Blacksoil

We have just finished a five week series at our worship gathering on Following Christ in a Consumer Culture. Part of what I wanted to do with this series was get beyond thinking about materialism as the problem. Materialism (by which Christians usually mean greed and lust for things) is, of course, A problem in a consumer economy, but I don’t think it’s THE problem.

I just started reading Vincent Miller’s excellent book Consuming Religion, which I would highly recommend to anyone trying to think through these issues. One point he makes, which he sees as critical to any Christian response to consumerism, is that it’s not about an alternate set of values. The problem isn’t that consumerism offers us a set of values and beliefs in conflict with the values and beliefs of the gospel. The problem is that the way consumerism trains us to relate to values and beliefs. In a consumer culture values and beliefs become commodities. They are detached from tradition, community, and practice. As such, they lose power to impact the way we live. We might take resurrection for example. How many Christians believe (in their heads at least) in resurrection and yet in practice relate to their bodies and the creation in more gnostic ways?

As such, Miller argues, responses to consumer focused on ideas (theology/values/etc.) will be inadequate since consumerism is so adept at absorbing even the harshest criticism and turning it into a commodity. (He uses the example of Barnes & Noble’s recent campaign to sell copies of Marx’s Communist Manifesto on its anniversary). An adequate response will be focused instead on practices, practices embedded in tradition.

Miller’s argument seems pretty compelling to me. And it presents quite a challenge to those of us in the emergent/missional church movement who are prone to making a patchwork quilt from practices from various Christian traditions. (E.g., our description of Blacksoil’s worship gathering says you are likely to encounter Greek Orthodox liturgy next to a Johnny Cash song). Are emergent/missional churches unwittingly fostering consumerism in our worshipers? Can our worship (and the rest of our church life) be eclectic and multi-traditional without caving to consumerism? What other practices outside of worship do we need to doing to resist consumerism? What do you think?