OLD TIME RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE

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From: SELLING GOD - American Religion

in the Marketplace of Culture,

by R. Laurence Moore

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Religious leaders had started national life

aware that they had to deal with competition.

They said so in many forums, and in one way or

another they declared it a problem.

All procedures were in the beginning ad hoc.

Innovation was a forced option. One locus

of competition was between denominations,

but in some ways that was the easy part of it.

The unexpected proliferation and prosperity

of new religious groups aided church leaders

generally. Looming as a bigger problem was

competition with non-religious enterprises on

the cultural landscape that attracted people's

attention and energies. Many of those

enterprises were changing the nature of leisure

in the United States. Increasingly, they turned

casual pastimes into organized businesses.

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Religious leaders entered a long struggle

to try to control the direction that commercial

culture took. In many ways, religion's determined

intrusion into the marketplace of culture made

that arena the central moral battleground of

American life. What religious leaders did early

in national history, they continued to do later.

They opposed many new forms of commercial

culture as they came along. They tried to set up

attractive, alternative diversions under church

sponsorship. They fought with cultural

entrepreneurs who resisted the idea of running

their businesses according to guidelines dictated

by a Protestant moral economy.

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These efforts gave American religious life a

distinctive quality that was radically different

from what it had been in the colonial era.

For one thing, almost all of them committed

religious leaders to a process of popularization.

They had to attract people to what they were doing.

Whether they were trying to clamp controls

on the marketplace of culture or not,

they found themselves using the language

of selling and commodification.

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