ABSTRACT
According to an oft-cited study of sex and advertising, “Every media consumer is alert to ‘sex in advertising.’ Its pervasive use and misuse are constantly before us, and typically elicit strong criticism” (Richmond and Hartman 1982, 53). Numerous studies over the past few decades (e.g. Cebrzynski 2000) have largely confirmed the truism that, at least within certain limits, “sex sells”—or, more correctly “sexiness sells”—and it is not hard to see why. Indeed, setting aside for the time being related ethical and gender issues, this fact itself requires little by way of further analysis. More interesting, though much less studied, is a question more germane to the present investigation: does religion sell? A recent study investigating the question of whether “spirituality sells”
found that, compared with sexuality, religious content in advertising is surprisingly infrequent: only one per cent of television and magazine advertisements (Moore 2005, 5). This may be due to the fact that, even more than
with sexuality, there are limits that must be negotiated-advertisers employing religious themes and images tread dangerous water. Perhaps sensitivity to what might be considered “blasphemous” is stronger today than sensitivity to what might be considered “obscene.” Having said that, in terms of the commercial use of sex, any limit is also a potential boundary that can be pushed and, short of a full-fledged consumer boycott, the surrounding controversy in itself frequently serves to increase attention to (and potentially sales of) the offending product. In a different and more provocative vein, extrapolating the work of James Twitchell, it may be that contemporary consumer culture has no need to adopt religious themes and images in selling products, because the culture of advertising already, in and of itself, performs the same functions as traditional religions (see Twitchell 1996). As Charles Taylor has argued, in order to succeed, religions require at least a partial commitment to the goal of “human flourishing”—even while they pursue goals that transcend worldly understandings of such (Taylor 2007). It follows that any attempt to proselytize must rely at least in part on themes and images that evoke, display, or promise worldly benefits, which is precisely the modus operandi of advertising. Whatever the reasons for this relative lack, it is important to note the
discrepancy in the treatment of Western and Asian religions in contemporary advertising. Moore notes that whereas Western religions are more frequently used to sell “cultural products” (books, magazines, films), Asian religions tend to be used to sell goods and services; whereas Western religious images tend to be historical, Asian ones are contemporary; and whereas, on the whole, ads containing images from Asian religions tend to be “respectful,” this is much less the case with ads containing images from Western religions, which are more likely to use humor to undercut or question the validity of Western religious beliefs or practices. On the whole, research has found that Asian religions, when represented in contemporary advertising, tend to be portrayed in a positive (if naïve or romanticized) light. And while Rick Moore misidentifies one of the Asian images, the yin/ yang symbol, as being “Buddhist”—it is in fact Daoist or, at any rate, a panChinese symbol that long pre-dates the arrival of Buddhism in East Asia-he nonetheless concludes that “Buddhism and Taoism are cool… Judaism and Christianity are not” (Moore 2005, 6-9, 11).
