RELS 210 God and Money: Religion in the Marketplace
Scholars and cultural critics often talk about the commodification, marketization, and commercialization of religion. What do these expressions mean, and what kinds of processes and transformations do they refer to? How do they help us problematize the role of religion in economic life, the relationship between the religious and the secular, and the demarcation of “religion” and “economy” into separate realms of the sacred and the profane? This course will equip students with historical knowledge and an interdisciplinary toolkit to understand the complex material, ideological, cultural, and ethical entanglements between religious and economic life. The course is divided into two parts. In Part 1, we will survey classic debates about whether capitalism forces a progressive decline in religion or whether capitalist modernity itself is a continuation of Christianity in a secularized form. We will also question Eurocentric assumptions about capitalism’s Christian origins that inform histories of capitalist expansion from the West to the global South. Moving from theory to practice, we will then examine religious and economic interactions in everyday life: including religiously-imbued practices of symbolic exchange, market transactions, money-making, gift-giving, indebtedness, and workplace discipline from the bazaar to Wall Street. Part 2 will leverage these concepts and apply them to concrete case studies. In particular, we will investigate the emergence of strategic alliances between conservative religious movements and global neoliberal capitalism, as witnessed through examples of Evangelical Christianity in the US, Hindutva in South Asia, and the rise of Islamic banking in the Middle East. Through these cases, we will discern how religion acts as a means of resistance against capitalist exploitation but also gets co-opted and assimilated into capitalist projects.
Credits
This course is a 4-unit course. On average, you should expect to spend at least twelve (12) hours a week (including in-class time) on this course.