The Bullish Spiritual Market
Columnist Terry Mattingly (who also blogs at Get Religion) has a column about the faith and spirituality boom in America.
“If someone had created a stock market for spirituality in the 1990s, all of the prime indicators would have gone off the charts…Some marketing professionals seem afraid to talk about these numbers, in part because religion is often controversial and this demographic is so hard to pin down. Are Faithful Consumers people who believe in God or the gods? Are they united by their broader spiritual concerns or divided by their narrow, specific dogmas? Are they prickly true believers or blowing-with-the-wind seekers? These days, the safe answer is all of the above. Americans love to shop.”
Faith, spirituality, and religion, are a boom market and it isn’t just one tradition or philosophy that is benefiting from this ongoing trend. Numerous reports about the rise in numbers of Pagan, evangelical Christians, Muslims, and celebrity-driven cult adherents can be seen all the time in the media. Mattingly wonders how a business world with open eyes to these trends would react/change. Personally I think corporations are indeed looking at these trends and I’m more wondering how politics will be formed by the booming minority faiths (and how they interact with the booming evangelicals). Sure politicians have to give props to Jesus on a regular basis now (both left and right) but what happens when key districts swing on the Muslim vote, the Buddhist vote, the modern Pagan vote, or gods help me the Scientologist vote. Will speech and actions on religion be guided in the future not by Christianity wrestling with the forces of secularism, but with the forces of minority religious and spiritual traditions? Something to ponder.
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