Why the Devil takes VISA

A Christian response to the triumph of consumerism.

-by Rodney Clapp

Every person under the sun must eat to live, and in that sense we are allblameless and glorious consumers-as at a feast lovingly prepared by agrandmother. There is nothing wrong, and much very right, about consumingto live. Hence Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard speaks winningly from the Jewish traditionof "consecrated consumption."

What worries some people is that the affluent, technologically advanced Westseems more and more focused not on consuming to live, but on living to consume.(I confess at the outset to being one of these ambivalent creatures, fatbut troubled in paradise.) The problem with consumption, and the consumercapitalism that has pushed it to feverish historical extremes, is the factthat it has become so all-consuming.

Even Americans-citizens of the premier "nation of consumers" (RichardTedlow)-recognize problems with the extremes to which we have taken consumptionas a way of life. Recycling containers, nonexistent ten years ago, now standsentry outside every home in my suburban neighborhood, bearing testimonyto one of the most obvious problems.

We are sensitized to the ecological damage of an intentionally wasteful societyfostered by "planned obsolescence." Perhaps some environmentalists indulgein hysteria and hyperbole, but however overstated their warnings may be,there is no denying the murky brown clouds of smog hanging over Los Angeles,or Lake Michigan beaches closed to swimmers because of raw sewage seepinginto the lake.

A problematic feature of consumer capitalism is the inescapable barrage ofadvertising-its coaching and coaxing of multitudinous desires. The NewYork Times has estimated that the average American is exposed to 3,500ads per day. So inundated, we are hardly aware of how pervasive and invasivethese images and messages are.

Their force struck me last winter when, in the course of researching thesubject of consumption, I spent three days at a Christian community devoidof televisions and radios, and removed from billboard-besieged highways.Arriving back at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, I felt assaulted by posters andbillboards hyping svelte, suave men and incredibly coiffed, airbrushed women-eventhough a few days before I had passed them by without a second thought. Deprivedof these stimuli for half a week, the ads seemed hollow, artificial, evenunnatural. I heard myself mutter, "This is not the way things are supposedto be."

But consumer capitalism is much more pervasive, and much less obvious, thansmog or billboards. Look harder, and you can see it at work all around-shapingattitudes, bending behaviors, grinding an endless series of lenses throughwhich to see and experience the world in a particular way. You see it atthe medical clinic, where doctors must pump a certain number of patientsthrough their doors to meet the required profit quotas of Health MaintenanceOrganizations. You see it on the calendar, defined not so much by holy daysas by a string of commercially hyped holidays. You see it at the ballpark,where owners and players sour even devout fans with their struggle over alreadyexorbitant salaries and box-office revenues.

I asked Lendol Calder, a historian in New Hampshire who devoted his doctoraldissertation to consumerism, "When did you first begin to notice the depthand breadth of consumerism in our culture?" He recalled a Christian campfor college students of several nationalities. A get-acquainted exercisedivided campers by nationality, charging them to choose a song representingtheir culture, one that all could approve and sing to the rest of the assembly.Most nationalities reached consensus, practiced, and were ready in 10 to20 minutes; nearly all the groups chose folk songs from their native lands.

Not the Americans. They debated over 20 minutes, then an hour. Some wanteda rock song; others suggested a series of country songs. At last they settledon the Coca-Cola jingle "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing." The tune ringingin his ears, Lendol realized that commercial culture was what really boundthese Americans-these American Christians- together.

It is not just consumerism in its most undisguised, hackneyed manifestationsthat should concern us, but consumerism as an ethos, a character-cultivatingway of life that seduces and insinuates and acclimates. This, too often,is consumption that militates against the Christian virtues of patience,contentedness, self-denial, and generosity-almost always with a velvet gloverather than an iron fist. It speaks in sweet and sexy rather than dictatorialtones, and it conquers by promises rather than by threats.

That is what envelops us, as surely as the air we breathe. But not as naturallyas the air. Consumerism and the capitalism that created and has sustainedit is not a force of nature. It has a history. Of course it cannot, and shouldnot, be reshaped overnight. It did not itself appear overnight, but insteadover the course of centuries. Yet the fact that it cannot be changed wholesaleimmediately is no excuse (at least not for Christians) for failing to engageit critically, understanding it as best we can, and resisting its ill effectswherever and as vigorously as we can. People can make history and changethe course of cultures, though not within circumstances of their own choosing.Consumer capitalism, both for good and for ill, is a pervasive and foundationalreality of our day, yet people can significantly respond to it and potentiallychange its course.

