The Religion of the Market

RELIGION IS NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT to define. If, however, we adopt a functionalist view and understand religion as what grounds us by teaching us what the world is, and what our role in the world is, then it becomes obvious that traditional religions are fulfilling this role less and less, because that function is being supplanted-or overwhelmed-by other belief-systems and value-systems. Today the most powerful alternative explanation of the world is science, and the most attractive valuesystem has become consumerism. Their academic offspring is economics, probably the most influential of the "social sciences:" In response, this paper will argue that our present economic system should also be understood as our religion, because it has come to fulfill a religious function for us. The discipline of economics is less a science than the theology of that religion, and its god, the Market, has become a vicious circle of everincreasing production and consumption by pretending to offer a secular salvation. The collapse of communism-best understood as a capitalist "heresy"-makes it more apparent that the Market is becoming the first truly world religion, binding all corners of the globe more and more tightly into a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as "secular." So it is no coincidence that our time of ecological catastrophe also happens to be a time of extraordinary challenge to more traditional religions. Although it may offend our vanity, it is somewhat ludicrous to think of conventional religious institutions as we know them today serving