ABSTRACT
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 had employed a variety of religious metaphors in The German Ideology of 1845 to describe commodity relations in terms of transcendence, community, and experience. There are obviously porous boundaries between religious fiction and religious fact Films and popular fiction compete spiritually and culturally for the "religious imaginary" in ways that professional religious intellectuals and institutions find hard to comprehend, even less to control. In the 1990s, there was little interest in or awareness of the growth of religious markets on the part of sociologists. Secularization for Wilson and others is an inevitable outcome of modernization, and popular religious movements convince them that the contents of religion is being corroded and eroded by the adoption of popular cultural idioms and practices—such as pop music in religious worship.
