Adventures in Christian Retail: A Response -- Part II

by Darren Grem 

As promised, here's my follow-up to my first post in response to Charity Carney's recent "Adventures in Christian Retail." 
Why “Christian” at all?  

So, if we’re going to ask about their experiences, the experiences of those at CC and other Christian businesses, how do we start? The intersection of religion and capitalism is a pretty well-trod one, so we have plenty of guides. Marx, Weber, and dozens of lesser mortals have unpacked religion – especially a Western-derived version of Christianity – in the marketplace. You can certainly read Dr. Carney’s experience at CC with those models and come to fine conclusions. 

With CC and other CC’s, however, I think it’s also instructive to think about historical context before moving on to an analysis of why -- or in what way -- this particular site is “religious” at all. In other words, first focus not on what a CC is doing to mark itself as “Christian” or “religious.” Focus instead on what it cannot do at this particular historical moment. Companies cannot hire/fire/promote/demote employees based on religion as per the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII. Of course, they can get around this or create a wink-wink, nudge-nudge "cultural gatekeeper" that signals it’s only accepting applications from like-minded job seekers. And, if they are operating stores in areas where, say, 95% of the people in their local community are of some religious group, then there are powerful cultural pressures for folks not to raise a legal stink. Still, at the end of the day, ignoring or doing an end-run around Title VII is taking a risk of the most fearsome four-letter word in corporate America -- tort. 

Yet, many business owners feel compelled to do something. Why is that the case? It depends and ranges widely based on race, gender, political leanings (which are, admittedly, conservative in general), industry, mass vs. niche market, place, type of Christianity, and other factors. But one thing, at least as far as I can tell, does unite their various impulses for bringing Christianity into the workplace and marketplace. For the most part, they share a sense that the workplace and marketplace are spheres of influence and, therefore, places for cultural activism, a way of shaping the world in their own image.  

Indeed, the ideological and cultural fights of the past thirty years have made an impression on many Christian business owners. This is not to say that the cultural issues of previous decades have not, but that the recent ones over race (such as affirmative action), gender (such as abortion or the "feminization of work"), and class (such as the disconnect between work, identity, and community) are the most prominent -- and they have been wrestled with in the midst of drastic restructurings in American capitalism that have left many without a row to hoe, a line to work, or a mouse to click -- or worried about the said row, line, or mouse. As scholars, we like to focus on the "big" arenas, big-name politicians, and, unfortunately, all too often on the biggest blowhards in these fights. But I would argue that the reflective decision by a small business owner -- or an attendant or a cashier or line worker -- to bring "faith," however they conceive of it, to play in their personal crusade in and against whatever the imagine as the dominant culture to be -- that is worthy of attention as well because it illustrates the very work of identity construction, cultural construction, class construction, and political construction. It's the very place where religion hits the road. And, as Dr. Carney's dispatches noted, it's a decision with multiple and often complicated implications. 

Ok, so, given those historical considerations, how might we interpret what’s going on religiously at CC or other companies? What's a company that wants to be “Christian” to do?

It can create an unmistakably “Christian” internal culture. But there are legal risks involved with that, at noted above.  

It can encourage or allow a “soft culture” of Christianity in the company. I think this is where the “Christian muzak” that Dr. Carney heard comes in. I’ve been to many CC's and seen it in countless other forms. Evangelistic tracts sitting next to the candy rack. An ichthys on the registers or on stationary. Bible verses on the bottom of Big Gulps. Tattoos on a tattoo artist (my favorite). It

all seems to work off the same impetus -- toss a little Christianity into the pot as spiritual spice, thereby making the company just a little "different." To attenuate charges of sectarianism or intolerance, especially if its not selling goods or services“by Christians for Christians,” a company can be somewhat flexible with its language, imagery, rituals, and terms of consent. I think of it as custom-fitting a Christian business for a “spiritual but not religious”America. Playing “Imagine” in the midst of a CCM-tilting playlist is another way to do this. So is putting “God’s Glory Auto Sales” up instead of “JesusChrist is the Only Savior of MANkind’s Auto Sales." 

