{"id":955,"date":"2013-02-21T21:18:19","date_gmt":"2013-02-21T21:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beta.dminlgp.com\/consumer-spirituality\/"},"modified":"2013-02-21T21:18:19","modified_gmt":"2013-02-21T21:18:19","slug":"consumer-spirituality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/consumer-spirituality\/","title":{"rendered":"Consumer Spirituality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Catholic theologian Vincent J. Miller unpacks the intersection of religion and consumerism in Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture.<\/em>\u00a0 The strong point to Miller\u2019s sketch is the depth and breadth of how he draws late modern capitalism, globalization, postmodernism, and Western Christianity together to show how culture has become fully commoditized.\u00a0 Here his thesis at its most essential is that: \u201cBeyond the excesses of consumerism lie cultural dynamisms that incline people to engage religious beliefs as if they were consumer commodities (225).\u201d\u00a0 This statement is ripe with insight, meaning, and extrapolation, but it also needs unpacking.<\/p>\n

Miller starts by showing the development of capitalistic-consumer society, and in agreement with Polanyi, dislocated production and work, making everything a commodity, and generally altering traditional stability of work, community, and trade.\u00a0 Capitalist societies needed labor and consumers, and at a rapid pace, thus the rise of Fordism, and the removal of commodities (things to be bought) from its rootedness in actual production and tradition.\u00a0 In this began the great abstraction of society, culture, symbols, products, etc.\u00a0 The production to market to consumer chain became seamless and invisible\u2026 full abstraction.\u00a0 At the same time, the need to sell within an abstraction and the rise of marketing meant that businesses became managers of consumption or quite literally \u201ccaptains of consciousness (44).\u201d\u00a0 As production ramped up, consumption also had to ramp up, whether there was need or not.\u00a0 Design, style, narrative, and ambiance were used to sell products (over and above utility).\u00a0 One can feel the coolness of Don Draper in full effect here, the calm charm of the American boom generation in perfect nostalgic advertising, with all the dysfunction and greed simmering just below the surface.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Desire becomes the clay in the hands of the potters of the consumer society.\u00a0 Desire however is corrupted and perverted into desire, not just for things, but for the need to feel desire for things.\u00a0 As the West moved into the postmodern epoch, the commodification of culture took on an ever increasing intensification with the rise of the information age (content becomes commodity), globalization (otherness becomes commodity), and the simulacrum, or over intensification of signs and spectacle (experience becomes commodity) fully abstracted from traditional meaning or use leads to three societal issues.\u00a0 Firstly, we are at \u201cnear constant consumption\u201d in the Western world, so that to live, to be human is to consume. \u00a0Secondly, the full fragmentation of all desire into many different sources, played upon the consumerist ploys of seduction and misdirection.\u00a0 Desire is decoupled from God and now found only in the experience.\u00a0 Thirdly, the rise through marketing, postmodernism, and hyper individualism of our fragmenting, abstracted culture of the therapeutic self, as the be and end all of human existence.\u00a0 That is people have now been trained to fulfill their desires of community, identity, happiness and meaning, in the consumptive world of marketing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Christianity, these shifts have been particularly jarring.\u00a0 The rise of a consumerist society which commodifies culture has meant that now religion is consumed and commoditized as well.\u00a0 This even is helped along by the celebrity status of religious figures and their own use of marketing.\u00a0 Moreover, in the postmodern, globalized world, \u201celements of tradition are interpreted, engaged, and used in abstraction of disembedded from \u2018their\u2019 traditional moorings- from historic creeds and doctrines, from broad symbolic universe, from religious community (91).\u201d\u00a0 This of course is the height of postmodernism.\u00a0 The bricolage approach to life where the past and present are picked over, and people are allowed to create their own realities and identities from scratch.\u00a0 Here religion becomes de-regulated and de-institutionalized, faith becomes hyper-individualized and traditional church structures become unstable and insecure. \u00a0(At the same time the de-regulation of the church may also be a blessing opening the experience of authentic faith to many more). \u00a0One wonders if perhaps Ross Douthat missed a large part of his thesis in not identifying another element of bad religion as the consumer society base of the West.\u00a0\u00a0 In this society, being a Christian is no longer about taking up one\u2019s cross, but is about finding satisfaction in consumption.\u00a0 It is no longer a desire for God, but a desire of accumulating.\u00a0 It is no longer identity rooted in community and tradition, but identity rooted in self.\u00a0 Miller shines a bright light on the religion of consumption that we are all so wrapped up in.<\/p>\n

