The Other Six Days

Usually it's
the Left (religious and political) condemning advertising and consumerism.  The Right, in response, tends to characterize
these as the free market in action.  Similarly,
we hear the Left ranting about corporate control of the media.  This video, however, comes from the Right (in
the pro-gold standard and anti-Federal Reserve sense); but the message is
anti-corporate advertising and anti-corporate media.  Corporate advertising, with the government's participation,
has made debt slaves of all of us. 

Is this
what Ron Paul would be like as a populist rather than a libertarian?  Will we see more crossing of ideological
lines if the economy continues to unravel?

In
his book Another City, Barry Harvey mentions two places in modern societies
where the Church seeks legitimation—the state and the market.  Regarding the state, Harvey argues that
most post-Reformation churches continue to embrace some form of
Constantinianism, proclaiming with joy the end of that era, yet…never hesitating
“to issue advice to the states as if they were Christian kingdoms.”

            If
a church turns to the market for legitimacy, it accepts the role of providing religious
goods and services to individual consumers.  The modern understanding of religion was a good fit for
America, says political columnist George Will: “The founders wished to tame and
domesticate religious passions…by establishing a commercial republic –
capitalism."  Persons seeking religion are
“encouraged to pick and choose from a vast inventory of religious symbols and
doctrines, to select those beliefs that best express his or her private
sentiments.” The obvious danger to any
American church lies in measuring its legitimacy (success) by consumer response, by the popularity of the product.  

The (Magic) Kingdom of God: Christianity and Global Culture Industries

Michael Budde

The thesis of political scientist Michael Budde's book: the
global culture industries present a huge obstacle to spiritual formation.  Budde's book is a wake-up call to the
Christian Church, to help it recognize the extent to which the culture
industries subvert the following of Jesus.

By "culture industries" Budde means mass
communications media, telecommunications firms, computer interests, and
marketing firms.  The construction of
consumption is the job of the culture industries. It is Disney, and not Exxon
or the State Department, which typifies power in today’s economy.  Beware of Mickey Mouse.

The facts are sobering: culture industries have an enormous
influence over what we desire, what we value, what we buy, and how we behave as
citizens.  We are not stupid or easily
fooled, but but our choices are increasingly channeled by the culture
industries.  We are playing poker against
an opponent who has already seen our hand (42).

Television receives its usual share of justifiable abuse in
Budde's book. No matter how many times we have seen the statistics, they still
cause a jolt: the average person will spend thirteen years of his or her life
watching television, three years of which – twenty-four hours a day – will have
been commercials.  Budde pays much more
attention television's form (rather than its content), the way it seduces and
immobilizes people through its manipulation of space and time. Add to
television the constant exposure to the Web, logos, and radio, and you have a
convincing argument that, yes, it really is that bad.

Culture industries present obstacles to prayer, Church
space, religious symbols and narratives. Above all, the global culture
industries rob the Church of time. "One would be hard-pressed to learn any
demanding set of skills or competencies with the amount of time most Christians
in advanced industrial countries devote to their faith tradition. On the other
hand, there are few competencies that cannot be acquired with three to four
hours per day of time invested – and people in the West use that much time to
develop 'competence' in television-watching" (82).

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole

Benjamin R. Barber

Are you deeply concerned by much of
what global capitalism has created, despite it’s wealth-producing potential?  You should be, according to Benjamin Barber.   

Global inequality has left the
planet with two kinds of potential customers: 1) the poor of the undeveloped
world, with vast and underserved needs but not the means to fulfill them, and
2) the first-world rich, who have lots of disposable income but few real needs.

While an earlier capitalist
economy, backed by a Protestant ethos, was built around selling goods like
timber and buckwheat that served people’s needs, today’s consumerist economy
sustains profitability by creating needs, convincing us that Wii’s and iPhones
are necessary.  It has done so by
promoting what Barber calls an ethos of infantilization, a mind-set of “induced
childishness” in which adults pursue adolescent lifestyles.  

Since basic human needs – food, shelter, clothing – have long since been met
for most people in the developed world, marketing professionals now bang their
heads together to reinvent and recreate goods in order to sell more stuff.  Aware that most of our needs were met long
ago, they set about eternalizing childhood desires and fabricating new adult ones. 

Barber records a moment when purchased bottled water in his London hotel. 
Bottled water, in a country where clean water flows straight from the
tap, is perhaps the ultimate in manufactured need. "Over a billion people
are without drinking water," says Barber. "Why don't we find out ways
to get the water they need to them, instead of new ways of getting water to
us?"

All this makes Consumed sound like depressing reading.  In many ways, it is, and the idea that Western
shoppers are to blame for environmental and cultural degradation, even if they have
been hoodwinked into buying unnecessary products, is a heavy cross to
bear. 

