Review of Selling God by R Laurence Moore
... In his book Selling God, American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture, author R. Laurence Moore explores this phenomenon. R. Laurence Moore starts out by writing about the religion in the days of revivals. ... Theaters stopped selling alcohol and the third tier was cleansed of its traffic in sex and it was renamed “the family circle. ... The theater was making money by selling religion, so other people could make money off of selling religion. This opened up a new door of selling religion beyond the theater. ... It was an essential part of a good life, designed by God. ... A more widely recognized religious business venture that Moore wrote about was the Young Men’s Christian Association, or the YMCA. ... One of the books that R. Laurence Moore writes about is the book Protestant Catholic Jew, An Essay in American Religious Sociology by Will Herberg. Moore calls Herberg’s book the bleakest assessment of the decade American religious landscape. ... Herberg and Moore both analyze the way religion has developed in the United States. ... The book Selling God deals with religion in the milieu of society. Society is what causes the people Moore wrote about in this book to be in mortal danger, but at the same time, without society, this book could not be written. Moore spent a lot of time writing about how people interacted with each other while still maintaining a chaste lifestyle. ... Moore also touched on technology. ... According to Moore, religion hasn’t completely transformed into a technological institution. ... This way, people can listen to the word of God all week long, instead of just at church services on Sunday mornings. ... However, if it were written just a few years later, I would be interested to hear what Moore had to say about religion on the World Wide Web. ... There are some rituals that Moore writes about. ... Not everyone saw revivals as a way of worshipping God. ... God was the sacred, and the revivals were worshipping God. I really did not like the book Selling God at all. ... It seems like Moore is more concerned with providing the readers with a complete history of religion and how it developed. ... Maybe the book would have been more convincing if Moore would have narrowed the topic down a little bit.