Religion as Pathology?

Having just finished another book for my second comprehensive exam I'm seeing the theme of religion as pathology emerge. Mara Einstein's 2008 book: "Brands of Faith: Marketing religion in a commercial age", is based on a numerous assumptions, too many to review in great detail, that undermine what is seemingly the main theme of the book: religion has become subject to the same marketing principles as other industries in the neoliberal economic market.

Einstein treats "religion", by which she means Christianity and Judaism, all other faiths are labeled "New Age" (which is problematic enough to inform a rapacious critique), as a means to incite uncomfortable, self-flagellating reorientations of the self. Take, as an example of this thinking, the sentiment that "religion isn't supposed to comfortable, and it is through discomfort that we find new parts of ourselves" (Einstein 2008: 210). While a disciplinary perspective on religion and its affective bio-power smacks of a "Foucault effect", he doesn't ever grace the pages of Einsten's analysis. Instead, the reader must be content with assertions that distract from what could be a meditation on the "commodification of the self" (Einstein 2008: 199 quoting Rindfleish 2005) but what ends up being a rage against the dissolution of religious purity by immigration, economic principles of profiteering, the "self-help" movement, and New Age spirituality; under which flows the assumption that religion is pathological, a social ill, the famous opiate and has been subsumed under the other social ill, an economic logic of fee-for-use services.

While my intention is not to discount these ideas, there is no reflexive mention nor contextualization of the links between religion and the economy, made famous by Weber, but well known regardless cross-disciplinarily. Einstein treats "religious consumers" as dupes, as social agents with no agency, no capacity to comprehend the social and economic maelstrom of religious devotion in an era of neoliberal market reform in (nearly) post-welfare economies.

These are unfinished, incomplete thoughts. More later.