It can also encourage an operationally“Christian”culture in the company, one that accords to whatever managers and workers are willing to accept as “Christian.” This is extremely difficult to observe and generalize about, even though it is certainly the part that sympathetic observers of Christian business like to talk about. In much of the Christian business/self-help/leadership literature (which is a growing genre), this is everywhere and it's usually framed in us vs. them terms, sometimes with culture war flourishes, sometimes not. In short, it's the infusion of "faith at work" that creates the presumed “difference” that Christian business owners see between themselves and their “secular” competitors, especially in how“moral” or “ethical” their business practices are. Higher wages, better customer service, "Christian" leadership, "character"-based decisions not to cheat an unknowing customer – these are all practices that can fall under this category and advance the evangelical-style "world changing" that CC's often cast themselves as partaking in. As Dr. Carney notes, this also opens the company up to charges of hypocrisy on religious grounds. Someone might say, “I’m a Christian. To my mind, Christians don’t do what you're doing to folks. You’re doing that to folks. Are you really Christian?” I've already written about when or where such questions might be appropriate to ask. But as scholars, I think one of the more interesting lines of inquiry might be why those religiously-based criticisms do or don’t often stick to Christian companies (or companies in general). I’m sure those conducting research into the history of anti-corporate Christianity right now might have something to say about that. (See Heath Carter's post as well as Janine Giordano Drake's forthcoming dissertation.)  

It can use “Christian” in branding, promotion, and networking. Some companies explicitly advertise themselves as “Christian." Maybe they put it in their ads, mission statements, or name (e.g., ServiceMaster, as in "Service Thy Master"). Others do it through corporate policies like – as Dr. Carney notes –closing on Sunday. This certainly advertises to customers who might share the company's religious affiliation or sensibilities. In the past, this has also been a way of creating anti-secularist solidarity between Christian businesses and consumers, as witnessed by the uptick in "Christian" business directories in the 1970s and 1980s. The placement of company franchises in church-saturated or notably dual parent, heterosexual, evangelical environs can also create links between a company’s brand and a “base” of Christian consumers. Joining Christian business owners or workers in non-profit, non-competitive associations (e.g., Fellowship of Christian Companies International) can do the same, encouraging sacred "fellowship" and the creation of social capital between members of the same business class or niche market.  

It can incorporate “Christianity” or “Christian”tenets in its social engagements, CSR, philanthropic endeavors, and political interests. Not every Christian company does this, but many do. It takes various forms – sponsoring “character-building” camps for kids, donating to Christian service or missionary agencies, giving money to local Christian charities, giving personal wealth to like-minded candidates. Publicly-traded companies, of course, generally hold back on using corporate profits or encouraging religious donations by executives, for obvious reasons. For that reason, a decent number (probably about half) of businesses with Christian owners or managers are privately-owned, thereby freeing them up to be freer with their money (or with their “stewardship”as they often call it). Trust me –political donations are down the list. For these folks, at least, there’s not much ROI in theocracy.

All of this should give the sense that what Dr. Carney observed did not happen by accident. If we are to take religion seriously in the marketplace, we need to think seriously about what folks are deciding to bring into the workplace, when and why they are deciding to do that, and how and why certain manifestations of religion appear there. This can be highly specific and custom-made, particular to a given store in a given area in a given state at a given point of time. It might even be limited to a given shift.

We should also recognize that, for as much as the appearance of religion in the marketplace is intentional, it is not always as well-thought out by our subjects as we might think or expect. Best-laid incentive-chasing does not explain it all, no matter what the Freakonomicists say. This does not mean that our subjects are not religiously self-reflective or collectively so. It certainly does not mean that they are dumb. To be sure, those running Dr. Carney’s CC might be behind the times in terms of tag-gun pricing and finger-counting bookkeeping. But many of CC’s counterparts are not Luddites, primarily because they have never been or can’t afford to be.  Many founded hi-tech companies or work for engineering firms. A few run or work for design firms and programming shops; others depend on government contracts and more than a few work for the DOD. As Darren Dochuk is currently researching, a lot of them founded or work for extractive companies– hardly a profession for the empty headed. Others created retail chains and work for large-scale corporations that depend on “just in time” coordination, top-shelf mathematical models,and multivariate problem-solving. All that, in my opinion, is more instructive and important to consider than the low-fi traditionalism observed at CC. Evangelicals have been often noted for their technological prowess in media production from the printed page to the Internet age. I wonder if that they’ve been even more technologically-inclined and savvy in corporate America, a place that evangelicals have been comfortable working in and through for much of the twentieth century and especially for the past fifty years.

