Book reviews : Religions as Brands: New Perspectives on the Marketization of Religion and Spirituality

Jean-Claude Usunier and Jӧrg Stolz’s edited volume Religions as Brands: New Perspectives on the Marketization of Religion and Spirituality builds upon and contributes to the extant literature on the status of religion, religiosity, and religious institutions in contemporary consumer society (see Jafari, 2014 for a concise classification). As a perfect companion to Gauthier and Martikainen’s (2013) Religion in Consumer Society: Brands, Consumer and Markets, this book both supports and challenges some of the established classical sociological accounts of religion (e.g., the relationship between capitalism and religion, economics of religion). Once again it reveals that, with the expansion of consumer culture, the secularization thesis will continue to be heatedly debated in different areas of the social science (see Gauthier and Martikainen, 2013).