Modernity has powerfully
shaped the church, although we are often unaware of its assumptions and
commitments that reside in our theology and practices.  Postmodernity have challenged these
assumptions and commitments, putting many Christians (particularly evangelicals,
it seems) on the defensive.  I think
Smith makes a good argument that this cultural moment provides an opportunity
for serious work in philosophical theory to serve the practice of the
church.  As Francis Schaeffer did before
him, he believes that we must take philosophy seriously, as philosophy does
have practical implications.

Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (The Church and Post

I especially liked
Smith’s treatment of Michael Foucault, the postmodern philosopher who
criticized the formative nature of political, economic and societal structures.  Knowledge, Foucault claims, is not a
neutrally determined reality but a construct shaped by networks of power.  Smith uses the example of the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next to
highlight how institutions attempt to shape people into what they perceive as
normative.  Discerning Christians can
concede much of Foucault’s critique of modernity’s power structures.  What mechanisms of control has the church
ignored, or even allowed to conform it into their image?  One thinks here of Constantinian Christianity,
when the church became nearly indistinguishable from the Roman Empire.  When denominations and their churches grieve
their numerical decline, I have to ask with some skepticism: Are we longing to
participate in God’s mission in the world, or do we long for the days when the
church held a privileged place in the cultural centre? 

Foucalt helps us to see
the role of discipline in our understanding of truth, which begs the question: Who
or what shapes our ecclesiology? 

However,
not all discipline is bad, explains Smith. 
Demonstrating how the church can respond to modernity’s emphasis on
consumerism and individualism by using its counter-forming practices, he
writes: “Discipline and formation are good insofar as they are directed toward
the end, or telos, that is
proper to human beings: to glorify God and enjoy him forever (Westminster Catechism,
question 1).”

Today’s Church is very
susceptible to the market orientation warned against by Philip Kenneson and James Street.  In their insightful book, Selling Out the Church: The Dangers of Church
Marketing, they claim the marketing orientation preached by George
Barna, Norman Shawchuck, and others changes not just a church’s style, but
changes its substance as well.  While the
Gospel may remain intact in a marketing-oriented church, the God-given mission
of the church has been exchanged for a focus on “effectiveness” and “customer
satisfaction,” rather than what the vision for what the church ought to be: “a
sign, a foretaste, and a herald of God’s present but still emerging kingdom.”  

Selling Out the Church The Dangers of Church Marketing

Philip D. Kenneson

            Whole-heartedly adopting what church
marketers refer to as a “marketing orientation” does in fact change “the
character of the Gospel” and “the self understanding of the community of
believers.”  Adopting a marketing orientation produces
more than superficial veneers on deeper identities, when in fact such
practices become substitute identities – forms of acquired character that has
the potential to go all the way down to the core.  Because church marketing defines the purpose
of the church solely in terms of attracting the surrounding community, it
struggles to reflect God’s character and glory to a watching world.  Instead, church marketing creates a church
that reflects the culture rather than shaping it. 

           To be true to its nature and
purpose, perhaps the Church needs to stop thinking attractional  – ‘Come and check us out’ – and to start thinking
incarnational.  By incarnational mission, I mean the understanding
and practice of Christian witness that is rooted in and shaped by the life, ministry,
death, and resurrection of Jesus.  We
must be sensitive to the considerable effort it takes for someone outside the
Christian community to take the initiative to discover an alternative way of
life.  As shown by Jesus and his
interactions – not just with temple authorities, but with the poor and the
rejected – the Kingdom typically lies outside existing religious
structures.  In a post-Christian culture
where so many have no understanding of the basic Christian message and do not
identify with the traditional Christian subculture, we must step out of our
building, and take the Gospel into our diverse community.

Another City is not an extensive ecclesiology, but an attempt to explain the stance that the church should have towards a post-Christendom world.  For the early Christians, Barry Writes, the Church was "another city," so we cannot withdraw into private religous experience or worship in congregations that are functionally equivalent to gated communities.  To this end, Harvey examines the apostolic and patristic vision of the Church not as a separate community, but as another city existing within the earthly city.  He outlines the collapse of this ecclesiology from the time of Constantine to the medieval and modern periods.  Harvey traces the blurring of the distinction of heavenly and earthly city that followed the Constantinian shift, to the abstraction of religion from secular concerns that took place as the result of a Cartesian shift.

Another City: An Ecclesiological Primer for a Post-Christian World

Barry A. Harvey

In the end, he urges a renewal of the early church’s vision of herself and her
mission, so that the church can again engage in a proper "sanctified subversion"
( a phrase from Rodney Clapp) of the postmodern risk culture.  Is the
postmodern church's struggle an intellectual one, adapting its message to the
surrounding culture?  Or does our struggle require technical or programmatic changes in
order to attract outsiders?  For Harvey, our struggle must be an ecclesiological
one.

I can't help but think that if American voters were better informed, Ron Paul would be leading in the polls.  Do we really have freedom in America if we really have only two choices on election day?