ABSTRACT
While religion has been much discussed by economic historians and sociologists in relation to industrialization and the rise of capitalist society within the framework of Max Weber’s sociology of religion, the relationship between religions, consumer society, and consumer behavior has received much less attention. The main exception is Colin Campbell’s The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, which located the cultural roots of modern consumerism in Pietism and the romantic movement. Paradoxically of course, Karl Marx (1965) had employed a variety of religious metaphors in The German Ideology of 1845 to describe commodity relations in terms of transcendence, community, and experience. The most famous was his metaphor of the fetishism of commodities in which commodified objects appear to take on an objective life of their own (Richards, 1991:68–9). In historical terms, the Victorian period was one in which there did indeed appear to be a close relationship between Christianity, colonialism, and the growth of world capitalism. Henry Stanley had in his In Darkest Africa (1890) celebrated the inevitable spread of Christianity on the back of British commodities. Similarly, the spread of Christianity to Southeast Asia would not have occurred without the help of the Dutch East India Company. There appears to be some general historical evidence 38that in Africa and America itinerant preachers were often itinerant peddlers (Giggie, 2006).
