The cost of selling spirituality

A $3.7 trillion industry ‘market’ for spiritual consciousness and wellness says something about today. Daniel Kim explores what’s driving this commodification and its market failure.

Daniel Kim

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

A white neon sign against a brick wall reads: 'This is the sign you have been looking for.

Sign o' the times.

Austin Chan via Unsplash.

Apparently, Scorpio women from Gen Z are the most passionate about astrology, while Taurus Gen X men are the most skeptical. At least, that’s according to a delightfully insightful consumer report put together by the Peoplestrology website after surveying 2,800 people. I’m a Taurus 1995 MillZennial man so I’m not sure where that puts me. I’m also a trainee Anglican vicar which may contribute more to my demographic features, but that’s beside the point.

We are increasingly fascinated by spirituality and religious practices. We are at a point where we can no longer assume that ticking “No Religion” on a survey means you’re an atheist or that you don’t believe in a supernatural realm or a God. In fact, a report by Theos found that only 51% of people in the UK who claimed ‘No religion’ also claimed that ‘they don’t believe in God’. That’s unreal. Another unbelievable insight from the 2022 UK religious data was the ‘Shamanism’ is now the UK’s fastest growing religious movement. Meanwhile, #WitchTok had 18 billion views in 2021, even hitting the mainstream when it got its own BBC article last year. For the uninitiated, these are TikToks that introduce people to witchcraft practices. A quick wander around the Waterstones ‘What We Recommend’ tables is enough to see the huge push to retrieve ‘ancient traditions’ that help people navigate the spiritual wilderness of modern life. Marcus Aurelius’ Stoicism, and the Confucian classics, are making their comeback. It goes beyond self-help.

I used to work in a Soho advertising agency. I remember sitting on a teal coloured mid-century sofa with colleagues discussing star signs and pagan mythology over a coffee break. As the Christian, I was the one feeling like the cynical sceptic. That’s a strange experience and feels like cultural whiplash. Flashback ten years and secondary school in the mid-noughties and early-tens was brutal as a Christian. I watched Richard Dawkins' polemic God Delusion documentary during my religious education classes and my fellow classmates laid into Christianity like it was the most vile and stupid thing in the world. Anyone who believed in a supernatural reality was equally vile and stupid. Today, the New Atheist movement seems like a strange late-twentieth century aberration that has very much given way to a re-spiritualising world. In some cruel corners of Reddit, the New Atheist is even a subject of ridicule.

It’s possible to discern two impulses going on in this re-spiritualisation. On one side of the heart, there are those who are reaching for the spiritual but not the religious - wanting connection with something bigger than themselves to provide meaning and an experience of transcendence. On the other hand, there are those who lean more religious but not spiritual - we want something to provide structure and order to our lives. There’s less of a concern about the spiritual experience but a desire to reign in the chaotic life - I used to have agnostic friends who would pop into a Catholic Mass because they liked the stability of the ritual. These are two ends of a continuum and invariably we are all somewhere in the middle. Both impulses are profoundly important ingredients to a life that is full of meaning.

This, in my opinion, is an exciting and positive move in our society. It turns out that humans really can’t live on ‘bread’ alone - not least live on careers, brunches, or think-piece articles - and we certainly can’t live on ‘content’ alone. There is a spiritual vacuum, and we’re reaching for the oxygen.

But in all of this, there’s a serious concern. Because wherever there’s demand, there is profit to be made - and right now, there is ample spiritual demand.

The ‘market’ for spiritual consciousness and wellness will be a $3.7 trillion industry.

When reflecting on astrology’s role in contemporary society, the Peoplestrology report deems it the ‘perfect solution for our hyper-individualised culture’ and the report ends with an ominous recognition that the ‘market’ for spiritual consciousness and wellness will be a $3.7 trillion industry. The valuation of the ‘spirituality marketplace’ and the emphasis on ‘hyper-individualism’ has me seriously worried. It opens the door to the commodification of religio-spiritual practices and extracting capital value from people’s genuine spiritual search. It can become a product that we use rather than a profound source of ultimate meaning. And it’s already happening.

