Recently published in the UK and still to come in the US, Capitalizing Religion, by Craig Martin, is a critical account of 'spirituality' or 'individual religion', arguing that much of what is labelled as 'spirituality' can be understood as consumerist ideology. We talked briefly with the author about his new book:
1.What particular areas of religious studies interest you and why?
For some reason I’ve been captivated by abstract, theoretical questions and concerns. I’m almost always less interested in the content of a particular religious tradition than the vocabulary that practitioners and scholars use to talk about those traditions. Why is it that, despite the fact that those forms of culture we call religion are not systematic and are not just about “beliefs,” practitioners and scholars continue to refer to them as “belief systems”? When what we call religion is so clearly public, why do people call it a “private” matter? When people opposed to “organized religion” organize themselves into communities devoted to “spirituality,” what’s going on there? I generally find that one doesn’t have to dig too deep into it to find that these are loaded terms—tied to varying social interests—and the social work they accomplish fascinates me.
2. How would you describe your book in one sentence?
That’s a hard question! Since I think the book ties together several theoretical concerns, how I would summarize it would depend on which theoretical strand I was thinking of at the moment.
First, Capitalizing Religion addresses the discourse of individualism in religious studies: Individuals, upon inspection, always turn out to be conforming to social codes; however, it appears that the rhetoric of individualism—an overtly normative rhetoric used both by scholars and religious practitioners—masks how subjects are constituted by their social worlds.
Second, this book addresses how discourses assign agency and responsibility to subjects: Individualism displaces all responsibility for social ills to individuals as opposed to social structures, protecting the latter from criticism or revision.
Third: Many “spirituality” and related “self-help” discourses recommend quietism, consumerism, and worker productivity in a way seemingly designed to reproduce the status quo within neoliberal capitalism.
3. When did you start researching for this book?
I would say that this book has, in a sense, three points of origin. First, I read Jeremy Carrette and Richard King’s Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion when it first came out in 2005. The book’s thesis—that our ways of talking about “religion” and “spirituality” are both implicitly and explicitly tied to capitalism—made a huge impact on me and I’ve never stopped thinking through the critical implications of their work.
Second, when I was working on my Ph.D. I spent quite a bit of time studying Christian discourses on theodicy and free will, according to which because individual humans had “free will,” the Christian god was not to be held responsible for evil or suffering in the world. I couldn’t help but notice the parallel between Christian theodicy and the common claim today that “poor people are poor because they are lazy.” Since then I’ve wanted to publish something drawing attention to this parallel.
Third, as I note in the “Introduction” to the book, before my father’s death he dealt with being laid off during an economic downturn by reading self-help literature that encouraged positive thinking yet blamed him for his inability to find a job. According to this literature, all of us have it within our power to improve our life’s station, if only we think positively; the necessary corollary is that we have only ourselves to blame for our failures. It broke my heart to see my father blame himself for his underemployment and financial woes, and that heartbreak lies behind much of my analysis in Capitalizing Religion.
4. Which part of writing a book have you enjoyed most?
While I hated reading “spirituality” and “self-help” literature for my research—as it seemed so frustratingly naïve and superficial to me—I did enjoy writing about that literature. For the second half of the book, where I offer an ideology critique of “spirituality,” I found I could write a chapter in just a few days because I knew exactly what I wanted to say. There was something cathartic in taking these authors to task.
5. Any tips for people reading the book?
If you’re not interested in the theoretical questions of part 1, jump to part 2 for the fun stuff!
6. If you could have dinner with one person, living or dead, who would it be?
Easy: Mark Twain. I read a lot of Twain in high school and college, and his work has made an indelible impact on who I am today.
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