And yet, to be sure, just because they can get a precision, laser-cut sprocket delivered to Toledo by Tuesday does not mean that they dotting every "i' and crossing every "t" when they pull or push religion into the marketplace. There are incongruities caused by religion's presence in the marketplace that fit oddly even within our received models of how it should work -- and sometimes quite oddly with how our subjects imagine a given religious practice should work. 

Take, for instance, Sunday closing. Sunday closing is incongruous with the very capitalism it's embedded within. Capitalism does not close on Sunday. The goods that are on CC’s shelves might have been made by Christians in another time zone, where it was actually Sunday there but Saturday here. The cargo ships and tractor trailers transporting these goods to the loading dock behind the store did not stop running on Sunday. As Dr. Carney reports, folks worked on Sunday putting those goods on the shelves because of the pressures and demands of their boss, who is certainly aware of the pushes and pulls of the system. The only point in the capitalist system that can be closed on Sunday at CC is the consumptive point– the doors letting customers in and the people behind the cash register checking them out. And all that is primarily because it is in retail. Can you imagine a Christian hotel closing on Sunday? A Christian electric company? Or worse yet, a Christian coffee company? 

Sunday closing is, therefore, an odd thing. But I think it's at those points of incongruity and inconsistency are where the richest analysis can and should happen, at the very points too many journalists, scholars, and many others like to leave uncomplicated, poke fun, or dismiss. It's at those points when religious sites like CC push us to consider the in-betweens of culture and capitalism in contemporary life, as well as push us to think hard about those who work every day in the midst of those in-betweens. 

Thanks again to Dr. Carney for telling us all about her time at CC and inviting us to think about it. And, in case you're dying to know, "CC" is a pseudonym for [intentionally left blank].

Adventures in Christian Retail: A Response -- Part I

Darren Grem

I want to thank Dr. Carney for the opportunity to respond to her “adventures in Christian retail.” I don’t intend to offer a peer review or a point-by-point response to each post. Rather, I’d like to reflect on a few questions raised by Dr. Carney’s time at CC.

There’s probably too much to deal with in one post (read: I had more thoughts than one post can contain). So, I’m dividing it up into a few posts. Expect another one soon.

So, are they really “Christian”?
If you do research on “Christian” business long enough, you’re guaranteed to field some version of that question. Often, it's the first one that folks ask, and I think it comes from an urge for normative evaluation of for-profit endeavors and, therefore, of capitalism itself. For whatever reason, people want to know if you can do capitalism in a “Christian” fashion, by which they usually mean “morally,” “ethically” or “differently from That Bad Company I Hate.” Among Christians, especially evangelicals, the question usually begs for answers about whether a company is "doing more" than acting within the boundaries of the law. They usually want to know if a given company is also willfully encouraging what they deem to be “Christian” forms of activity, whether in-house or in its broader socio-economic engagements. It’s most analogous, I suppose, to questions about the “greenness” of a company, with all the attendant assumptions and complications that question entails. And, given the egregious abuses witnessed on Wall Street and elsewhere in corporate America in the past few years, it’s an understandable one to ask.

Others, of course, ask about a business’s Christianness because they are suspicious of any religious claim about business. Or, perhaps they relish hypocrisy. Either way, they want to know what really makes a Christian business tick, what really goes on behind the scenes, and who or what is really responsible for making the entire enterprise -- of Christianity, of capitalism, of "Christian" capitalism -- a fraud at best and a cover for abuse at worst.

