Consumerism

Big Box Altars

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All hail the might dollar!This last weekend, my wife and I did something we haven’t done in almost three years…

We spent a day shopping.

Unlike some Americans, we shop only if forced. As we try to simplify our lives by purchasing fewer and fewer things, shopping dwindles into the background along with other things we’ve relegated to the backburner of life (like TV viewing, going to the movies, and taking vacations every year).

One of the truths the Lord’s been teaching me concerns the embarrassment of riches we have in the United States. I got a larger lesson in this when I walked into a store I haven’t visited in more than two years: Best Buy.

My wife practices her singing on the way to work, but her car’s stereo burned out so she can’t practice along with her CDs. I came to see what I could find in a new stereo under $150. I also noted here a few weeks ago that our TV burned out. While we may watch next to no broadcast television, we do, on rare occasions, get a DVD out of our local library and take an evening off. So I wandered into Best Buy to get a feel for what’s out there in both offerings.

Whoa. The price tags! Am I reading it right that a TV capable of rendering a fully digital signal—as mandated by the FCC as of this month—costs a minimum of $1,500?

Sometime in the distant past of my shoddy memory, $1500 used to be what a car cost. In other words, one heck of a lot of money. Yet on this eighty degree, sunny day, Best Buy filled with people waving cash, their eyes wider than the width of the TVs that grabbed their attention.

What grabbed my attention was those folks’ shoes. You can tell everything you want to know about someone’s income by their shoes. Well-off people may wear grubby clothes, but rarely do they wear grubby, no-name-brand shoes. (When I worked in sales years ago, I picked my customers based on their shoes and routinely chalked up monster sales figures as a result) .

The shoes on the humungo TV-buyers said this: “We can’t afford this TV.” The kids wore knock-offs, swooshes that mimicked Nike, stripes not exactly Adidas. And so did their parents.

Thrifty, perhaps. But a quick scan of the newspapers tells a different story. We’ve got record personal bankruptcies, record mortgage defaulting, a huge spike in credit card debt (after years of downward numbers), negative savings rates, too much leverage on our houses through home equity loans, and a rise in every negative economic indicator known to Man.

Yet we keep on buying. We have to.

Hear David’s heart cry:

Look to the right and see: there is none who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to me; no one cares for my soul. I cry to you, O LORD; I say, “You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living.”
—Psalm 142:4-5

Standing there in Best Buy, watching people cart out thousands of dollars worth of items that a house fire would reduce in heartbeats to so much melted glass and oozing plastic, I understood.

Best Buy takes notice of them. Samsung cares for their souls. Sony is their portion, Panasonic their refuge. Be it Best Buy, Home Depot, DSW, Bass Pro Shops, or whatever— that big box store’s got an altar to perfectly fit that hole where God should be enthroned.

At some point in the history of the United States, Jesus Christ failed to satisfy. You and I know this had nothing to do with the splendor of the Lord. He’s the same yesterday, today, and forever. But something changed in us.

I’ve been writing about the Holy Spirit quite a bit lately, and I think the American Church’s understanding of Him may explain our Big Box Altars.
I believe that we made the Lord a mental exercise. The Enlightenment inflicted a dire wound on our grasp of the Faith. We turned the Faith that enlivens us into something we cognitively assent to. Yet in doing so, we stripped the passion, the intense feelings of intimacy, that accompany faith in Christ. Our churches transformed into dim depositories of hazy reflections of what it means to be aflame with love for Jesus.

As a result, verses like the following don’t register with us:

I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the LORD!”
—Psalms 122:1

I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. As a lily among brambles, so is my love among the young women. As an apple tree among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved among the young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. Sustain me with raisins; refresh me with apples, for I am sick with love.
—Song of Solomon 2:1-5

Instead of being sick with love for Jesus, instead of longing with all our hearts to dwell with our brothers and sisters in Christ before Him, we pump ourselves up to watch March Madness on our new 60″ plasma TV. You should have seen the eyes of the men in that store as they watched (oh so fortuitously) NCAA basketball games on those monster TVs. You could almost hear their souls saying, “This is what I truly need. I’m sick with love.”

Idolatry isn’t pretty.

But then again, neither is sterile intellectual debate. Yet how easily the American Church concedes passion and emotion! Dry, dusty churches fill with people looking to be sick in love with something, someone, anything, yet we give them intellectual discourses on the fiery faith of our fathers. We hold Jesus Christ out as a systematic theology. Or we make Him into a trifle that exists only to wave a magic wand and Poof!, a more real object of our affection shows up in our living room—all sixty plasma-filled inches of it.

A reader asked me the other day what kind of church I go to that it has drums and dancing. The fact that someone asked that question saddened me, because it made me wonder what kind of church he/she attends. What kinds of sermons? What kind of fellowship? What kind of worship?

Any life at all?

I’ve got to believe there’s something wrong with a Church where week in and week out there’s no weeping before the altar of the Lord. If a man can go through an entire church year without once falling on his face weeping, without soaking the church carpeting with his tears, something’s desperately wrong with his church.

