoyed air-conditioning in their kennel. In the 1939 Rolls, Bakker would drive generous givers around Heritage USA, his theme park in Fort Mill, South Carolina, which blended bible schools with a luxury mall and the 501-room Heritage Grand Hotel; at its height, it was the third most visited entertainment park in the United States, bringing in $126 million a year, until, in the late 1980s, a combination of sex and ta
x scandals brought Bakker down to earth. For the evangelical faithful, Heritage USA was proof that Christian love and luxury belonged together. As one female visitor put it, ‘Christians don’t have to accept second class. I worship luxury and make no secret of it.’17

  What accounts for the contrast between religious vitality in America and religious sclerosis in Western Europe? From Adam Smith in the eighteenth century to Alexis de Tocqueville in the nineteenth and the Economist in the early twenty-first, many writers have found the answer in America’s uniquely open marketplace, where churches and sects have to compete with each other to survive, without being bolstered by state subsidies or other privileges.18 This makes them more entrepreneurial and more entertaining. Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, a popular TV programme that began in 1966, for example, is staffed by over 4,000 volunteers who make 4 million prayer calls a year and generated the bulk of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s annual income of $233 million.19

  Religious life in Europe has never been entirely divorced from commerce. The Crusaders traded relics in the Middle Ages and millions of candles and medals have been purchased every year at Lourdes since Mary’s apparition there in 1858. Michele Ferrero (‘Mr Nutella’), a fervent Catholic, attributed his success to the Madonna of Lourdes and, in 1982, designed and named his Ferrero Rocher chocolates after the rocky grotto; he also placed statues of the ‘Madonnina’ outside all the factories of his global sweets empire.20 Still, this is nothing compared to the profusion of Christian rock albums, bible-based video games, children’s ‘pray clothes’ and scripture cookies in the United States.21 The American marketplace is a fertile ground for mega-churches, especially among revivalist and non-denominational groups without an established home. The Second Baptist of Houston, a mega-church with 17,000 members, fields sixty-five softball teams and has craft and fitness rooms. Even some Catholic churches such as St Timothy’s in Mesa, Arizona, have grown into mega-churches, complete with music, entertainment and radio shows.22

  In Western Europe, it is said, the strength of established churches, benefiting from tax, revenue and other privileges, all but eliminates the need to innovate and entertain. There is some truth in this, but it is only a partial argument. After all, in the eighteenth century, the Church of England was more powerful than it is now, but this did not stop the popular Methodist revival. Moody and Sankey, it is worth pointing out, took America by storm in 1875 after having completed an equally successful tour of Britain. The established Churches today have lost many of their former privileges, but mega-churches and revivalist groups have not filled the void.

  Arguably, just as important as the religious marketplace is the nature of the social state. In America, religious bodies offer not only spiritual guidance but community, self-help, social services and leisure. Willow Creek, a mega-church in Illinois, runs a food pantry and an employment bureau, offers childcare and support groups for parents, divorcees and recovering addicts, and even has volunteer mechanics who fix the cars of single mothers free of charge.23 In other words, American churches continue to do a lot of the work that has been taken over by welfare states in Europe since the Second World War, although austerity measures are starting to test this division of labour.

  So far, the discussion has followed religious bodies, but religion is not the preserve of institutions. It is possible to believe without belonging to a church or a temple. William James, in 1902, defined religion as the ‘feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude’ in relation to a divine force. This force could be a single God but just as well might do without a God (as in the case of Buddha, who stands in his place), or be trandescendentalist, whereby men and women have a divine spark within them and the power to connect with the mystical truth in nature. What difference has consumer culture made to religious experience?

  That agnostics even in Western Europe today remain a minority (c.20 per cent), tells us something about the remarkable flexibility of religious feelings in the face of secular change. In Denmark and Finland as well as Ireland and Italy, over 80 per cent of people still define themselves as Christians, even if they never set foot in a church.24 Three in four Americans believe in God or some higher power. But belief can mean a lot of things. According to the US General Social Surveys of 1991 and 2006, for example, 70 per cent of Americans see God as a ‘healer’. Two thirds viewed God as a ‘friend’; the same percentage also believed in the devil. One in two Americans said they ‘definitely’ believed in miracles.

