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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Megachurch-Industrial Complex: Searching for Transcendence in the Culture Industry

The Megachurch-Industrial Complex: Searching for Transcendence in the Culture Industry

Kidwell, Josiah

Hardcover

Series: The Frankfurt School in New Times

General Racism & Ethnic StudiesGeneral Sociology

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1666947156
ISBN13: 9781666947151
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Pages: 160
Weight: 1.00
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

A Las Vegas megachurch transforms faith into spectacle to attract the unchurched, even as its iconoclastic approach strains longstanding religious and cultural traditions.

Drawing on critical theory, media studies, and the sociology of religion, Josiah Kidwell situates the church's evolution within broader patterns of rationalization in civil society and the spectacle-driven urban landscape of Las Vegas. Using extensive fieldwork, he chronicles the church's shift into an entertainment-oriented religious franchise and unpacks the cultural trade-offs that accompany this change. Kidwell explores how the leadership's organizational approach and use of new media and popular culture reshape place attachment, recast communal life, and introduce the one-dimensional logic of the culture industry. Throughout, Kidwell resists deterministic accounts, highlighting how members interpret, negotiate, and sometimes push back against these changes while also revealing the subtle erosions they produce in social life. Ultimately, this book offers a sharp, multilayered portrait of religion's adaptation to an entertainment-saturated society-and will be of interest to scholars of religion, media studies, cultural sociology, and anyone curious about the future of communal life in an age of spectacle.

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