How do religious markets emerge?

本研究以休斯敦和明尼阿波利斯/圣保罗大都市地区的新教教会为例，运用经济、宗教和组织社会学的观点，探讨了美国宗教市场的出现。我们的主要假设是，在新教领域盛行的制度性“非民族主义逻辑”越来越多地被一种新的制度性“市场逻辑”所叠加。在这一过程中，首先，宗教竞争从教派的组织层面转移到作为新教领域主要竞争者的教会层面（竞争取向）。其次，信徒越来越被视为宗教"消费者"，教会根据消费者的需求定制他们的"救赎产品"（消费者导向）。因此，该项目旨在回答两个问题：（一）市场逻辑制度化的体制条件是什么？(ii)宗教参与市场的制度化会产生什么后果？由于在COVID-19疫情期间，旅行禁令禁止前往美国约20个月，该项目的主要目标无法实现。在最初项目申请的主要假设基础上，我们将研究兴趣的范围扩展到宗教市场出现与数字平台参与之间的关系。在COVID-19疫情期间，美国新教领域的数字化进程大大加快。我们研究（iii）休斯顿和明尼阿波利斯/圣保罗大都市地区新教教会在数字平台上的活动在多大程度上面向"市场逻辑"，（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的教会及其参与者之间的地方关系。为了回答这些问题，我们结合联合收割机不同类型的数据：1）定性访谈和2）网络数据（调查），在六个教会从每个休斯顿和明尼阿波利斯/圣保罗以及3）推特数据，以重建约200个教会在两个大都市地区的数字关系。借助计算社会科学、社交网络分析以及定性比较分析的方法，可以将本地市场数据与Twitter平台上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.