  Baby boomers have been diagnosed as ‘spiritual seekers’, who, since the 1970s, have mixed their own cocktail of beliefs, blending elements of Eastern religion with Christian traditions and adding a touch of New Age spirituality. A physical therapist living near Boston, when asked by a researcher in 1996 whether she had checked out other religions after experimenting with drugs and Scientology, responded, ‘Oh yes . . . I read all the books I could on Buddhism . . . I liked the fact that it encouraged me to . . . look within myself and to find out what was right and true for me. I also like Star Trek – is that a religion? I don’t know.’25

  Still, it is debatable how representative this kind of do-it-yourself religion is. A large-scale study of American teenagers carried out between 2001 and 2005 found that most of them were remarkably conventional in their religious lifestyle, following loyally in the mainstream denominational footsteps of their parents; only 4 per cent tried to integrate Zen, Buddhism or Hinduism into their Christian faith, and only 0.3 per cent had joined pagan or Wiccan cults. Hardly anyone went church shopping. At the same time, and notwithstanding spending many a Sunday in a church, most of them had little or no understanding of the Gospel. Some Catholic teenagers believed in reincarnation, while many of their Protestant peers felt they would go to heaven if they did ‘the right thing . . . and nothing really bad’, in ignorance of the doctrine of justification by faith alone on which Protestantism was founded. American teenagers looked to God as a ‘cosmic therapist’ on demand, in the words of the researchers.26 As we have already noted, the idea that people and the world carried a divine spark was already on the rise in the nineteenth century. It is, therefore, a mistake to treat it simply as the result of materialist individualism after the Second World War. Still, advertising and consumer culture arguably did make Christian belief more self-centred and self-serving than before. For most Americans, God is no longer a judge but a healer and a buddy.27

  From a global perspective, however, Christianity’s main momentum is no longer in the North but in the South, driven by the Pentecostalist revival in Africa and Latin America. In 1970, one in seven Christians in Nigeria was a Pentecostalist. By 2010, it was every second. In Brazil, the percentage jumped from 7 per cent to 25 per cent of the Christian population in these years. Some leaders, such as the Nigerian Enoch Adeboye, who heads the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), were inspired by their charismatic brethren in the United States, such as Kenneth Hagin and his word-faith movement. In general, however, these are locally financed, indigenous success stories, not American imports. What made Pentecostalism so attractive in the 1980s and ’90s was that it offered a material as well as a spiritual response to globalization and the challenges and opportunities that came with it. At a time of inflation, unemployment and uncertainty, Pentecostalist churches offered a message of self-help, education and work, promising to liberate believers from dependence on old elites and giving them a chance to forge their own life.

  Since the 1970s, Pentecostalists have invoked the ‘spirit of poverty’ doctrine. Africans, in this view, were poor because they remained under the spell of witchcraft, ancestor worship and indolence. A better life required rebirth and discipline. Pentecostalism held out both. For those under the spell of the ‘spirit of poverty’, foreign goods were temptations by the devil that dragged them into debt, alcohol and ruin. By contrast, those who had been baptised in the Holy Spirit would learn to accumulate a fortune and enjoy the good life. The power of the word purified consumer goods, keeping the dev
il at bay.

  Anthropologists in Ghana and Zimbabwe have documented the interplay between spiritual and material rebirth. Instead of spending their hard-earned money on expensive customs and on gifts for the extended family, believers were taught how to invest in themselves, their nuclear family and their church. Pentecostalist churches offered literacy classes and advice on managing money. They tapped into a pre-existing culture that looked to individual willpower to overcome poverty. As the state retreated from social support in the neo-liberal 1980s, Pentecostalism filled the gap. The message of self-help and security appealed to the poor in the countryside as well as to the upwardly mobile in urban mega-churches; in Brazil, Pentecostalism initially attracted the poorest of the poor, although it has moved up the social ladder since the 1990s, cashing in on the new opportunities for wealth in a growing economy.28