{"id":11802,"date":"2017-02-16T23:29:55","date_gmt":"2017-02-17T07:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dminlgp.com\/?p=11802"},"modified":"2017-02-16T23:29:55","modified_gmt":"2017-02-17T07:29:55","slug":"a-smorgasbord-of-commodification-appropriation-and-privilege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/a-smorgasbord-of-commodification-appropriation-and-privilege\/","title":{"rendered":"A Smorgasbord of Commodification, Appropriation, and Privilege"},"content":{"rendered":"

The past several weeks I have been thinking quite a bit about privilege, especially those privileges to which I am blind. It\u2019s pretty easy for me to recognize the big privileges. I\u2019m white and well-educated. I was raised in a nuclear family that loved me and protected me. I have always been free to talk about the person I love, to marry that person, and to buy a wedding cake from whomever I darn well please. I have never had to live outside. Well, the list pretty much goes on and on, but lately I have begun to see those hidden privileges that may not even seem like privilege to most people. Reading Vincent Miller\u2019s Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture<\/em> revealed to me a couple of big privileges I had never considered.<\/p>\n

In his introduction, Miller notes that the things we consume have become anonymous to us. \u201cWe nourish ourselves on food from nowhere and dress in clothes made by no one.\u201d[1]<\/a> In the past century, we have become so separated from our supply chain, that we don\u2019t think twice about where our food comes from, whose fingers stitched our clothing, or who stood for hours on a factory floor building our car. T\"\"<\/a>his anonymity feels like being absolved of responsibility for the practices and processes used in the supply chain. This is the first privilege the Miller\u2019s text highlighted for me. As a citizen of the United States, particularly one who lives in a large city, I never have to think about the supply chain. I may choose<\/em> to think about it (I mean, I live in Portland and Portlandia gets its shtick from our reality), but I don\u2019t have to. I can head to my favorite local food cart, order my Pad Thai just the way I like it, and enjoy all without ever giving it a thought. That\u2019s privilege.<\/p>\n

The second privilege that broadsided me is the privilege of being able to pick and choose the religious practices that suit me. Miller, in discussing the commodification of religion, states, \u201cReligious beliefs and practices are in danger of being extracted from the complex cultures, institutions, and relationships that enable them to inform the shape of daily life.\u201d[2]<\/a> I\u2019m not Catholic, but I have prayer candles and I recently bought my daughter a lovely St. Cecilia medal as she is the patron saint of music and musicians. I am not Episcopalian, but I love the way the tradition honors the communion table, so my husband and I attend a local Episcopalian church when we are missing the liturgy. I have practices in my life that are incorporated (appropriated?) from Buddhism, Catholicism, and Pentecostalism alongside my own Wesleyan holiness practices. None of these practices threaten my walk with Christ, but neither do they live within the richness of their own traditions. I have commodified these practices because they \u201cwork for me.\u201d While Miller\u2019s discussion did not focus on the fact that this commodification is tied to privilege, that is exactly what struc\"\"<\/a>k me like a sledgehammer! Where else can someone dabble in practices from multiple religions while maintaining the guiding tenets of their own religion without much question? Could a Christian woman in China do this? How about a Jewish woman in Syria? For that matter, could a Muslim woman in America engage religion this way? It never occurred to me that only my privilege as a white American Christian affords me the ability to develop a smorgasbord of religious practices to suit my personal desires at any given time.<\/p>\n

Miller suggests that we have been trained to distinguish practices from the traditions and contexts that give them meaning and that restoring them to these contexts can counteract commodification.[3]<\/a> While one of the reasons I have pulled these practices into my life is because of the way they have been developed and continue to be valued in their own traditions, the problem is that I do not feel that I need to commit to these communities in order to engage the practices. In an odd way, I devalue the practices precisely because I value them over the community into which they were born and nurtured.<\/p>\n

As I have meditated on all of this (see what I did there?), I have realized that the ultimate privilege is expressed by the fact that I will likely continue these practices. I will not become a Catholic. I will not become a Buddhist. I might<\/em> become a Pentecostal or an Episcopalian. If I could find a Wesleyan Holiness tradition that incorporates a liturgy around the Table, all the while focusing on room for the Spirit to speak, I would probably join them. But only if they let me light prayer candles, honor my patron saint, and whisper \u201cNamaste\u201d as we greet each other.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [1]. Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture<\/em>, (New York: Continuum, 2004), 3.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [2]. Ibid., 105.<\/p>\n

<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [3]. Miller, 195.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The past several weeks I have been thinking quite a bit about privilege, especially those privileges to which I am blind. It\u2019s pretty easy for me to recognize the big privileges. I\u2019m white and well-educated. I was raised in a nuclear family that loved me and protected me. I have always been free to talk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[374,255],"class_list":["post-11802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-consuming-religion","tag-miller","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}