The commodification of religion and the challenges for Theology: reflections from the Irish experience

Abstract

The symposium that gave rise to these papers set out to assess the core thesis of Vincent Miller's recent book, Consuming Religion. As Miller's text is written from the perspective of the USA, our task was to consider whether or not his analysis spoke to the European context. The issues we were asked to explore included whether or not Europe could be considered to be as consumer-driven as North America; the extent to which religion is undergoing commodification in the European context; and whether or not the kind of responses to consumerism Miller recommends for the Christian community would, in our view, be valuable and effective in the European context.