Consumerism
From Neoredemptive
The dominant religion of the early-21st-century United States, consumerism orders human life around acquisition and consumption. Consumerism reduces the individual's significance to their role as an economic actor, propping up the machine of "economic growth" by cultivating the habit of buying things for increasingly narcissistic, vapid, and inconsequential reasons.
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Consumerism and Postmodernity
Postmodern thought, in both its academic and popular forms, is a natural breeding ground for the consumeristic impulse.
Postmodern philosophy has commodified all ideas, worldviews, and religions, judging them all to be contextual and subjective and therefore fungible; if our thought life is then simply a matter of brand loyalty and impulse acquisition, why should our economic life be any different?
Postmodern culture, similarly, has devalued all immaterial concepts of value (character development, spiritual worth, and the Imago Dei), leaving the acquisition and display of material wealth as the only viable standard for the "measure of a person".
Consumerism in Church Culture
The consumerist ethos of our culture has been adopted wolesale within the North American Christian community. We shop at "christian" book stores, listen to "christian" radio, and browse "christian" business directories. The "christian" record labels continue to pump out countless carbon-copy "christian" bands, "christian" publishing houses barage us with all of the latest things we must read, the "christian" conference machine pumps out high-dollar events that all "relevant" leaders simply must attend, and even local churches urge their members to pad the bottom line by buying sermon CDs (sold at unjustifiably high margins) and the pastors' vanity-published books.
In the public eye, this trend hit its apex in the 1980s with the rise (and subsequent implosion) of prosper-and-consume ministries -- "only by enjoying in Christian form the full range of pleasures offered by commercial culture could they signal their control over modern technology" (R. Laurence Moore, Selling God, quoted in Above All Earthly Pow'rs), but -- as with most radical errors -- their baldfaced acceptance paved the way for widespread adoption of a much more subtle, much more insidious, much more pervasive version of the same lie.
The vacuity of the american evangelical subculture will not and can not be filled by its participation in any commercial enterprise; indeed, its hollowing-out may be merely a symptom of its obsession with getting more, newer, trendier, and cheaper.
Ecclesiastic Consumerism
There are two sides to consumerism's influence upon congregations -- supply and demand.
On the demand side, congregational loyalty is in collapse as a cultural phenomenon, as the popular rationales for church-hopping and church-shopping becoming increasingly self-centered and vapid. This is not suprising, particularly among those who have not been taught to do all Jesus taught and commanded; it simply follows the natural contour of the culture out of which we came and amid which we live.
What is most terrifying about this phenomenon is the willingness of churches to conform themselves, uncritically, to the demands of such church consumers -- which brings us to the supply side. Many churches have demonstrated a complete inability to engage with a consumerist culture without being coopted by it. Such churches have ceased to be churches at all; they are one-stop emporiums where people can identify their felt religious needs and have them met on their own terms. From their anthropocentric vision to their inoffensive preaching to their cross-free music to their therapeutic small group methodology, such communities are not the redemptive communities envisaged in the New Testament. Such churches lack the theological spine to do that which will not sell to selfish consumers: preach the gospel.
Theological Consumerism
One of the many rabit-hole fads in today's theological academy is that of "plausibility" - that the Gospel as recorded in Scripture is not plausible to the modern mind and therefore must be completely re-cast, both in its presentation and in its content. This line of thinking finds its culmination in the heresy of Shelby Spong, although many in this camp have refused to travel quite so far down that rabbit hole.
This is nothing more than the market side of consumerism infecting our theological thought. The gospel is reduced to a branded good which can be reshaped at whim to suit the preferences of its potential "buyers", completely setting aside a foundational observation about the Gospel -- that it has never actually been plausible, in any era. It is a strange chronological prejudice to say that there is something special about our modern fallenness which somehow refutes Christ's atoning work on the cross having the same effect it has always had -- condemning and conquering our sin and sinfulness.
A Redemptive Response
We tend to agree with Andy Crouch and Frederica Mathewes-Green in The Church in Emerging Culture...
The right response of the church to consumerism is not to embrace it, co-opt it, or even peacefully co-exist with it. While some of the mechanisms of our consumer culture are redeemable, the consumerist ethos at its center stands in stark contrast with and opposition to the gospel. Our purpose is not to feed an economic monster, no matter how noble it may appear; our purpose is to honor and glorify God. We cannot buy true salve for the deep wounds of the soul, only temporary anaesthetics. Our consumption distracts and placates us, but does nothing to fill our vacuous and empty selves.
References
- Too Good to be True
- The Church in Emerging Culture
- David Wells' series, especially God in the Wasteland
