ABSTRACT
The global utilization of “culture” by transnational firms has radically altered the environment within which the church exists, first in the advanced industrial regions but increasingly in Third World contexts as well. Beginning only slightly before the resurgent interest in culture by political economists, the academic world also saw one of its periodic revivals of interest in the social impact of religion. The confident predictions of irrevocable secularization, of the withering of religion as a socially potent force, seem as dated as starched shirt collars and fedora hats. Welfare policies and the provision of consumer credit allowed consumption to continue during periods of recession and unemployment—features of the Fordist era largely absent. In contrast, the “crisis of Fordism,” which emerged in the 1970s, was not one of overproduction but of a profits squeeze. Declining rates of return on investment appeared across the advanced capitalist world, making the Fordist compromise between labor and capital more a liability than an asset.
