Mystics against the market: American religions and the autocritique of capitalism

This article asks what might be learned about Western cosmology by focusing on religious traditions that originated in the United States and have developed outside the mainstream of Christianity. Mormonism and other American religions, we argue, carry a hidden repertoire of mystical and communal themes that directly conflict with the Western 'market mentality' as often described in the anthropological literature. These religions, furthermore, have surprising affinities with mystical and communal traditions outside the West, affinities that are fully revealed, ironically enough, only in the context of American cultural expansion in the non-Western world.