Faith in the Market

by Giggie, John Michael; Winston, Diane H.; Kemeny, Paul (CON); Morgan, David (CON); Todd, Terry (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780813530994
• ISBN10: 0813530997
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-07-01
• Publisher: Rutgers Univ Pr

Summary

Scholars have long assumed that industrialization and the growth of modern cities signaled a decline of religious practice among urban dwellers -- that urban commercial culture weakened traditional religious ties by luring the faithful away from their devotional practice. Spanning many disciplines, the essays in this volume challenge this notion of the "secular city" and examine how members of urban houses of worship invented fresh expressions of religiosity by incorporating consumer goods, popular entertainment, advertising techniques, and marketing into their spiritual lives.

Faith in the Market explores phenomena from Salvation Army "slum angels" to the "race movies" of the mid-twentieth century, from Catholic teens' modest dress crusades to Black Muslim artists. The contributors -- integrating gender, performance, and material culture studies into their analyses -- reveal the many ways in which religious groups actually embraced commercial culture to establish an urban presence. While the city streets may have proved inhospitable to some forms of religion

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction Hidden in Plain Sight: Religion and Urban Commercial Culture in Modern North America	1	(12)
John M. Giggie
Diane Winston
Part I Evangelical Experimentation
Living in the Material World: Salvation Army Lassies and Urban Commercial Culture, 1880-1918	13	(24)
Diane Winston
Protestant Visual Culture and the Challenges of Urban America during the Progressive Era	37	(20)
David Morgan
The Best Show in Town: Carry Nation and the Selling of Temperance in the Urban Northeast	57	(17)
Fran Grace
New York, the New Babylon? Fundamentalism and the Modern City in Reverend Straton's Jazz Age Crusade	74	(17)
J. Terry Todd
Part II Protestant Transformation
Building California's Past: Mission Revival Architecture and Regional Identity	91	(17)
Roberto Lint Sagarena
Christian Science Architecture in the American City: The Triumph of the Classical Style	108	(25)
Paul E. Ivey
Banned in Boston: Commercial Culture and the Politics of Moral Reform in Boston during the 1920s	133	(22)
P. C. Kemeny
Part III Minority Adaptation
``Saturday Sinners and Sunday Saints'': The Nightclub as Moral Menace in 1940s Race Movies	155	(22)
Judith Weisenfeld
``In Vogue with Mary'': How Catholic Girls Created an Urban Market for Modesty	177	(22)
Kathryn Jay
Nation Time: Black Islam and African American Cultural Politics, 1955-1970	199	(28)
Melani McAlister
Beyond Borscht: The Kosher Lifestyle and the Religious Consumerism of Suburban Orthodox Jews	227	(20)
Etan Diamond
Contributors	247	(2)
Index	249