Page - 189 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

Adam Bajan Book Review Marcus Moberg: Church, Market, and Media A Discursive Approach to Institutional Religious Change London: Bloomsbury, 2017, 202 pp., ISBN 978-1-4742-8057-0 In an era of apathetic secularism, Marcus Moberg offers up a finely tuned dis- cursive analysis of mainline Protestant efforts to increase relevance through marketization that is as original as it is thought provoking. As a socio-cultural practice, marketization involves a combination of free-market ideas and the continuous development of new media technologies to communicate these ideas (6). Accordingly, Moberg’s principal thesis is that these ideas and develop- ments have infiltrated religious organizations, where they quickly become part of discursive structures within these organizations and are reflected in official church communication. It is these discursive structures which Moberg focuses on in his engaging and lively analysis. Following a detailed introduction to the study of religion, markets, and media in the first chapter, Moberg aptly notes that previous studies in this field have largely focused on the effects of mediatization on religious groups while ignor- ing how these effects may be rooted in free-market ideas and neoliberal cul- ture, thus giving the book its raison d’être. The book’s second and third chapters provide a detailed review of canonical literature on critical discourse analysis and the various theoretical approaches used in the study of religion and media. While these early chapters are by no means uninteresting, they are quite typical of contemporary scholarship focusing on the intersection of religion and media. However, the book’s fourth and fifth chapters are given over entirely to a very detailed analysis of official church documents at seven mainline Protestant churches in five countries. These are, in order of appearance: the Presbyteri- an Church (USA), United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Church of England, and the national churches of Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. Specifically, Moberg’s analysis involves a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of 79 publicly available documents from these churches including an ad- ditional reading of a further 47 documents, 33 of which are used in this volume. DOI: 10.25364/05.05:2019.2.10 Book Review: Church, Market, and Media | 189www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 189–192