If you wanted, I suppose you could take away either impression about CC, as per Dr. Carney’s dispatches. The comments that accompanied some of her posts – defending “Christian” businesses or deriding them – show that you can.

I certainly have my own opinions about the “Christianness” of various companies. But asking if a company is actually a "Christian" business usually ends up obscuring more than it reveals. Let’s be honest – as with anything else, where you start your line of inquiry will shape the questions you will ask and the answers you will probably get. Asking about a company's "Christianness" will also -- more than likely -- lead you back to yourself and your own definition of what "Christianness" entails. That's fine, I suppose, in certain contexts. But I'm not sure it will tell us much about CC or any other form of "Christian" enterprise.

That’s why I’d rather not do religious diagnostics here; neither do I want or intend to knock Dr. Carney’s own diagnostics of CC's "Christianness." So there's no misunderstanding, let me be crystal clear. I am not advocating that we ditch our moral, ethical, or religious compasses when thinking about religion and capitalism (and, of course, it’s debatable whether that’s even possible). Neither am I talking about situations where, say, a law has been broken. In Dr. Carney’s case, she claims that CC broke the law and claims to have solid, non-circumstantial, non-anecdotal evidence to prove it in court. Hence, she is urging investigation by OSHA and considering litigation. That is an entirely different matter, and, if she or anyone else wants to add religious justifications or language behind their reasoning for legal action, then they have every right to do so. I am only talking about how we proceed if we’re trying to make sense of the religious, historical, and economic dynamics behind the world of Christian business.

So, how can we proceed? Thankfully, Dr. Carney’s experience shows us a way.

Whatever you may think about the pros and cons of her “undercover” methodology, her discussions with folks at CC – especially the men and women working the aisles and running the registers – point to the fact that our interest in a company’s “Christian” identity is a shared one. The employees at CC evaluated its Christian claims for themselves and came away with opinions that do not fit easily into an either/or dichotomy. Their emotional state, personal experiences, religious upbringing, sex, race, economic security, historical context – all of these factors went into how they addressed, for themselves and others, how “Christian” the workplace was and is, how “Christian” their boss was and is, or how “Christian” their work was and is.

This is all to say that places like CC are very interesting religious sites indeed. They are places where the complicated relationship between identity, community, religion, class, gender, race, and capitalism is in high relief. Of course, they are not the only places where this relationship is available for observation and study in contemporary America. But they are a “field” of a sort. Or, as another historian of all this once told me, they are “archives” ripe for the picking.

So, for starters, let's try to proceed with an analysis of such sites that is less about us and our own religious or ethical or conceptual matrix. Rather, it is about trying to understand, contextualize, and convey theirs.

Up next: Why “Christian” at all?

ASA Religion Redux: Part 1

Today's post is a conversation between Mike Altman and me (Kelly) about the place of religion at the American Studies Association meeting last week in Baltimore, Maryland. We reflect on the types of panels at ASA on religion as well as the lingering questions from these panels including issues like embodiment, race, science, and the secular. I'll post part two tomorrow.

What does American Studies reveal to us about religion in America?

Kelly Baker (KB): As a long time ASA attendee, I am still struck by the sheer interdisciplinarity of panels: literature, material culture, religious studies, history, media studies, critical race and gender theory, sociology, legal studies, and psychology. This means that discussions of religion in America occurs across a variety of disciplines, so that a term like “fundamentalism” gets analyzed and deployed differently depending on whether a scholar studying literature, history or someone like me trained in religious studies uses it. This variety leads to discussions that I might not be having at AAR.

I attended panels ranging from the production of conservative religious documentaries to discussions of religion and American nationalism to religious visual and material cultures to religion and consumer products to re-evaluation historiographies of race and religion to negotiations and case studies of terms like global religion. What was most striking was the attention to science, embodiment, race, and the “secular,” which emerged again and again in each panel. Sandra Garner (Miami University, Ohio), Rita Trimble (Ohio State University), and John-Charles Duffy (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) showcased how participation in scientific and social scientific discourse allowed conservative Mormon documentarians to present data about population stagnation, previous “lost” peoples in the Americas, and uplifting of traditional families. Participating in secularizing language became a way to legitimate one’s religious position, a mode of verification. Science authenticated religion, which is not often how this relationship is described.

