Abstract

CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE, 2017 VOL. 20, NO. 4, 368–382 BOOK REVIEWS Religion and the marketplace in the United States, edited by Jan Stievermann, Philip Goff and Detlef Junker, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, 295 pp., $99.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-936179-3; $35.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-19-936180-9 Compared to other industrialized nations, the United States seems to be full of religion. Even a cursory glance at any national political campaign, especially in the so-called Bible Belt South, will reveal that even the most evasive politicians cannot escape religion’s gravitational pull. Yetatthe same time,religious affiliation is now in decades-longs decline, particularly among the young, many of whom openly disavow it. The relationship between the pervasiveness of the marketplace and religion (or religion’s disappearance, depending on one’svantage point) is particularly confounding. It is to this question – of religion’s role in late capitalist America – that a group of multinational scholars turn in Religion and the Marketplace in the United States. This edited volume, with contributions from scholars based in the United States and Europe, draws on an impressively wide array of disciplinary perspectives from religious studies, theology, his- tory, literature, cultural studies, American studies and area studies. The authors make in many respects