Prometheus 6

I find stuff like NET POLITIK, your basic progressive site. And I make note because I found links to two related articles. This one was linked at NET POLITIK:

The Market as God
Living in the new dispensation
by Harvey Cox

A FEW years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.

Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies.

Capitalism as religion is one of my BIG peeves.

The article has this related link:

The Death of Real Religion
-- Dr. Joseph Chuman
Joseph Chuman is the Leader of the Bergen Ethical Society.

The Decline of Belief and the Rise of the Therapeutic Model
The Problems of Religious Surfing
Religion's Mimicking of the Market

This is the "Religion's Mimicking of the Market" section:

Religion's most important role is to stand outside society and criticize its evils and excesses from a plateau of higher moral values. It points a finger at government and the wielders of secular authority and speaks "truth to power." Religion's social role needs to uphold those ideals which money cannot buy and which lie outside the realm of financial exchange justice, charity, human dignity, compassion, righteousness and peace among them.

Most ominous of religion's current tendencies is its aggressive appropriation of the values of the marketplace. The free market is all the rage, and religion lamentably has fallen prey to its seductions. Large churches are modeled on shopping malls. Ministers have become entrepreneurs increasingly preoccupied with body counts and keeping the collection plates brimming. With self-fulfillment a motivating impetus behind religious seeking, the religious leader is being transformed into an entertainer in order to fill the pews and retain the interests of parishioners in an era of diminishing attention spans. Today religion is a consumer item, and people shop around for a church or spiritual regimen as they would a new refrigerator.

But what happens when religions sells out to the marketplace? What effect does it have on religion's traditional prophetic function when it envies, mimics and jumps on the bandwagon of the unfettered market? Clearly, it yields its vitally necessary role as a standard bearer and protector of those values which civilize society and give meaning to individual lives. Throughout American history, religion's authority to criticize the abuses of power has been its greatest gift to a society much in need of reform. This proud legacy has all but disappeared in an era awash in "spiritual" seeking, when religion's rewards begin to look too much like the blandishments of the world.

The abolition movement, the movement for women's suffrage in the 19th century and the civil rights movement of the 20th exemplified religion in its prophetic role; religion at its best. Masses of Americans were liberated from conditions of oppression, and the American character was transformed and uplifted. Today, American religion has greatly ceded its grandeur and high moral purpose. In many quarters it has abandoned its distinctive calling. In this era of religious triumphalism, American religion is in danger of losing its soul.