Mike Altman (MA): So, I’ll pick up on a couple of the themes you mentioned because they jumped out to me too. First, the body. All weekend we were drawn back to bodies and while the question "where's the body in your project?" can seem like a theoretical gotcha (or a form of academic snarkenfreuden), nonetheless, bodies were central to much of the research presented on American religions. Our own Emily Clark (Florida State) offered an excellent paper on Moorish Science Temple teas and tonics meant to purify the body, a purity that paralleled the need for racial and religious purity. Jordan Wade (University of Kansas), who appeared on a panel with me focused around “global religions” in America and took us into the world of Bikram Yoga with her ethnography of a yoga center in Lawrence, Kansas. In Wade's telling, yoga emerges as a form of bodily discipline, rather than spa relaxation technique, tied up in a transnational network that spans Europe, India, and America.

All of the focus on the body in some papers prompted me to wonder where the body was in other papers. When we discuss Moorish Science or yoga it seems that we notice the body but in Friday's panel "Getting the Nation Right with God: American Politics in the Conservative Christian Imagination" I realized that we don't tend to think about Christian Right bodies--at least not in the contemporary discourse scholars and journalists are producing. We especially don't tend to think of politician’s bodies--well, unless you pick cover photos at Newsweek. The presentations on this panel from Sarah Posner, Eoin Cannon, and Karen Seat were all very well done but, for me, they highlighted an overarching problem with the way the Christian Right is imagined both in the media and by scholars. It's always about ideas. The GOP candidates are constantly trying to disembody themselves and represent themselves as pure ideology. How can we force them back into bodies? How can we take Christian Right ideas about the body and think through Christian Right bodies? Marie Griffith has offered us some glimpses of Protestant bodies but we need more on contemporary political religions.

KB: Mike, yes! I couldn’t agree more. Ideas become the fundamental evidence of religiosity for some groups, and bodies become the evidence in others. This division of ideas and bodies proves superficial and unhelpful (at least I think so) to our scholarship. Critical analysis of both race and gender necessarily lends itself to discussions of embodiment, so discussions of race and religion like Ed’s panel at 8 am on Thursday interrogate and engage embodiness, the bodily, and practice as well as the ideological and theological ramifications. Much like Emily and Jordan engaged both in their presentations to make clearly how the bodily impacts the more ephemeral renderings of spirit and purity.What becomes telling is where embodiness appears as a legitimate method of describing, documenting, or analyzing religious peoples, movements, and ideas and where embodiment is somehow not considered.

What I liked about Jason Bivins’ (North Carolina Sate) response to the Getting Right with God panel was his attempt to bring up embodiment as a legitimate method to interrogate the Christian Right and other politicitizations of religion. Why don’t we problematize, or heck, even engage, the bodies attached to these ideologies? I think it deeply matters that white male bodies are ignored in favor of their ideas and their rhetoric. They become soley progenitors of words, somehow absent from the fleshy reality that plagues the rest of us (even though there is attention, not analysis, of physical appearances). Embodiment matters, and I want to know why there is still hesitance to press bodily analysis on certain, dominant religious groups. Griffith does lead the way on this, and I think Martha Finch’s work, gets us closer to this kind of analysis. Why aren’t we analyzing white Christian bodies? Is it an assumption of invisibility and dominance? Or is there something more subtle and possibly insidious going on here?

I asked a variation of this question at quite a few panels to get at the question of the invisibility of whiteness as a racial classification. Didn’t you even call it my “whiteness question?” Judith Weisenfeld (Princeton University) pointed out the need for more analysis of assumptions of whiteness in her response to the conservative documentaries panel. By the end of the weekend, I felt a bit like a broken record. We need to think more about race as more than marked by difference but also unmarked categories too.

Continued here.