I. When Capitalism Was Unthinkable
Several essential features of today's capitalism were either unimaginableor positively condemned throughout most of Christian history. We no longerquestion the legitimacy of making money with money. But throughout churchhistory, up through the Reformation, the charging of interest was proscribed.In earlier eras, the church would have regarded stock market speculationas nothing more than profligate gambling. We suffer no crisis of conscience,nor even a second thought, about consuming goods or experiences solely forrelaxation and amusement. Yet Puritans and our Christian forebears of otherstrains understood consumption principally for pleasure as sinful indulgence.

We presume the obvious rightness-as long as it is done legally-of makinga profit, and indeed, maximizing that profit. It did not so easily make senseto the church fathers. "Business is in itself an evil," Augustine flatlydeclared. And Jerome suspected, "A man who is a merchant can seldom if everplease God." At the end of the first century, the author of theDidache would not have gone in for building a mutual fund portfolio:"Never turn away the needy; share all your possessions with your brother,and do not claim that anything is your own. If you and he are joint participatorsin things immortal, how much more so in things that are mortal?" In the secondcentury, The Shepherd of Hermas counseled directly against investmentand the accumulation of profit, arguing that Christians are aliens to thisworld and have no call to amass worldly wealth. "Instead of fields, then,buy souls that are in trouble. . . . Look after widows and orphans and donot neglect them. Spend your riches and all your establishments you havereceived from God on this kind of field and houses!"

Much later, in the Boston of 1635, a Puritan merchant was charged by theelders of his church with defaming God's name. He was hauled before the GeneralCourt of the Commonwealth and convicted of greed because he had sold hiswares at 6 percent profit, 2 percent above the maximum allowed by law.

One more example should suffice to drive home the point that capitalism andconsumerism have not always been with us. Max Weber argued that while moderncapitalist employers depend on the principle of increased "piece-rates,"or more pay for more production, such a thing was not at all second natureto a traditional or precapitalistic way of life. Again and again, he says,employers in the early capitalist period found that raising piece-rates didnot automatically raise production. For example, Weber observed that if ahired hand were offered an increase in wage per acre of hay mowed, he wouldnot increase his production but would rather work until he made the sameamount to which he was accustomed, actually reducing his production. "Theopportunity of earning more was less attractive," said Weber, "than thatof working less."

But, as Weber realized, it was not just that working less was more attractivethan earning more. There was simply no conception of an economy that mightlimitlessly increase-of progress and career tracks and salary increases.The traditional man or woman saw no sense in making more than necessary tomeet his or her customary needs. So, as Weber put it, "A man does not 'bynature' wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomedto live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose. Wherever moderncapitalism has begun its work of increasing the productivity of human labourby increasing its intensity, it has encountered the immensely stubborn resistanceof this leading trait of pre-capitalistic labour."

All this meant that, in the Christian-influenced West in which capitalismoriginated, for capitalism to succeed it required a theological foundationand legitimation. Capitalism had to be learned. Many important factors inaddition to theology were at work, of course: technological innovations,the growth of cities, and other developments were necessary for capitalismto be born and to thrive. But pervasively Christian polities and people didnot-in fact, could not-suddenly one day simply assume the rightness and goodnessof profit-making, of taking interest on loans, of consumption for pleasure,of the accumulation of resources exceeding immediate needs.

Through decades they honestly and reverently grappled to interpret and shapetheir material lives in the light of God. Toward that end lay persons, andnot just professional theologians, struggled to give theological credibilityto what we now call capitalism and (eventually) consumerism. Of course, atno point in the development of capitalism did any theologian set out consciouslyto construct a theology of capitalism-let alone to justify such abuses ofcapitalistic economies as price gouging, addictive shopping, or ecologicaldamage. This process of sanctioning capitalism and consumerism was done withouteconomics in mind, so that in looking back on a "theology" of capitalismand consumption we are talking about indirect and often even undesired effects.

The theology behind capitalism
Max Weber demonstrated in his venerable The Protestant Ethic and the Spiritof Capitalism that the mercantile way of life was not held in high esteemprior to the Reformation. According to Weber's famous and much-debated thesis,it was the Protestant, and particularly the Calvinist, understanding of
a Christian's calling that paved the way for business to be accepted as anhonorable and eventually exemplary way of life. Protestants following Calvinfulfilled their calling in the entirety of their lives, not just in any onepart or specially "religious" sphere of life. For them, their calling wasnothing less (if a bit more) than their daily work-everything they did fromsunup to sundown. And evidence or assurance of their salvation flowed fromthe success of their calling.

