How do religious markets emerge?

本研究以休斯敦和明尼阿波利斯/圣保罗大都会地区的新教会众为例，运用经济、宗教和组织社会学的见解，考察了美国宗教市场的出现。我们的主要假设是，新教领域盛行的制度“宗派主义逻辑”正日益被一种新的制度“市场逻辑”所叠加。在这个过程中，首先，宗教竞争从教派的组织层面转移到会众层面，作为新教领域的主要竞争对手(竞争取向)。其次，信徒越来越被视为宗教的“消费者”，会众根据消费者的需求(消费者导向)量身定做他们的“救恩商品”。因此，该项目旨在回答两个问题：(1)市场逻辑制度化的制度条件是什么？(2)宗教参与市场制度化会产生什么后果？由于新冠肺炎疫情期间禁止赴美旅行约20个月的旅行禁令，该项目的实质性目标无法实现。基于原项目申请的主要假设，我们将研究兴趣的范围扩展到宗教市场涌现与数字平台参与之间的关系。在新冠肺炎大流行期间，美国新教领域的数字化进程大大加快。我们研究(Iii)休斯敦和明尼阿波利斯/圣保罗大都会地区的新教会众在数字平台上的活动在多大程度上是以“市场的逻辑”为导向的，(Iv)社会和技术条件在多大程度上解释了宗教参与的形式和程度，以及(V)数字化如何影响我们研究的大都市地区会众及其参与者之间的地方关系。为了回答这些问题，我们结合了不同类型的数据：1)定性访谈和2)每个休斯顿和明尼阿波利斯/圣保罗六个会众的网络数据(调查)，以及3)Twitter数据重建这两个大都市地区约200个会众的数字关系。借助计算社会科学、社会网络分析以及定性比较分析的方法，可以在Twitter平台上将本地市场数据与来自数字领域的数据联系起来。

This study examines the emergence of religious markets in the USA on the case of Protestant congregations in the metropolitan areas of Houston and Minneapolis/St. Paul by using insights from the sociologies of economy, religion, and organizations. Our main assumption is that the prevailing institutional "logic of denominationalism" in the Protestant field is increasingly superimposed by a new institutional "logic of the market". In this process, firstly, religious competition shifts from the organizational level of denominations to the level of congregations as main competitors in the Protestant field (competitive orientation). Secondly, believers are increasingly perceived as religious "consumers" with congregations tailoring their "salvation goods" according to the consumers' demands (consumer orientation). Consequently, the project aims at answering two questions: (i) What are the institutional conditions for the institutionalization of the market logic? (ii) What consequences result from the institutionalization of markets for religious participation? Due to a travel ban that prohibited travellig to the USA for about 20 months during the COVID-19 pandemic, substantial objectives of this project could not be realized. Taking up the main assumption of the original project application, we extended the scope of our research interest to the relationship between religious market emergence and participation on digital platforms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the digitalization of the Protestant field in the USA has considerably accelerated. We study (iii) the extent to which activities on digital platforms by Protestant congregations from the metropolitan areas Houston and Minneapolis/St. Paul are oriented towards the "logic of the market", (iv) the degree to which social and technical conditions explain the forms and degrees of religious participation, and (v) how digitalization affects local relationships between congregations and their attendees in the metropolitan areas of our study. To answer these questions, we combine different kinds of data: 1) qualitative interviews and 2) network data (surveys) in six congregations from each Houston and Minneapolis/St. Paul as well as 3) twitter data to reconstruct the digital relations of about 200 congregations in both metropolitan areas. With methods from computational social sciences, social network analysis as well as qualititave comparative analysis it becomes possible to relate the local market data with data from the digital sphere on the platform Twitter.