Religious Branding and the Quest to Meet Consumer Needs: Joel Osteen’s ‘Message of Hope’

Explanations of religious change in terms of a religious market metaphor often employ one of two approaches: (1) the supply-side approach, which stresses both the role of restrictions and deregulations in the religious marketplace and the innovative contributions of religious suppliers as perpetrators of religious change, or (2) the demand-side approach, which attributes religious transformations to modified consumer needs and perceptions as well as to broader developments in the cultural sphere that account for shifting consumer desires and sensitivities.18 In this essay, I argue for a combined approach that sets both sides—production and consumption—in relation to each other. Presuming contemporary consumer culture to be broadly encompassing and inescapable, thoroughly permeating everyday practices, I also presume that it frames and shapes processes of production and consumption. Successfully marketed religious products are the result neither of a genuine contribution ex nihilo on the side of religious suppliers nor of passive social actors uniformly consuming these products.19 Producer and consumer inhabit a social and material world that enables and simultaneously restricts, a world that structures and simultaneously is structured by knowledge regimes and practices. A case study of Joel Osteen as a religious brand and his “message of hope”—the product on offer—will show how both production and consumption are tied to broader cultural patterns and discourses that structure the social world and the ways that actors on both supply and demand sides engage that world.