Thus, suggested Weber, did the Protestant Ethic enable the spirit of capitalism.Still, it is perhaps more a theology of production than a theology ofconsumption. For, as Weber put it, the Protestant Ethic was not originallyconsumer-oriented or hedonistic. In fact, it featured a "strict avoidanceof all spontaneous enjoyment of life."

But there were ironic consequences. As John Wesley famously worried, theProtestant Ethic must "necessarily produce both industry and frugality, andthese cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger,and love of the world in all of its branches." He concurred that "we mustexhort all Christians to gain all they can, and to save all they can; thatis, in effect, to grow rich." Yet, "wherever riches have increased, the essenceof religion has decreased in the same proportion." We have here a hint thatthe line between a theology of production and a theology of consumption quicklyand easily blurs.

The justification of consumption
In a Weberian vein, the British sociologist Colin Campbell has traced theblossoming of a theology of consumption (The Romantic Ethic and the Spiritof Modern Consumption, 1987). To show how Christian theology and waysof life laid the groundwork for the later Romantic preoccupation with selfand the self's pleasures, Campbell focuses on those extremely influentiallater Calvinists, the Puritans.

Campbell notes that for the Puritans, "an intensely personal, subjectiveexperience" was used to gauge the authenticity of faith. As the historianWilliam Haller put it, Puritans "were taught to follow by intense introspectionthe working of the law of predestination within their own souls." The "theater"of the most intense drama imaginable-eternal salvation or damnation-was inside"the human breast." Consequently, it came to pass that a melancholy bearing,self-debasement, and fascination with one's own death were considered outwardsigns of inward godliness. True faith, observes Campbell, was associatedwith a certain "profound emotional sensibility."

In short, Campbell argues that Romanticism and its precious cultivation ofthe emotions is in part Puritanism secularized. The eighteenth century sawincreases in technology and affluence that lengthened life expectancy andprompted more optimistic attitudes about life and the world. The Enlightenmenttook hold, and religion was forced to relax its grip. Yet even as old beliefsin sin, hell, and eternal damnation paled, "there was a reluctance to abandonthe subjective states with which they had been associated" since these"religiously generated emotions had became a source of pleasure in themselves."

A secularized society seeks the satisfaction of this appetite for intenseemotion by relishing the frights of a horror movie, knowing there reallyis no lunatic with a butcher knife behind us; or by delighting in an amusementpark ride, realizing the roller coaster is not going to fly off the track.We pay money to savor the tears we weep, on cushioned theater seats, at aShakespearean tragedy. So have our feelings become "a source of pleasurein themselves" and, as we will see, the primary "object" of our consumerculture.

And so it was that gradually and subtly, between 1660 and 1760, the middleclasses reinterpreted Protestantism sentimentally, rather than Calvinistically.Weber's Protestant Ethic stressed "rationality, instrumentality, industryand achievement." What Campbell calls the Other Protestant Ethic stressedfervent feeling, sentimentality, luxurious introspection, and an abidingemphasis on self-fulfillment. This Other Protestant Ethic had a great influenceon both evangelical and liberal Protestantism, as well as secular cultures.

We do well to remember that Western civilization did not go to bed one nightfull of faith and wake up the next morning absolutely secular. Even today,of course, faith is not finally vanquished-and neither is it unmarked bysecularization. In our actual, messy world, Christians-quite apart from theirancestors' sobriety and wariness of hedonism-still had a thing or two toteach the world about consumption. Consider the example of revivalism.

Revivalism and the architects of consumerism
By underscoring the importance of making a decision for Christ, Charles Finneyand other revivalists helped along the sanctification of choice, akey component of today's consumer capitalism. Revivalism encouraged rapturousfeelings and a malleable self that is open time and again to the changesof conversion and reconversion. This was simply translated into a propensitytoward "conversion" to new products, a variety of brands, and fresh experiences.

In fact, peddlers were fixtures on the fringes of revival meetings, wherethey hawked counsel and medicines promising transformation of the buyers'lives. Modern advertising grew directly out of the patent-medicine trade.And advertising testimonials drew directly on the before-and-after patternof evangelical testimony. The difference, as Jackson Lears notes, was that"In the patent medicine literature, soul-sickness took bodily form and requiredphysical intervention. Suffering was caused not by sin, but by constipation,catarrh, bilious liver, seminal losses, or the ubiquitous 'tired feeling.'"

