It's no happenstance that the advertising men, or "attention engineers," who helped bring about the rise of Consumer Culture were steeped in the Protestant tradition. They understood both the nature of yearning and how to franchise it. They knew the language of sincerity. They knew the power of promise—large promise. They knew how to make a sale and close the deal. Marketing was a white upper-middle-class Christian endeavor, in part because most of the educated population was Protestant and in part because the procedure for selling manufactured resolution to life's present problems was so similar to what religion had developed to sell future redemption. Above all, they knew the power of story.

—James B. Twitchell, Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld