Selling the Sacred explores the religio-cultural and media implications of a two-sided phenomenon: marketing religion as a product and marketing products as religion. What do various forms of religion/marketing collaboration look like in the twenty-first century, and what does this tell us about American culture and society?

3000. That’s the number of marketing messages the average American confronts on a daily basis from TV commercials to podcast ads to YouTube pre-roll ads. Over the last decade, advertising has become more devious, more digital, and more deceptive, with an increasing number of ads designed to appear to the untrained eye to be editorial content. It’s easy to see why. As we have become smarter at avoiding ads, advertisers have become smarter about disguising them.

Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know exposes how our shopping, political, and even dating preferences are unwittingly formed by brand images and the mythologies embedded in them. It helps us combat the effects of manipulative advertising and enables the reader to understand how marketing industries work in the digital age. Most importantly, it awakens us to advertising’s subtle and not-so-subtle impact on our lives–both as individuals and as a global society.

Compassion, Inc.: How Corporate America Blurs the Line Between What We Buy, Who We Are and Those We Help

Pink ribbons, red dresses, and greenwashing—American corporations are scrambling to tug at consumer heartstrings through cause-related marketing, corporate social responsibility, and ethical branding, tactics that can increase sales by as much as 74%. Harmless? The answer is a resounding “No!” In Compassion, Inc. I outline how cause-related marketing desensitizes the public by putting a pleasant face on complex problems. We look at the unseen ways in which large sums of consumer dollars go into corporate coffers rather than helping the less fortunate. I end by pointing out companies that truly do make the world a better place, and those that just pretend to.

Brands of Faith is the first book to take a hard look at why religion is, and needs to be, aggressively marketed. In a category that used to be guaranteed an audience – if your mom said you were going to church, you were going to church – now there is a competitive arena filled with both other faiths and a myriad of more entertaining, more convenient leisure time activities. In light of this competition, faiths have become brands and religions are products, sold using the same tools secular marketers do.

Blending the sacred with the secular, however, has consequences – both for religion itself and for the culture more broadly. We have to question whether religion will survive if it becomes so of the market that it loses its unique selling proposition – the very ability to raise us above the commercial culture.

Religion and Reality TV: Faith in Late Capitalism argues that the reality genre offers answers to many of life’s urgent questions: Why am I important? What gives my life meaning? How do I present my best self to the world? The book’s fourteen essays explore why religious themes proliferate in reality TV, audiences’ fascination with “lived religion,” and the economics that make religion and reality TV a successful pairing.

Religion and Reality TV provides a framework for understanding the intersection of celebrity, media attention, beliefs, and values.

Media Diversity: Economics, Ownership, and the FCC provides a detailed analysis of the regulation of diversity and its impact on the structure and practices within the broadcast television industry. As deregulation has changed the media landscape, this book puts the changing structure of the industry into perspective through the use of an insider’s point of view to examine how policy and programming get made.