I’ve got to believe that a church will never amount to much for the Kingdom if it never once sees someone get up and dance during worship. I’ve got to believe that a church filled with people who just sit and nod their heads will be asleep when the Bridegroom comes. The Holy Spirit’s missing in a church that goes through the emotionless motions.

How can an unstirred church reflect anything resembling the abundant life?

In C.S. Lewis’s masterful book, The Great Divorce, he posits a heaven so substantial that all of life this side of it resembles a vapor. Massive, unearthly Christians fill that dense heaven, giants, heroes that shake the foundation of the world with their conquests. How then can it be that so little life fills believers today? Why is it that we cannot find succor for our souls on Sunday, but instead find our hearts strangely warmed—if only for a passing moment—by a 60″ plasma display rocking with the Final Four?

Have we Christians rendered Christ so inconsequential? Have we denied the power of YHWH for the power of LG?

What happened to passion and fire?

Seen So Far This Christmas Shopping Season…

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Some random things I've observed in the first weeks of the shopping season. Nothing of great spiritual import, just interesting.

  • I've not done much shopping, but already I've noticed that almost every item on the shelves is about 15-25% more expensive than last year, especially if it's made of plastic. I suspect that this shopping season is the first one to reflect higher petroleum prices. Almost every toy that was $30 last year is $35 this year. One classic plastic toy I bought my son last Christmas sold at a regular price of $12.95. This year that same toy is $17.95. Same store, same time of the year, same exact toy.

  • Discount stores like WalMart are lowering their sales figure expectations, while more expensive department stores are seeing a 6% rise in sales over last year. Not many pundits are speculating on this odd discrepancy, but it fits with studies showing the rich getting richer and the poor poorer. If too many discounters have a bad selling season, expect to see them move upscale quickly. I know that Costco continues to upscale their offerings. Now I buy about two-thirds fewer items from them than I did just ten years ago. Aldi, here I come.

  • Who are these people who buy giant battery-powered vehicles for their toddlers to drive? I saw a Hummer model selling for $300. Are you kidding me? The American savings rate is in negative numbers, but people are buying $300 Hummer replicas for their kids to drive around in?

  • Over the past decade, I've purchased most of my Christmas presents online. In nearly every case, I found items online for significantly less, even with tax and shipping figured in. This year, though, the brick and mortar stores seem to be beating online stores in average price.

  • When I was a kid in the Sixties and early Seventies, Spirograph held our interest for years. We had a Super Spirograph kit containing a half dozen ring and bar templates, plus a couple dozen circles, crosses, and even "rotary engine"-shaped pieces to go inside/outside them. I probably cranked out a couple thousand Spirograph pictures over the life of our kit. So this year I go looking for a Spirograph for my son, only to find a scaled-down abomination: one tiny circle template and some weird ovoid, plus about a half dozen circles. What a bitter disappointment. So I check eBay and the best Spirograph kits are going for $50+! Hasbro seriously missed the boat on this new "Deluxe" Spirograph. Way to mess up a perfectly good, inexpensive plaything.

  • Prices for digital cameras jumped right before Christmas. Companies bumped their $200 models to $250 by adding features no one will ever use (built-in sepia tone, anyone?) Canon replaced the excellent Powershot A620 with the A640 and jacked the price $60 for no real reason I can discern. Bah, humbug!

  • Board games seem to be coming back into vogue—and that's great. (Unfortunately, most stores stock the same boring ones everyone's played. Honestly, does anyone find Monopoly fun?) For a break from the ordinary, check out Boardgames with Scott. Scott Nicholson's premise is one of the best uses I've seen for online video snippets: introduce people to new games and demonstrate how they're played. I'd love it if Ticket to Ride (America) showed up under my Christmas tree this year.

  • A pox on toy manufacturers who play up some electronic gizmo with plug-in cartridges one Christmas, then a year later you can't find the cartridges anywhere.

  • I spotted only one Salvation Army bellringer so far. That's sad. They've got a fantastic series of commercials and print ads this year, but the number of bellringers goes down every year.

Sorry if this post appears Grinch-y. I'm usually done shopping by Veterans Day, but this year I can't seem to get into shopping like I once did. Growing up, my family saved all shopping for the year for Christmas, so presents swamped the tree. I'm used to taking hours to open gifts.

This year, though, I'm distracted. I see so much need around me. It's so easy to buy, buy, buy and miss the people whose Christmases will once again be sparse. I think about the elderly people who would much rather have their family pay them some attention than to toss a gift their way one day and ignore them the other 364. Or single parents struggling just to keep a roof overhead and food on the table.

I'm watching more than participating in the six week consumer bonanza that makes up the majority of yearly spending in this country. Frankly, our own Christmas promises to be a little thin this year. Don't know how I'll square that with Christmases fondly remembered, but I still have room to grow.

I believe God's desiring that all of us receive less and give more, thinking outside the bunkers we call home to the less fortunate tucked in the cracks of the world. We got the ultimate gift in Jesus. I pray we don't forget to offer His gift of eternal life to everyone we know.

