The Megachurch-Industrial Complex
Searching for Transcendence in the Culture Industry
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:10th Dec '26
£75.00
This title is due to be published on 10th December, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Josiah Kidwell examines the convergence of Las Vegas’s entertainment culture and organized religion, showing how a local megachurch’s transformation of faith into spectacle reflects contemporary forms of community.
A Las Vegas megachurch transforms faith into spectacle to attract the unchurched, even as its iconoclastic approach strains longstanding religious and cultural traditions.
Drawing on critical theory, media studies, and the sociology of religion, Josiah Kidwell situates the church’s evolution within broader patterns of rationalization in civil society and the spectacle-driven urban landscape of Las Vegas. Using extensive fieldwork, he chronicles the church’s shift into an entertainment-oriented religious franchise and unpacks the cultural trade-offs that accompany this change. Kidwell explores how the leadership’s organizational approach and use of new media and popular culture reshape place attachment, recast communal life, and introduce the one-dimensional logic of the culture industry. Throughout, Kidwell resists deterministic accounts, highlighting how members interpret, negotiate, and sometimes push back against these changes while also revealing the subtle erosions they produce in social life. Ultimately, this book offers a sharp, multilayered portrait of religion’s adaptation to an entertainment-saturated society—and will be of interest to scholars of religion, media studies, cultural sociology, and anyone curious about the future of communal life in an age of spectacle.
This is a remarkable study in its capacity to develop multiple epistemic angles on the megachurch as a socio-spatial macroworld, shifting scale from broad cultural transformations to the lived experience of individual believers with striking fluency. Structural trends and intimate religious practice are seamlessly interwoven, yielding a rare balance between critical theory and participant-centered analysis. The result is an empathetic and incisive reading, at once analytically rigorous and deeply humane. -- Massimo Leone, University of Turin, Italy
Josiah Kidwell deploys Frankfurt School theory and methodology to provide an original and engaging study. Kidwell’s critical analysis shows how the megachurch draws on media technology, advertising techniques, and spectacle to draw spectators into their church, demonstrating how religion today is promoted and shaped by techniques of the cultural industries. His analysis shows how important forms of religion today are mediated by big religious corporations that which use strategies of the culture industry which transform religion into a vital part of the consumer society. -- Douglas Kellner, UCLA, USA
With a keen and focused eye for observation coupled with sharp analytical skills, Josiah Kidwell takes readers into the fiery spectacle of the contemporary American megachurch. By deftly applying Critical Theory’s concepts and perspectives, he shines a light on some dark places where Christianity, new media, and popular culture collide, morph, and ascend in unexpected and sometimes alarming ways. -- Michael Ian Borer, University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA
Josiah Kidwell’s The Megachurch-Industrial Complex names and describes a late stage in the maturation of the evolution of religion under the regime of modern mediation and modern marketing. We’ve long watched as public religion has continued the accommodation that began with the Gutenberg revolution in the Reformation. Kidwell shows how the best way to understand the situation is in economic more than theological terms. -- Stewart M. Hoover, Professor Emeritus, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
ISBN: 9781666947151
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
160 pages