Written by: gfesadmin on January 24, 2013

Consumerism is a term many would use to describe much of American and Western culture.  However, the term is rarely unpacked and understood from a theological framework.  William Cavanaugh in Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire begins to unpack the intermingling of Christian life amidst the complexity and ambiguity of capitalism, specifically focusing on the ways in which the capitalistic ascetic has in many ways replaced the Christian ascetic and desire for God, creating a system where authentic human desire is corrupted into that where “everything is available, but nothing matters.” 

Indeed we live in a world of utter consumption where sex, pornography, food, products, gadgets, and even church and spirituality are consumed in massive quantities without introspection.  Moreover, all of these “things” vie for marketing shares of our desire, money, and time.  As Cavanaugh points out, the capitalist system is based on turning human desire towards the “restless” need to flit about from experience to experience, to have something else.

This is highlighted in the postmodern shift to hyper-reality and Braudillard’s simulacra contained in the intensification of marketing, and creating “restlessness” in all and every medium from billboards to Facebook. Our brains have been wired to seek our God given desires in the meaninglessness of experience for experience sake.  U2 and Bono were early to point this postmodern intersection of marketing driven desire for ephemeral experience, the consumption of desire for experience’s sake.  The song “Mofo” connected with the onslaught of images and faux marketing of the wryly named “PopMart Tour,” as Bono sings:

“Lookin’ for to save my, save my soul
Lookin’ in the places where no flowers grow.
Lookin’ for to fill that God-shaped hole
Mother, mother-suckin’ rock an’roll.

Holy dunc, space junk coming­ in for the splash
White dopes on punk staring into the flash.
Lookin’ for the baby Jesus under the trash
Mother, mother-suckin’ rock an’ roll.
Mother.

Lookin’ for a sound that’s gonna drown out the world.
Lookin’ for the father of my two little girls.
Got the swing, got the sway, got my straw in lemonade.
Still lookin’ for the face I had before the world was made.
Mother, mother-suckin’ rock an’ roll”

The message being here that people have replaced their search for God, family, and ultimate meaning in the flash and splash of consumption. 

Cavanaugh continues on to diagnose the issue of desire for consumption, not as materialism, but ultimately as detachment.  Production of actual goods has become marginalized in the West, and at the same time work, the market, goods and money have all been abstracted and detached from material connection.  In this, marketing, to meet the challenge of ongoing abstraction within the economic market and also postmodern ethos, has developed a market for feeling about products.  Thus, everything we buy from the clothes that makes us cool, to the futuristic iPhones that makes us relevant are based on an abstraction of continual unfulfilled desire.  Our desire for transcendence in God is replaced for a desire for transcendence in novelty, experience, and the new… in a hyper individualization and ultimately detachment from anything beyond our personal pleasure and satisfaction.  This is our consumerist world, just as sacramental as our spiritual one, but divorced from meaning and connection.

Thus, for Cavanaugh: “Consumerism represents a constant dissatisfaction with particular material things themselves, a restlessness that constantly seeks to move beyond what is at hand.  Although the consumer spirit delights in material things and sees them as good, the thing itself is never enough.”

As Bono points out, we are searching and desiring for transcendence and a God given desire at that.  Clearly, the consumer ascetic has moved into the church.  People consume churches, books, speakers, conferences, and experiences.  I don’t wish to critique this too much, churches are meeting people’s desires with an answer rooted in the gospel.  Certainly, consumerism is a problem, but I wish to ask a question pertinent to Cavanaugh’s discussion of detachment.  Are evangelical Christians detached?  Are we creating Christian culture that flits from experience to experience removed from community, God, and life transformation?  Have we reduced loving God and your neighbor to a retweet, or a like on a Facebook status?

One area, I have begun to see the consumerist nature of the US negatively create detachment and paralysis is in the area of short term missions.  Short term missions have become one of the fastest growing segments of the evangelical movement.  Intensified in recent years by globalization, the explosion of Christianity in the majority world, and the ease of international travel, almost every church now has a short term missions program.  Almost every youth group sends its youth on mission trips from Mexico to Malawi.  Short term missions are now seen as almost a necessary, a right, and as people move from church to church seeking fulfillment, some bounce from mission experience to mission experience.  I have heard and seen from friends and associates more than a few people complain about how a short term trip didn’t meet their expectation and did not produce a “spiritual high.”  Many people talk about life change and an amazing experience, but still giving to long term missions and numbers of long term missionaries going overseas are not increasing.  Other talk about how mission trips are a form of discipleship that benefits their church.  Some people return from trips idealizing and romanticizing the poverty and cultural uniqueness they have witnessed.  Are we creating a type of global Christian tourist, detached from any real connection to the people they visit?  What real impact are all these trips having on the global Christian movement, and are they for us, or for the people receiving them?

 My particular organization has been sending short termers (with the hope of developing long termers and raising up national leadership) for decades now.  More recently I have noticed a decided shift to a more marketing and consumer approach.  Students are encouraged to “get together with some friends and go and change the world.”  The emphasis is on their experience, on adventure, and having a good time. 

This is in stark contrast to Christian laborers and missionaries from other nations who go with the desire to serve long term and with sacrifice.  It is in further contrast with the gravestones of the brave and committed missionaries in the cemetery I visited last year in Seoul. “If I had a thousand lives, I would give them all to Korea” went one of a young woman who died in Korea.

I do not wish to disparage all short term missions.  I have seen them work well, and make significant headway and life change.  I myself would not be in the place I am (and I know many others as well), were it not for short term missions.  But, I do wonder if we are beginning to cross over a line into which even long term missions are about experience and self-satisfaction,  something which can be tossed aside if it does not meet our criteria, instead of an incarnational approach to the cross and gospel of sacrifice and suffering?  Are we creating a new class of global cosmopolitans, detached from the reality of the local needs and movements?  Are we simply helping many Christians check the mission’s box of their life Christian experience list?  I do believe serious reflection is needed to begin to disentangle the consumerist nature of mission trips and missions in the US.  We need to stress attachment to localities, desire for God, love of neighbor, and ultimately a commitment to empty oneself and serve the other.

The sociologist Ulf Hannerz has developed within globalization and global culture, the idea of a cosmopolitan class.  That is a group of people who live in an elite international strata but existing apart from the local.  Cavanaugh himself develops this idea of the tourist, one that is detached completely from the realities, needs, and pain of the local, caught up only in the need to consume.  Are we in American forming missions into a tourist/cosmopolitan endeavor, consuming experience and culture, yet never entering into true community with the existing body of Christ and the body of Christ to be?  This is my concern, and if we have become detached from the call to love God and our neighbor within missions in a real and tangible way, and replaced it with a restless desire for experience and individualistic fulfillment, then I fear for the future of the American church, and its role in the future of missions.  How do we not become tourists detached from the cultures and people’s we wish to impact?  How do we make missions about God and neighbor and not about our own desire and need for new experiences?

Yet, I know that God will raise up a new generation of Latin American, Asian, and African missionaries who will be “absorbed into a larger body… the small individual self … de-centered and put in the context of a much wider community of participation with others in the divine life.”

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