How do religious markets emerge?

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Thomas Kern; Dr. Insa Pruisken
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 409780244

This study examines the emergence of religious markets in the USA on the case of Protestant congregations in the metropolitan areas of Houston and Minneapolis/St. Paul by using insights from the sociologies of economy, religion, and organizations. Our main assumption is that the prevailing institutional "logic of denominationalism" in the Protestant field is increasingly superimposed by a new institutional "logic of the market". In this process, firstly, religious competition shifts from the organizational level of denominations to the level of congregations as main competitors in the Protestant field (competitive orientation). Secondly, believers are increasingly perceived as religious "consumers" with congregations tailoring their "salvation goods" according to the consumers' demands (consumer orientation). Consequently, the project aims at answering two questions: (i) What are the institutional conditions for the institutionalization of the market logic? (ii) What consequences result from the institutionalization of markets for religious participation? Due to a travel ban that prohibited travellig to the USA for about 20 months during the COVID-19 pandemic, substantial objectives of this project could not be realized. Taking up the main assumption of the original project application, we extended the scope of our research interest to the relationship between religious market emergence and participation on digital platforms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the digitalization of the Protestant field in the USA has considerably accelerated. We study (iii) the extent to which activities on digital platforms by Protestant congregations from the metropolitan areas Houston and Minneapolis/St. Paul are oriented towards the "logic of the market", (iv) the degree to which social and technical conditions explain the forms and degrees of religious participation, and (v) how digitalization affects local relationships between congregations and their attendees in the metropolitan areas of our study. To answer these questions, we combine different kinds of data: 1) qualitative interviews and 2) network data (surveys) in six congregations from each Houston and Minneapolis/St. Paul as well as 3) twitter data to reconstruct the digital relations of about 200 congregations in both metropolitan areas. With methods from computational social sciences, social network analysis as well as qualititave comparative analysis it becomes possible to relate the local market data with data from the digital sphere on the platform Twitter.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants