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In the philosophy of religion, theodicy is the attempt to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with belief in a God who is at once omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good. Leibniz coined the term in his 1710 Theodicy, arguing that the actual world, evil included, is the “best of all possible worlds” a perfect being could create. The referent is a reasoned defence of divine goodness against the problem of evil, argued philosophically, and it is the source construct that sociology later turns into an account of how people explain suffering and that consumer research borrows to study how people justify fortune and lack.[1]
In the sociology of religion, theodicy is broadened from a philosopher's proof to any socially shared explanation that makes suffering, death, and inequality meaningful and endurable. Berger's The Sacred Canopy, developing Max Weber, treats theodicies as part of the “nomos” by which a society holds chaos at bay, legitimating both the good fortune of the privileged and the misfortune of the suffering. The referent is a collective meaning-system that renders anomic experience bearable, analysed sociologically, and it is the same construct as the philosophers' theodicy, shifted from justifying God to sustaining a plausible social order, and later carried into consumer research.[2]
In consumer research, theodicy was borrowed to describe how consumers sacralize certain goods and experiences and how they make sense of having or lacking them. Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry's “The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey” documents the rituals, pilgrimages, and collections through which people set apart the sacred in ordinary consumption and reconcile themselves to inequality of means. The referent is the meaning-making by which consumers justify and sacralize consumption, studied ethnographically, and it is the same theodicy construct carried from philosophy through the sociology of religion into the marketplace.[3]
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