Like it or not, we are consumers. Just as a peasant in feudal 13th century Normandy was, without a choice, a farmer, so we, 21st-century westerners, are consumers. That isn’t to say the 13th-century farmer or the 21st-century consumer is reduced to that identity, but it is undeniably a part of how the farmer or the consumer thinks, feels, believes, and acts.

That consumerism, then, profoundly shapes the way we view the world and our faith. We can’t help but view our faith with the eyes of consumerism. That might feel like an off-putting statement. I realize that consumerism is thrown around as a dirty word and our natural impulse is to distance ourselves from it.

But to be able to diagnose our hearts, we have to be willing to accept this reality about ourselves. Just as you would think it absurd for a medieval feudal peasant to demand, “farming may impact the faith of those around me, but it doesn’t impact my faith!” so we ought to have enough self-awareness to realize that consumerism impacts the way all of us in 21st century America interact with our faith.

Jamie Smith’s profound book, Desiring the Kingdom, lays out a captivating description of the shopping mall as seen through the eyes of a Martian. In doing so, Smith gives us new eyes to see the ways in which the mall speaks cultural truths.

Smith exposes three truths that the mall tells us about ourselves as consumers and I’ve added a fourth:

1)      “I’m broken, therefore I shop.” The mall latches onto our own sense of deficit and insecurity; it creates desires and offers fulfillment for those desires, whether it is a PS4 or a new wardrobe or a salty soft pretzel coupled with a tart and sweet lemonade.

2)      “I shop with others.” Despite our tacit assumption that we are individualistic as a society, the mall actually betrays that we are built around social connection around shared desires and competition in those desires.

3)      “I shop therefore I am.” We are implicitly told at the mall that consumption is redemption. Shopping is therapy, we lose ourselves in “the labyrinth of racks and find new delights and surprises that – at least for a time – cover over the doldrums of our workaday existence.”[i] In addition, shopping creates a sense of identity in what we acquire. We “seek to find” to acquire and become what we hope for.

4)      “I am in control.” The phrase “the customer is always right” is ubiquitous and shapes our experience as consumers. It doesn’t matter who we are or what station we have in life, when we walk into the mall, with $5 or $500 to burn, we are in control and treated as royalty.

There ought to be a prick in our conscience as we read these truths about who we are as consumers. Even for those who fight the way in which we’ve been shaped by our culture’s cathedral of consumerism, the reality is that there are none of us who have been unaffected.

The next post will turn to how this impacts the way we engage our faith in the context of the local church

For more on the Consumers series, see:

Part 1: I Shop Therefore I Am

Part 2: The Odd Concept of Church Shopping

Part 3: Welcome to McChurch

Part 4: Consuming Worship

 [i] James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 99.

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