Selling Religion

2021 ◽  
pp. 44-72
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Business Culture ◽  
Media Campaigns ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Billy Graham

The chapter shows how Billy Graham’s crusades played an important role in shaping a new relationship between religious life, consumerism, and business culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Graham’s American revival meetings were run with businesslike efficiency, supported by the local business communities, and embedded in vast marketing and media campaigns. Graham himself embodied modern consumer culture and middle-class aspiration. This chapter explores how British and German church leaders and ordinary Christians experienced, discussed, and critiqued a more consumer- and business-oriented faith. While evangelicals and lay Christians in particular were willing to adopt a more businesslike attitude and consumer-oriented rhetoric through their transnational interactions with the Billy Graham team, the majority of church officials in Germany and the United Kingdom defended their more critical stance toward an embrace of consumer capitalism, thus leaving untapped an important source in the battle against secularization.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Culture ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Billy Graham ◽  
The Status ◽  
The 1950S

The introduction embeds the revival meetings American evangelist Billy Graham organized in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany in the 1950s in the existing historiography of religious life in the 1950s, America’s spiritual Cold War, and the interplay between religion, consumers, and business culture. It contends that transnational phenomena such as Cold War culture, white middle-class economic aspiration and increasing prosperity, and religious revivalism blended in Graham’s spiritual and ideological offer and explain its attractiveness on both sides of the Atlantic. By introducing the concepts of everyday and lived religion, the introduction argues for a fresh interpretation of the status of religious life and the process of secularization in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. In centering the voices and practices of ministers and ordinary Christians, this new approach makes the contours of a transatlantic revival visible.

scholarly journals Shopping with violence: Black Friday sales in the British context

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 677-694 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Smith ◽  
Thomas Raymen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Black Friday

This article argues that the 2014 adoption of the US shopping tradition of Black Friday sales to stores and supermarkets in the United Kingdom and beyond represents an important point of enquiry for the social sciences. We claim that the importation of the consumer event, along with the disorder and episodes of violence that accompany it, are indicative of the triumph of liberal capitalist consumer ideology while reflecting an embedded and cultivated form of insecurity and anxiety concomitant with the barbaric individualism, social envy and symbolic competition of consumer culture. Through observation and qualitative interviews, this article presents some initial analyses of the motivations and meanings attached to the conduct of those we begin to understand as ‘extreme shoppers’ and seeks to understand these behaviours against the context of the social harms associated with consumer culture.

scholarly journals Class Diversity and Youth Volunteering in the United Kingdom

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 95S-113S ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Dean
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Young People ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Diverse Populations ◽  
Widening Access ◽  
The United Kingdom

This article utilizes Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of habitus and cultural capital to offer some explanation as to why there is a lack of class diversity in formal volunteering in the United Kingdom. Recent studies have shown that participation in volunteering is heavily dependent on social class revolving around a highly committed middle-class “civic core” of volunteers. This article draws on original qualitative research to argue that the delivery of recent youth volunteering policies has unintentionally reinforced participation within this group, rather than widening access to diverse populations including working-class young people. Drawing on interviews with volunteer recruiters, it is shown that the pressure to meet targets forces workers to recruit middle-class young people whose habitus allows them to fit instantly into volunteering projects. Furthermore, workers perceive working-class young people as recalcitrant to volunteering, thereby reinforcing any inhabited resistance, and impeding access to the benefits of volunteering.

Psychological type and sex differences among church leaders in the United Kingdom

2004 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte L. Craig ◽  
Leslie J. Francis ◽  
Mandy Robbins
Keyword(s):  
Sex Differences ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Psychological Type ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
The United Kingdom

Psychological Types of Male and Female Lay Church Leaders in England, Compared with United Kingdom Population Norms

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Francis
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Myers Briggs Type Indicator ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Psychological Types ◽  
Population Norms ◽  
United Kingdom Population ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Type Indicator ◽  
Myers Briggs

A sample of 322 evangelical lay church leaders completed Form G (Anglicized) of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Among the female church leaders extraversion and introversion were equally represented. There were preferences for sensing over intuition, for feeling over thinking, and for judging over perceiving. Among the male church leaders there were preferences for introversion over extraversion, intuition over sensing, for thinking over feeling, and for judging over perceiving. The type preferences of the current samples were statistically analysed in comparison with the United Kingdom population norms (Kendall, 1998). It was found that evangelical lay church leaders differ from the United Kingdom population in a number of significant ways; most notably, intuitive types are significantly over-represented among both male and female evangelical lay church leaders compared to the United Kingdom population norms.

‘It makes you go crazy’: Children's knowledge and experience of alcohol consumption

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Jayne ◽  
Gill Valentine
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Alcohol Consumption ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Intergenerational Transmission ◽  
Alcohol Drinking ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
The United Kingdom

This article contributes to a burgeoning body of writing focused on children and consumption with reference to critical writing around alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. Drawing on empirical research undertaken in the United Kingdom with families with at least one child aged 5–12 years, we show that despidte being uninterested in drinking themselves, children have a sophisticated understanding of alcohol and its effects. In doing so, we contribute to recent theoretical and empirical work on social reproduction, adult–children interaction, materialities and intergenerational transmission of consumption cultures that are bound up with social rather than individualised notions of consumption. By adding non-representational theories relating to emotions, embodiment and affect to such an agenda, we also point to new fruitful avenues for research on children, childhood and consumer culture.

scholarly journals Cultural Capital as Class Strength and Gendered Educational Choices of Chinese Female Students in the United Kingdom

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siqi Zhang ◽  
Xiaoqing Tang
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Tertiary Education ◽  
Female Students ◽  
Educational Choices ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Middle Class Families

The present qualitative study analyzes how cultural capital, gender, class, and family involvement impact Chinese female students’ aspirations of studying in the United Kingdom. We investigated how these factors facilitate or limit female students’ choice of study destination, as well as choices of subject and program. Data were gathered through participant observation and semi-structured interviews in a British university. A total of 25 young Chinese female students from different subject areas took part in the semi-structured interviews. Out of those, five students are undergraduates, 11 are taught master’s students, and the other nine students are doctoral candidates. Most of the undergraduates and postgraduates are from middle-class families, while some of the Ph.D. students are from working-class families. The results of the content analysis were examined in light of gender and cultural capital theory. It was found that although there exist differences within the middle-class families regarding the possession of cultural capital, many female students from middle-class families obtained high levels of cultural capital, and these students usually internalized the idea of pursuing a place in the United Kingdom’s tertiary education system as a way of enhancing women’s competency in future job markets. Furthermore, compared with working-class students, many respondents’ choice of subject and program was highly gendered, as their families expect them to live a feminine life by choosing “appropriate” feminine subjects. Therefore, despite having the privilege to study abroad, female middle-class students’ educational choices are still constrained by gender and class.

Some Popes in English Literature c. 1850–1950

2012 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 374-384
Author(s):  
Bernard Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Creative Writing ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
The United Kingdom

In 1850 the Roman Catholic hierarchy was re-established in England. Although this caused widespread resentment, one consequence was, as its critics had feared, that the pope once again became a part of English social and religious life. This change was reflected in English creative writing during the next hundred years. Here and throughout this essay I use the term English rather than British advisedly, because different conditions obtained in other parts of the United Kingdom. This essay will examine how five writers with widely different viewpoints represented the pope, and will consider how their work may reflect attitudes to the papacy among the reading public.

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