U2 also prophetically saw this cultural shift of the confusion and entanglement of faith and consumption in their song, \u201cThe Playboy Mansion:\u201d<\/p>\n

If coke is a mystery<\/span>
Michael Jackson, history<\/span>
If beauty is truth<\/span>
And surgery the fountain of youth…<\/span><\/p>\n

What am I to do?<\/span>
Have I got the gifts to get me through<\/span>
The gates of that mansion?<\/span><\/p>\n

If O.J. is more than a drink<\/span>
And a Big Mac bigger than you think<\/span>
And perfume is an obsession<\/span>
And talk shows\u2013 confession<\/span><\/p>\n

What have we got to lose?<\/span>
Another push and we’ll be through<\/span>
The gates of that mansion.<\/span><\/p>\n

I never bought a lotto ticket<\/span>
I never parked in anyone’s space.<\/span>
The banks they’re like cathedrals<\/span>
I guess casinos took their place.<\/span><\/p>\n

Love, come on down<\/span>
Don’t wake her she’ll come around.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chance is a kind of religion<\/span>
Where you’re damned for plain hard luck.<\/span>
I never did see that movie<\/span>
I never did read that book.<\/span>
Love, come on down<\/span>
Let my numbers come around.<\/span><\/p>\n

Don’t know if I can hold on<\/span>
Don’t know if I’m that strong.<\/span>
Don’t know if I can wait that long<\/span>
Till the colours come flashing<\/span>
And the lights go on.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then will there be no time for sorrow<\/span>
Then will there be no time for shame<\/span>
Though I can’t say why<\/span>
I know I’ve got to believe.<\/span><\/p>\n

We’ll go driving in that pool<\/span>
It’s who you know that gets you through<\/span>
The gates of the playboy mansion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then will there be no time for sorrow<\/span>
Then will there be no time for shame<\/span>
Then will there be no time for pain<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

But, Miller is not pessimistic.\u00a0 He sees consumer society as an opportunity, and he sees cracks in the system.\u00a0 Miller argues that the system is not closed and that agency can make a difference.\u00a0 People can rise up within the system and build communities that turn the system on its head to make a positive change through communal and cultural agency.<\/p>\n

I want to leave this post with an example of how the commodification of culture can be used to actually create cultural agency for good.\u00a0 The band quoted above has sold millions of albums, and been at the apex of the intersection of consumption, art, style, and cool.\u00a0 Yet, they have also used their celebrity and cultural cache to challenge politicians and fans alike to take up the cause of poverty, the widow and the orphan, and those suffering with AIDS.\u00a0 Through their music and influence they were able to create a grassroots movement that turned marketing and globalization into an ongoing campaign to change the world.\u00a0 I personally know people in Africa who would be dead, if it were not for U2\u2019s belief that only when we disentangle faith from consumption will there truly be an eschatological time of no pain.<\/p>\n

I leave you with a cry from U2 to cultural agency, from their song \u201cStandup Comedy:\u201d<\/p>\n

Out from under your beds<\/span>
C’mon ye people\u00a0<\/span><\/span>
Stand up for your love<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Catholic theologian Vincent J. Miller unpacks the intersection of religion and consumerism in Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture.\u00a0 The strong point to Miller\u2019s sketch is the depth and breadth of how he draws late modern capitalism, globalization, postmodernism, and Western Christianity together to show how culture has become fully commoditized.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"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":[371,374,2,255],"class_list":["post-955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-consumerism","tag-consuming-religion","tag-dminlgp","tag-miller"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955","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\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}