(Spickard 1998). Within this framework, religion is treated as merely one of
the many “economies” functioning within capitalist civil society. From this
“religious economies” perspective, religion is nothing but a “commodity”
that is produced, packaged and sold by churches or “firms” – as they are
called in this theory – to religious consumers. It is quite obvious that this the-
ory merely takes the early liberal and now neo-liberal capitalistic principles
of a market economy and applies them in “cookie-cutter” fashion to religion
as a mere constitutive institution of the established society. The Rational
Choice Theory of religion proceeds quite dogmatically and in a simplified
manner to apply its generalized paradigm of detached bourgeois subjectiv-
ity and the resulting utilitarian methodology of an instrumental rationality
and praxis to its sociological construction of religion.
The Rational Choice Theory of religion is not concerned with religion’s
essential wrestling with, and expression of, the meaning and critical theod-
icy questions of “why” life or society is as it is. As such, this theory is not
concerned with religion giving voice to the cries and longings of suffering
humanity for liberation, redemption and the creation of a more humane and
just future society. Even with Rodney Stark’s attempt to justify this Theory’s
reading of Christianity by proof-texting utilitarian statements in the Bible as
being substantive, this theory’s focus is positivistically on the techné ofhow
religion accommodates and functions within a reified, capitalist status quo.
This is not only a corruption of the emancipatory, prophetic and Messianic
hope expressed as essential to the biblical proclamation, which is founda-
tional for the critical and eschatological praxis of the church for social change;
this is also a not-so-subtle extension of a bourgeois Christianity as a cultural
expression of the dominant neo-liberal doctrine in the United States to the
rest of the world religions. To paraphrase Max Horkheimer (1993:12) from
his opening address upon becoming the Director of the Institute for Social
Research in Frankfurt, Germany, the positivistic paring down of religion to
conform to a pre-determined capitalist paradigm is not only badly under-
standing religion, it is also bad social science and falls under the suspicion
of being ideology, i.e., false consciousness. This domination of the solipsistic
bourgeois paradigm in the religious conceptual realm is tragically the expres-
sion of its actual, concrete domination in the class antagonism of civil soci-
ety and its globalization.
126 • Michael R. Ott