Economic Interpretation Beyond Metaphor
by Daniel Vaca
Whatever you think about Roger Finke's "supply-side" approach to historical interpretation—as presented in this volume or in The Churching of America (2005), written with Rodney Stark—we all can agree with at least one of its guiding principles: metaphors are wonderful things. If I had to describe how it felt to be in the room in the fall of 2023, when contributors to this series of essays gathered to discuss this volume with an audience that included dozens of colleagues from multiple scholarly generations, I would reach for a metaphor. It felt like nothing less than a party. Here, I am using a metaphor to convey a feeling, stretching the limits of language as well as my own ability to translate perception. Through metaphors, we capture sensations or insights that we otherwise struggle to share.
It is hard not to think about metaphors when reading Finke's take on historical interpretation. He presents religious life in the United States as a kind of consumer market, religious groups function like entrepreneurial organizations, and churchgoers are consumers in a free-market of religion. In this essay, Finke's argument is that the federal disestablishment of religion created a market that allowed religious groups to innovate and supply diverse religious forms. That market also generated competition, which allowed groups to respond to what he describes as "market openings." Those responses included efforts to supply immigrants and migrants with churches as well as attempts to fill openings created when existing groups "secularized" and accepted features of "dominant culture"—like drinking and dancing. In short: American religious freedom made the religion market possible—and in that market, people ultimately get what they want and need because the market ultimately supplies it.
But even if metaphors enhance our ability to communicate, their power is limited. Above all, they often obscure the many different ways that people experience or interpret common phenomena or events. Had you attended our panel, for instance, you might have described it as a party. But it took place at 9am, in Texas, around Thanksgiving, and each of those facts might have dampened some attendees' festal feelings. Or, to use Finke's examples: if a white, conservative Christian congregation starts allowing dancing after previously prohibiting it, some religious groups might see that as a market opening to which they can respond. But most of those new competitors would likely comprise people with white and conservative subjectivities. By making supply and demand stand in for processes that take shape in response to complex social incentives, opportunities, and constraints, Finke's metaphor dramatically flattens social life. Worse, it shields forms of social difference from view, foreclosing interpretations that help us recognize and account for inequities.
If we find that particular methods of interpretation obscure more than they reveal, why discuss them? A colleague asked this question during our session, directing it partly toward me. Beyond the fact of its presence in this volume, I see at least two reasons for engaging the supply-side interpretation of American religious history. First, the supply-side and free-market metaphors became and remain prominent methods of discussing religious life. While most prominent in colloquial conversations, these metaphors also appear commonly in journalistic and academic narratives. Sometimes, this is appropriate. How, for example, should we narrate the proliferation of groups over the last decade that have claimed legal recognition as "churches" centered on the consumption of cannabis? One narrative could focus on the effort to "supply" the "market openings" created by religious freedom restoration acts and cannabis legalization in many states. Yet even this seemingly ideal application reveals the metaphor's limited ability to reveal inequities. It obscures, for instance, how much easier it has been for white Americans not only to consume cannabis but also to take advantage of legal loopholes without experiencing the legal penalties and incarceration that people of color commonly have faced. Not everyone is equally free to supply apparent market openings.
A second reason for engaging the supply-side interpretation of American religious history focuses on what it has inspired. I often remind my students that our scholarly work always builds in some way on the work of those who came before us, which means that we should focus far more on acknowledging what others help us see than on chronicling what they seemingly failed to see. And I believe that Finke's use of economic metaphors helped inspire scholars of religion to think with and beyond his metaphor. Speaking at least for myself, the metaphorical study of religious economies helped inspire a turn toward analyses focused not only on literal economic activity but also on issues that economic metaphors invoked, such as choice, freedom, and consumption. With this in mind, I turn toward highlighting some scholarship that has built on Finke's narratives in ways that have enriched the study of American religious history as well as the study of religious and economic life.
Thinking against the grain of the market metaphor and its emphasis on voluntary choice, a large contingent of scholars have helped us see how formations of power shape the way that people have perceived and practiced their supposed choices. This is one of the lessons of virtually any work from the past decade on religious freedom or life in neoliberal society, but historians such as Finbarr Curtis, John Modern, Dana Logan, Sarah Barringer Gordon and others have shown us how supposedly free markets shape social norms, cultivate desire, and produce the sensation of freedom amid disciplined conformity. These lessons should frame our understanding not just of work like Finke's but also of classic narratives like Nathan Hatch's foundational The Democratization of American Christianity, which is basically a supply-side story.
A second way that scholars have built on Finke's free market metaphor is by examining literal economic markets. This work has revealed how "market openings" do not simply appear in the absence of competing religions; instead, apparent market openings and market opportunities are produced within particular infrastructures that privilege some subjectivities over others. I explored this phenomenon in my book Evangelicals Incorporated, which showed how commercial strategies and structures—from the selection of bookstore locations to the use of niche market segmentation—cultivated key features of American evangelicalism, including its white conservatism. Many other scholars have contributed to this work around infrastructure and capitalism and inspired my own—including Kathryn Lofton, George Gonzalez, Kati Curts, Chad Seales, and others.
A third and final area to highlight involves the free-market metaphor's implication that markets naturally produce equilibrium through a process that is morally neutral or even good. The implication is that it is good because it gives people what they want. But as scholars like Janine Giordano Drake, Lucia Hulsether, and Laura McTighe have shown in recent and forthcoming books, racial capitalism and markets fundamentally limit freedom and reproduce social disparities by obscuring harms and enfolding efforts to escape harm. This work presses hard against the notion of market neutrality and even beyond the critique of capitalism; it helps us imagine a world beyond supposedly good intentions. I draw inspiration from these scholars in my current work, which explores the relationship between religion and inequity, focusing especially on taxation as a realm of response. I see it as a future for our field. But I also see that future of economic interpretation beyond metaphor as one that the supply-side interpretation helped make possible.
Daniel Vaca is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University. His research and teaching explore histories of religion and culture in North America, focusing especially on relationships between religious and economic activity in the United States. His first book, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Harvard, 2019), traces the history of the evangelical book industry and its audience since the end of the nineteenth century, exploring how evangelical theological preoccupations, racial divisions, cultural identities, and institutional alliances have taken shape through commercial strategy and corporate initiative.