Sacred Design Labs, for example, is a consultancy that looks to ‘translate ancient wisdom and practices to help organizations develop products, programs, and experiences that uplift social and spiritual lives.’ Their vision is genuinely very positive - it’s to make the workplace a less sterile and meaningless place. Don’t we all want that? However, they are also perfect examples of the trend in capitalising on this burgeoning market. To illustrate the point, one New York Times article recounts where the consultancy was hired to pull together hundreds of religious practices and categorise them by emotional states in order to give them possible uses in different corporate contexts. This exercise made the client ‘realize how many useful tools existed inside something as old-fashioned as his childhood church’. I’m glad that religious practices are getting a hearing in mainstream corporate contexts, but it saddens me to hear words like ‘useful’ being used to describe them. That’s only a hop and a skip away from ‘efficient’ or ‘profitable’.

The inconvenient truth is that this commodification of spirituality is not just something corporations can be guilty of. We as late-modern individuals can be guilty of stripping religious practices out of their religious context and incorporating them into our self-care programmes. Tara Isabella Burton, author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, calls this the ‘bespoke-ification of religion’. As Burton notes - ’We risk seeing spirituality as something we can consume, something for us, something for our brand’. And when we turn spirituality into a product, we turn it into something trivial.

The irony is that this is profoundly counter-productive. Haven’t we agreed that hyper-individualism, and the commodification of everything, were precisely the things that led us to the spiritual vacuum we are now living in? If there was anything that Karl Marx, Aldous Huxley, and Billy Graham could agree on, it’s at least that. Are we doomed to repeat the radically individualistic cycle of dismantling the very thing that we are desperately grasping after - deep connection with our community, with our work, with our bodies, with our universe, and perhaps, just maybe, with our God? Satisfying our spiritual hunger is about more than just increasing our efficiency and decreasing our blood pressure. It’s about answering some of the most important questions any human individual can ask. Who am I? What am I made for? Is there a God or a spiritual dimension to the universe? Am I free or fated? What happens after I die? All these questions require us to look beyond ourselves, and to stare into the wild edges of human experience.

If we are going to embark on a journey of spiritual discovery, whether it’s through astrology, pagan mythology, silent retreats, Tibetan Buddhism, or dare I say, Christianity, we can’t let our spiritual hunger be commodified for profit. Neither can we let it shrink back to the hyper-individualism that will keep us locked away in a prison called “self”. Our spiritual wellness is too important for that; it is worth more, infinitely more, that $3.7 trillion or a subscription service advertised to you on Instagram.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Weirdness

Zombies

24 October 2024

5 min read

Zombies: a philosopher's guide to the purpose-driven undead

Don’t dismiss zombiecore as lowbrow.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A regency woman dabs her mouth with a bloody hankerchief.

Lilly James in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s fascination for all things monsterous. In the second of a two-part series, he asks what and where zombies remind us of, and why they caught the eyes of C.S. Lewis and Salvador Dali

On how Frankenstein’s monster came to life nobody knows for sure, but he is more urbane than zombies tend to be. Nor do Jewish golems and Frosty the Snowman count as zombiecore. The latter sings too much, and both are wrongly formulated. Frosty comes from snow, obviously, and the golems—from mere loam, not what the Renaissance playwrights call “gilded loam,” that is, already pre-assembled bodies, which is a zombie requirement. Tolkien’s orcs function likewise as golem-esque monsters, cast from miry clay and then enlivened by the grim magic of Mordor. We do not, for instance, discover scenes with orc children.

And neither is Pinocchio a zombie, nor Pris from Blade Runner, but dolls, automatons, and C3POs border upon the land of zombies insofar as they all carry a non-human tint. Zombies, however, carry something else as well, a history of personhood, and so in their present form appear as macabre parodies of the human condition writ large. They are gruesome undead doppelgangers, reminding us of who we are not and perhaps—too—of where we are not. Hell is a place prepared for the Devil and his angels, Christ tells us in the book of Matthew. And maybe, subsequently, for zombies.