Unshackling the American Church: Mammon

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No servant can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
—Luke 16:13 MKJV

Faith in Fashion or in Christ?Strong’s Concordance lists that troubling word mammon as “avarice (deified).” A better definition one cannot possibly hope to unearth. Unearthing a Church buried under layer after layer of avarice deified, on the other hand, poses a challenge to us American Christians, so inured are we to the materialism that masquerades as legitimate culture in this country.

What else can explain the horror pictured at right? As frightening as this “innocent” figurine might be, I suspect that the manufacturers sold a boatload to Christians so ensnared by mammon that they couldn’t discern the conflict. The double entendre of “Faith Is Always in Fashion” works doubly hard to prove the case that we’ve developed a consumerized faith that isn’t necessarily in Christ, but in the art of the deal.

(Don’t you just love the little ICHTHUS fishes embroidered down the side of her jeans? Somewhere, a Christian fashion designer is thinking, “Man, they stole my idea!”)

The nauseating text for "Faith is always in fashion"What I cropped out of the picture is the sickening description for this figurine. You can find it at left. As a freelance commercial writer who’s a Christian, I’d rather be dragged over a pile of broken glass with an alcohol bath chaser than write what you see reproduced here.

Now I’m not one to call for burning at the stake, but the person who greenlighted this abhorrent project at The Hamilton Collection should at least receive a hotfoot or a Roman candle dropped down his or her briefs.

But then it’s difficult to be angry at the perpetrators of this excrement when we consider how a love for mammon defines Americans today. Too many of us in the American Church can’t see our hypocrisy. While Evangelicals rail against the secularized liberal elite that preaches a nonstop stream of dissolute sexual freedom, at the same time that same Christian Right has few hang-ups about unimpeded avarice deified. We certainly wouldn’t champion being “pro-choice” when it comes to abortion, but try to take away our consumer choices (two hundred breakfast cereals, anyone?) and we’ll holler just as loud as the pro-death leftists we say we oppose.

We of all people, the ones who fully understand the depths of human corruption, should be the folks casting a wary eye on economic systems run by fallen men. Yet we so easily fake blindness to unrestricted markets and the devastation they bring through the hands of unregenerate men and women. What does it say about us that all too often we’re capitalists first and Christians second?

I don’t get political on this blog because there’s a million and a half Christian blogs out there talking politics, but I find it astonishing that so many Christians claim to be political conservatives, but the only thing they seem to be interested in conserving is a middle to upper class consumptive lifestyle. Their Christianity adheres to politics like velcro, but does it inform a reality that conserves what is most important to our Lord?

What is the natural outcome of unrelentingly pursuing cheap items? On our way to that sale at Macy’s, are we aware we might be sacrificing the very values Jesus Christ came to reinforce? TV has programmed us to be jealous of the Joneses, so while we champion family values, it’s become every family for itself. I don’t see that in my Bible anywhere.  And as much as we talk about Christian community, do our church folk eat together in each other’s homes daily like the early Christians did? Does the community of saints even see each other regularly outside of our Sunday meetings? If not, then how are we truly a community if we’re not investing in each other’s lives more than once or twice a week?

The Industrial Revolution ultimately birthed all this consumerism, killed countryside communities, broke apart our families, left our youth with nothing else to do than to shop and hang out at malls, put us in soul-killing jobs, and saddled us with this nagging, modern ennui. Yet the American Church never questioned it. Even today, we’re unwilling to step back and ask if we went wrong on our little trip to Modernism.

We can question it now. We can stop accumulating and start thinking about conservation of what is right before God: strong families working with their neighbors creating strong local economies that grow strong communities and strong churches that make disciples, create beauty, conserve the sacred, and steward the Creation.

We can serve God or we can serve mammon. We’ve spent too many decades serving the latter. Time to try the former.

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This is the last post in the “Unshackling the American Church” series based in part on ideas in Rod Dreher’s book, Crunchy Cons . I would encourage everyone reading this blog to read that book with an eye on what Christians should truly be valuing in this life. Even though many Christians are political conservatives, we’ve gotten off the path of what in God’s eyes is most worth conserving. I could probably blog more on this topic, but I’ve previously touched on many of these ideas in the Best of Cerulean Sanctum posts you can find listed in the Sidebar.

Don’t accept the status quo. Much of what we live out today in normal practice in the United States is not inherently Christian, though we’ve gilded it with enough spiritual talk to allow it to pass. We can’t live like that, though, because God will judge us for what we did with the things He considers valuable.

The American Church is shackled by consumerism, wastefulness, disregard for the Creation, disconnectedness between people, a penchant for the cheap and ugly, and a shockingly low regard for what is sacred and lasting. But like I say so many times here at Cerulean Sanctum, it doesn’t have to be that way. If enough of us take the time to consider if a more Christian way to live exists, we’ll eventually find a way to live it, even if it never fully mirrors our ultimate destination.

Thanks for reading.

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Other posts in the “Unshackling the American Church” series: