Seeker-friendly: The Hillsong megachurch as an enchanting total institution

The increasingly voluntary quality of religious expression has prompted many faith-based entities to embrace ‘secular’ means of evangelism. This is evident within the Sydney-based Hillsong Church, which has grown rapidly in attendees, capital resources and global reach. This ‘seeker-friendly’ strategy, however, raises questions around whether the ‘megachurch’ can sustain itself in offering respite from wearying Weberian processes of rationalisation and disenchantment. Hillsong’s resolution of this dilemma has been to create an encompassing arena of enchantment for constituents, a contemporary Goffmanian ‘total institution’ by reproducing the unalterable mechanisms of the economic order in a way that imbues them with greater meaning. Loyalties are sought by aligning desires for both personal reinvention and collective subsumption with the overarching evangelical aims of the Church. Thus for the committed devotee the transcendent and pragmatic may become synonymous and imbued with wonder, so that any gnawing dissonance felt as characteristic of late capitalism may be reconciled.