Kolchak, in an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker aptly titled “The Zombie,” correctly discerns the grim scenario at hand: “He, sir, is from Hell itself!”

C.S. Lewis pursues a similar line of thinking in The Problem of Pain: “You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all. To enter Heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter Hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into Hell is not a man: it is ‘remains.’” Lewis makes an intriguing point, which has as its crescendo the now-famous line about the doors of Hell: “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside by zombies.” I added that last part about zombies.

I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration.

Not everyone believes in Hell, of course, yet most concede that some people behave worse than others, which also helps our cause. Indeed, part of zombiecore’s wisdom is to show that bad people often produce more horror than the zombies themselves. Such is the character of Legendre Murder, a case in point from the film White Zombie. Not fortunate in name, Mr. Murder runs a dark satanic mill populated by hordes of zombie workers, which is the film’s heavy-handed critique of sociopathic industrialization. The truth to be gleaned, here, is that zombies did not invent the multinational corporation; rather, they fell prey to it.

We might think, too, of Herman Melville’s dehumanized characters from Bartleby the Scrivener: Nippers, Turkey, Ginger Nut, and the other functionaries whose nicknames themselves indicate the functions. From an economic standpoint, their value becomes a matter of utility, not essence, which is Melville’s reproach of the despairingly corporate drive to objectify personhood—of which zombies are an example beyond the pale. They might as well be fleshy mannequins, in fact, and as such provide the perfect foil for the human being properly conceived.

Here, then, is why we do not blame zombies for eating brains, nor do we hold them accountable for wearing white pants after Labor Day, as some inevitably do. They cannot help it—in ethics and in fashion. Perhaps especially in fashion. The best we can hope for in the realm of zombie couture is Solomon Grundy, the quasi-zombie supervillain who holds up his frayed pants with a frayed rope, a fashion victory to be sure, however small it might be, though “zombie fashion” is a misnomer in the final analysis. They wear clothes, but not for the same reasons we do.

The point holds true for Salvador Dali’s zombies as well, most of whom find themselves in nice dresses. I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration. Not so. Exhibit A: the avant-garde Dali, darling of the highbrow, or at least still of the middlebrow, now that his paintings appear on t-shirts and coffee mugs. Burning giraffe. Mirage. Woman with Head of Roses. All zombies, too ramshackle and emaciated to live, never mind the missing head on the last one, and yet there they are posed for the leering eye, not unlike those heroin-chic supermodels from Vogue magazine in the late 1990s. Necrophilia never looked so stylish.

The zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity...

But never let it be said that zombies are lazy. They are tired, to be sure. Their ragged countenances tell us this, but they are not indolent. Zombies live purpose-driven undead lives. They want to eat brains, or any human flesh, depending on the mythos, and their calendars are organized accordingly. No naps. No swimming lessons. Just brains.

But we quickly discern that no amount of flesh will satisfy. There is always one more hapless minimart clerk to ambush, one more sorority girl in bunny slippers to chase down the corridor. In this way, the zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity, an emblem of the perverse appetite unchecked, which has at its core the irony of insatiable hunger. And as the pleasure becomes less and less, the craving becomes more and more. The law of diminishing returns. So, it is with all vices. The love of money demands more money, and the love of brains, more brains.

And so, in conclusion, a prayer. God bless the obsessive-compulsive internet shoppers, the warehouse workers on unnecessarily tight schedules, and the machine-like managers of the big data algorithms. God bless the students who sedate themselves in order to survive their own educations, taking standardized test after standardized test. And God bless the Emily Griersons of the world, who keep their petrified-boyfriend corpses near them in the bedroom, an emblem of what happens when one tries too mightily to hold on to the past. And God help us, too, when we see in our own reflections a zombie-like affectation, the abyss who stares back at us and falsely claims that we are not the righteousness of God, as Paul says we are in 2 Corinthians. And, finally, Godspeed to Gussie Fink-Nottle from the P.G. Wodehouse sagas: “Many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance, and started embalming on sight.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.