CFP: Religion and American Culture Caucus (ASA) Best Paper Prize

Call for Papers

The Religion and American Culture Caucus of the American Studies Association is pleased to announce its 8th annual best paper prize competition. Any paper presented at the 2011 ASA meeting in Baltimore, Maryland is eligible for consideration. The prize will be awarded to the paper that makes the most significant and creative contribution to the study of religion (broadly construed) and American culture.

For consideration, please submit your paper to Kelly Baker at kbaker27 (at) utk (dot) edu by Friday, October 7.

The winner will be selected by a national jury of scholars in the field, and announced at the Caucus business meeting at the ASA.

Wednesday Round-Up: Must Read Edition

Kelly Baker

While Paul is away, the blog will go on (and on) with a new series on religion and masculinity (see Charity's first post here) and the long overdue return of the Gender and the American Religious Historian series. We have to keep all you readers busy, so y'all breathe a deep sigh of relief when Paul returns. Anyone, contributor or guest poster, who would like to submit posts to either the masculinity or the gender series, please send it along to kellyjbaker (at) gmail (dot) com. The more the merrier!

Happy Wednesday everybody! Here are some must-reads for the middle of the week.

First, the Center for the Study of Religion & American culture posted the proceedings from the second biennial conference. The proceedings from the 2009 meeting are also available. RiAH bloggers provided our thoughts on the conference (Elesha's here and here, Janine's here, Paul's here and mine), and now, the excellent papers are available to all of you who missed the lively conference.

Second, check out our own John Fea's "Can the Study of History Heal the Culture Wars?" at Patheos. Here's a snippet:
...I could not help but wonder if the thing that ails us most is not our failure to engage in activism, but our failure to understand and empathize with those with whom we might disagree. Perhaps our failure to bringing reconciliation and healing to our divided culture is, at its core, a failure of liberal learning, particularly as it relates to the study of history. Christians and secularists can team up in social justice projects, and Barack Obama can give stirring speeches about ending the Red State-Blue State divide, but until the American people develop the discipline of listening to one another, we will remain stalled in our attempts at reconciliation.

Third, Craig Martin interviews Manuel A. Vásquez about his More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford 2010), which I will be reviewing a bit later for the blog. Martin describes Vásquez's project in these terms:

More than Belief is very much a “theory” book, as it provides a comprehensive introduction to modern and postmodern theories (feminist, anthropological, sociological, philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific, etc.) relevant to the study of that thing we call “religion.” Along the way Vásquez criticizes each theory considered, selects the best elements of each that he finds worth saving, and synthesizes the useful remainders into his own general theory of religion. What was astonishing to me about the book was the scope: Vásquez moves from the mind/body problem in Plato and Descartes to the rejection of dualism by Spinoza and Nietzsche, to the origins of phenomenology in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, to social constructionism in Foucault and Butler, to Deleuze and Haraway, to cognitive science of religion, and so forth (this list includes highlights from only the first half of the book—I wasn’t joking when I said “comprehensive”!). Vásquez ends up arriving at a naturalist but non-reductive materialist theory that emphasizes embodiment, practice, and global social networks.

And here's Vásquez on the role of theory in the study of religion:
Today, I am far more skeptical that theory can solve all social problems. Although some of my Jesuit teachers were killed by the military during the Salvadoran civil war precisely because of their ideas, I am keenly aware that there is always a painful gap between theory and practice (even when theorizing is a form of practice). Moreover, I do not see the theorist as some sort of Sartrean emancipatory hero, always choosing freedom over bad faith. As Bourdieu tells us, being an authoritative theorist requires a habitus, a habitus that is formed by one’s privileged trajectory in the fields of knowledge production. Still, I do theory as a critical engagement with particular problems or impasses. I agree with Foucault that theory should be driven by a “limit-attitude,” a situated “permanent critique of ourselves.” It should grow out of “our impatience for liberty.” As such, theory should be a passionate endeavor “oriented toward the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary,’ that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.” This normative stance, which implies that theory should be useful not just in academia, but, to the extent possible, to our being-in-the-world, is a corollary of a materialist epistemology that stresses immanent becoming.

For more the rest of Martin and Vásquez's conversation, parts one and two are available.