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Introduction
The intersections of the sacred vs profane, mundane vs mystical and religious vs secular are embedded in everyday life and necessitate religious and non-religious individuals alike to navigate the consumption landscape as a self-identity project. Regardless of consumers’ disposition toward the marketplace, few can escape the market permanently (Kozinets, 2002). As a result, individuals learn to perform consumption functions coherent with ones’ religiosity and identity (Karataş and Sandıkcı, 2013). Religiosity refers to “a person’s degree of adherence to the beliefs, doctrines, and practices of a particular religion” (Dube and Wingfield, 2008, p. 503). Some work has been done in the study of religion and religiosity. Scholars have examined the effects of religiosity on dominion and stewardship toward the environment and subsequent sustainable behaviors (Leary et al., 2016), the effects of religious institutions on forming the marketing systems (Mittelstaedt, 2002) and the effects of religiosity on globalization and business strategy (Laczniak and Klein, 2010). Past consumer research on religion and the marketplace have also revealed how religion shapes the marketplace (Blankson et al., 2018; Izberk-Bilgin, 2012), how marketplace impacts religion (Drenten and McManus, 2016; Willson et al., 2013), how religion becomes a part of the consumer culture (Veer and Shankar, 2011), how consumption cycles within the context of religion and the interactive and reciprocal role of religion in shaping consumer behaviors and market systems (Belk et al., 1989; Cayla and Elson, 2012).
In addition, although religion permeates individual identity in complex ways and largely underlines the psychology and behaviors of consumers in all aspects of life, the study of religion in marketing has been sparse and mostly qualitative in the literature (Cleveland et al., 2013; Mathras et al., 2016). Mainstream business journals have presented little research that explores the relationship between religion and marketing (Cleveland et al., 2013; Engelland, 2014). The common denominator of previous studies is a lack of a systematic view of religious consumption and its specific influences on consumers. To position future study of religion and the marketplace, scholars have recently taken stock of the most prominent studies of religion in marketing. Their efforts concluded that the theoretical and quantitative methods contribute a small percentage in the study of religion, urging diversification of perspectives to...