Lost in the Supermarket - Part 1

This article is part of a series entitled “Charting Our Course,” published in our church paper, in which we are exploring Who we are, Where we are, and Where we are going as Christ’s Church.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark

As human gods aim for their mark

Make everything from toy guns that spark

To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark

It's easy to see without looking too far

That not much

Is really sacred.

(Bob Dylan)

It is easy to ignore the invasion of the psyche that advertisements now constitute. More pushy than Goebbels (Hitler’s minister of propaganda), every fifteen minutes for much of people’s lives, and never subjected to critical scrutiny, they add up to near terminal indoctrination. Or haven’t you noticed? (Alan Storkey, Sociologist)

All I wanted was some cereal. We’d been a year away in Beijing, teaching English, and were now returning to “normal” life in our little apartment in Winnipeg. I’d gone to our local Safeway to get some basic groceries and a few minutes later found myself shipwrecked in aisle # 10 (or 9, or 7, or whatever), virtually unable to move as I tried to cope with the fact of an entire wall of cereals in front of me, all of them bent on seducing me by associating health, youth, happiness, and sex appeal with the purchase of a particular brand. Kendra and I have since reacclimatized. We now think it is both normal and necessary to have 60 brands of cereal to choose from. We’re not sure that our ability to adapt is a good thing.

It’s no secret that we’re consumers. In our world the number of available products of all kinds has increased exponentially from year to year. We now have an increasing number of “needs” that our parents and grandparents never even new about (note: tongue firmly in cheek here). It has always been true that consumption is necessary to live, and certainly commercial development within a culture can be healthy. But necessary consumption is a much different thing than Consumerism. Consumerism is an unhealthy development of commerce. My thesis in this paper is that Consumerism is a religion. I will first of all define what consumerism is, then describe how it functions as a religion.

What is Consumerism?
Craig Bartholomew, in a book entitled Christ and Consumerism: A Critical Analysis of the Spirit of the Age, points out three main characteristics of consumerism. First, “Consumerism points to a culture in which the core values of the culture derive from consumption rather than the other way around.”[1] Think about that for a moment. If our core values are derived from consumption, rather than our consumption determined by our core values, then consumption for consumption’s sake becomes the guiding value of life. What ultimately counts is my own pleasure and gratification.

A second characteristic of Consumerism is that in it “freedom is equated with individual choice and private life.”[2] If freedom is equal to individual choice and private life, and if our individual choices are largely determined by our experience of pleasure and gratification through consumption, then freedom of choice is in principle unconstrained and for the sake of private pleasure. The implications of this are radical. All restraints on what can be consumed are removed. Activies, objects, and even relationships can all be reduced to mere commodities for the use of the individual consumer’s personal pleasure and gratification.

The third characteristic of Consumerism is that it is a culture in which “needs are unlimited and unsatiable.”[3] The success of consumerism and, we are made to believe, our economy, is premised on an unlimited consumer appetite. The benevolent advertising gods go to a great deal of trouble to make us aware every day of needs that we did not know we had. Need creation is big business. This is ironic, because “consumerism promises to satisfy our needs in an unprecedented way, but its continuance depends on that satisfaction never actually being achieved.”[4]

Consumerism as Religion
So, what do the above characteristics of our culture have to do with religion? Is it too much to say that consumerism has an underlying religious story (the march of progress, which produces “goods” (or bads) and technological advances by which humanity will eventually achieve peace, prosperity, and personal wellbeing), requires a faith (in unlimited economic growth which is necessary if needs are indeed unlimited and unsatiable), and has definite places of worship (the shopping mall, either physical or online)?[5] Sociologist Alan Storkey writes that “Consumption has now become the dominant faith… Consumption is collectivist-individualist, nationalist-internationalist, the healer, the entertainer, the lover, the spiritual, the feeder and the consolation. It is the chief rival to God in our culture.”[6]
Think of it from another angle. What does God promise us? Peace, joy, hope, a future, right relationships, belonging, and purpose are a few that come to mind. Through advertising Consumerism links these fundamentally spiritual effects with certain products. Storkey notes that “This (advertising) is a process whereby products are linked to the inscape of persons. Let us list a few of the inner [spiritual] appeals which are made, premised on buying certain goods: confidence, innocence, relaxation, love, security, power, naturalness, fun, status, comfort, peace, happy families, romantic love, friendship, excitement, freedom from stress, sex appeal, personal attraction, health, youth, happiness, serenity and many more aspects of a good life are tied to products and services.[7] And so it is that Consumerism offers an alternate way to the “goods” that God promises us if we follow Him. Is Consumerism not a religion?

Like any religion, Consumerism deeply impacts key areas of life. Next month in “Lost in the Supermarket, Part II” we will look at the way it shapes our ethics and experiences of birth, marriage, death, religion, and our relationship with our neighbor.
[1] Craig Bartholomew, “Christ and Consumerism: An Introduction” in Christ and Consumerism, ed. Craig Bartholomew and Thorsten Moritz, (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2000.), 6.
[2] Ibid., 8.
[3] Ibid., 9.
[4] Ibid., 9.
[5] Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 30.
[6] Alan Storkey, “Post-Modernism is Consumption” in Christ and Consumerism, 100.
[7] Ibid., 113.