Marketing and religion, marketing religion, religious marketing, marketing as religion — all of these are topics for discussion on this blog. This includes everything from marketing God to worshipping commercial culture to brand cults (think Mac users) to faith brands (think Joel Osteen or Oprah).*

How do religion and marketing interact in the 21st Century? I contest that rather than a culture war, there is a blending of the two spheres. We can see this in a myriad of ways from how we practice our faith to how we connect to consumer products.

I wrote Brands of Faith in hopes of coming to an understanding about my own journey through religion and spirituality. Raised in a liberal Jewish home by parents who didn’t much care about God but did have vestiges of a Jewish cultural heritage, I found myself floundering in my faith as I got older. I spent years trying one New Age philosophy after another. I meditated. I read. I walked. I hiked. I meditated some more. I tried A Course in Miracles, Kabbalah, and Buddhism (even thought I might qualify as a JuBu – a Jewish Buddhist – for a while) and through it all I was never satisfied. Oh, I was for a while, but then I would get itchy again.

Many times I thought it was because I wasn’t born a Christian. You see, all of my Christian friends knew they had to go to church on Sunday. For Jews, Saturday synagogue was never mandatory (and figures show this is true for most American Jews).

However, as I began to research religion more thoroughly, I found that Christians aren’t going to church that much either. While the most widely published statistics put church attendance at 40-45%, others suggest that it is closer to 26%. That felt more right to me as I tended to see an awful lot of people at Starbucks on Sunday mornings, and I couldn’t imagine that they were all Jewish.

I began to wonder if it had something to do with marketing – that the books and the expos and the meditation retreats weren’t about getting me spiritually grounded, but rather about getting me economically lighter…and I knew I wasn’t the only one. Was there something fundamentally different about today’s spiritual practices? Did paying for spiritually somehow change spiritual practices themselves?

It is this marriage of the sacred and the secular that has become the focus of my work. Has religion gotten too commercial? Has the market become a place of faith? Can faith be found in commercial and popular culture? Is religion the best way to sell products – religious or otherwise? – let the debate begin.

* Let me say here, that this blog is not a how-to on institutional religious marketing. While I am curious to learn about what churches and synagogues have done that is successful – or more interesting, what hasn’t worked – this is not a space for sharing best practices.