Chapter 2

Chapter 2, entitled “Making Over Christianity” examines how advertising combined religion and fashion. How might you introduce this topic in your class, whether a course focused on religion and fashion, religion and popular culture, or material religion? What might students gain from a discussion of religion and advertising?

Possible Student Learning Outcomes:

• The student will be able to (SWBAT) recognize various “religious” elements of advertising.

• The SWBAT analyze the implications of these advertising strategies.

• The SWBAT evaluate the broader relationship between religion and advertising.

Potential Strategies:

• Creating Analytical Categories: Equip students with the ability to recognize “religious elements” of advertising by facilitating a class discussion on things to look for—potential categories of people, places, and things—as part of this process. You might display some sample advertisements (print or video) to foster this discussion and assemble a list that includes such things as religious language, religious symbols, and religious figures, while also discussing how the concept of religion is actively constructed.

• Magazine Advertisement Analysis Activity: Have students, individually or in small groups, examine select advertisements (you could have these advertisements pre-selected, have students purchase a given magazine (a potentially pricey option), or bring in your own collection of magazines) as a way to affirm, complicate, and/or challenge the categorization students have constructed. Their analysis will provide data about the religion/advertising relationship that you can discuss as a class. It will also generate the basis for a discussion about the effectiveness of their categorization schema. They could then go back and refine their list or you might using this as a jumping off point for a more in-depth examination and discussion of religion and advertising.

• Class Debate: These activities would provide the basis for a more in-depth discussion of how advertisements combine fashion (or some other topic) with religion. You might also use them to provide students with data for a debate about whether or not advertising is religious. For this activity, consider assigning part Tricia Sheffield’s The Religious Dimensions of Advertising and/or Sut Jhally’s “Advertising as Religion” in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America.

• Mini-Lecture: Before or after the students create their list of “religious elements” to look for, provide them with some additional tools, specifically other visual structures and patterns in advertising that utilize religion. In his book, Advertising the American Dream, Roland Marchand identifies a few of these patterns that emerged in the early to mid-twentieth century and still appear today.

  • “The World We Have Saved”: Advertisements tout the latest technological advancement or the next big thing, but they often do so by appealing to iconic American village scenes—often complete with a Christian church. The product being sold is framed as something that preserves, saves, and comes from this vision of American unity, value, and integrity.

  • “Heroic Proportions”: Numerous advertisements attempt to convey the “numinous” or spiritual qualities of products through their sheer magnitude. Size matters as it attracts attention and fosters a sense of awe.

  • “Adoring Throngs”: Sometimes “adoring throngs” of worshippers surround an object of “Heroic Proportions” and amplify the alleged effects of the object being sold. Other times an individual or group’s gestures and facial expressions convey the reverence due to the advertised object.  

  • “In its Presence”: This visual cliché features small groups faithfully huddled around the advertised object, which bestows its wondrous qualities upon them. In other instances, the advertisement highlights the religious ecstasy and power attributed to the product.

  • “Radiant Beams”: Beams of light, suggestive of heavenly, celestial, or supernatural realms, are another way that advertisements highlight the “numinous” qualities of their products.