Not unlike a witness at a revival meeting, one Karl Barton in 1875 confessedthat his life before his first bottle of Dr. Chase's nerve pills was a mess."It was a pretty hard matter for me to call attention to anything in particular.It was a general, debilitated, languid, played-out feeling, and while notpainful, depressing." In the ads the nerve pills were, of course, his salvationand road to a new, born-again life.

Other examples might be added to that of revivalism. In fact, Christianswere in a remarkable number of cases architects of twentieth-century consumerculture. Many influential advertising managers and copywriters, for instance,were the offspring of ministers. Some famous individuals stand out, not leastCoca-Cola magnate Asa G. Candler and department-store impresario John Wanamaker.

Candler bought the formula for Coke from its pharmacist-inventor in 1891.Brother to a Methodist bishop and a devout Methodist himself (Emory University'sCandler School of Theology bears the family name), Asa, according to hisson, made his faith "the central purpose" of his life.

Candler believed Coca-Cola cured his chronic headaches and promoted it withsomething like evangelistic zeal. "If people knew the good qualities of Coca-Colaas I know them," he said, "it would be necessary for us to lock the doorsof our factories and have a guard with a shotgun" to control demand. In thisspirit, he liked to conclude sales meetings with a group singing of "Onward,Christian Soldiers."

Coca-Cola was one of the earliest commodities to be massively advertised.In 1912, the Advertising Club of America declared it the best-advertisedproduct in the U.S. Economic historian Richard Tedlow believes that Candler'sbreadth of marketing vision grew out of his involvement in national andinternational missions.

John Wanamaker, founder of Wanamaker department stores, was a lifelong, intenselyfaithful Presbyterian. He was an inveterate Bible reader, a close friendand supporter of Dwight L. Moody, heavily involved in the Sunday-school movement,and refused to sell wine and liquor in his stores "on principle."

At the same time, Wanamaker, more than any other merchant of his time, broughtFrench fashion to America. He had the country's biggest furniture showroomsand was pleased that he could translate "luxuries into commodities or intonecessities" more rapidly than any other merchant.

Wanamaker, who died in 1922, was also a main player in the commercializationof the Christian holy days of Christmas and Easter. At Christmastime, Wanamakerturned the Grand Court of his Philadelphia store into a veritable cathedral,replete with stained glass, stars, and angelic statuary. The effect was sochurchlike that gentlemen, upon entering, instinctively doffed their hats.The store was also sacrally decked out at Easter when Wanamaker displayedgiant, 23-foot-long paintings of Christ Before Pilate and Christon Calvary.

The point in dwelling on revivalism and such men as Candler and Wanamakeris that, to follow the historian R. Laurence Moore, Protestantism in clearif sometimes strange ways "was excellent preparation for the pleasures of. . . modern consumer hedonism." It sanctified choice.

It brought Christianity lock, stock, barrel, and Bible into the marketplaceand redefined faith in terms of the marketplace. It refined close observationand exquisite stimulation of feelings, and, "since the Protestant imaginationwas free to venture forth on its own without the intervention and controlof priests, it luxuriated in novelty."

II. Making Consumers
It would be a gross distortion to act as if Protestantism alone inventedand sustained consumer capitalism, though Protestantism's effects are significantif we are to understand the influence of consumerism on Christians. Still,it is crucial to note other historical factors essential to the birth andgrowth of consumerism. In terms of the push and pull of the everyday economy,historians are agreed that production-oriented capitalism moved on to becomeconsumption-oriented capitalism because capitalism itself was so successful.

Until the twentieth century, most American homes were sites not only ofconsumption but of production. Even as late as 1850, six out of ten peopleworked on farms. They made most of their own tools; they built their homesand barns; they constructed their furniture; they wove and sewed their clothes;they grew crops and animals, producing food and drink; they chopped woodand made candles to provide heat and light. One nineteenth-century Massachusettsfarmer, for instance, produced so much of what he needed at home that henever spent more than $10 a year.

The Industrial Revolution changed all that, very quickly. As the factorysystem and mass production came to dominance over the space of decades, itdisplaced home production by cheaply producing a host of commodities formerlymade at home, driving out cottage industry and forcing millions into wagelabor. From 1859 to 1899, the value of manufactured goods in the United Statesshot from $1.9 billion to $13 billion. Factories grew from 140,000 to 512,000.

Rather suddenly, this economic system could produce many more goods thanthe existing population, with its set habits and means, could afford andconsume. For instance, when James Buchanan Duke procured merely two Bonsackcigarette machines, he could immediately produce 240,000 cigarettes a day-morethan the entire U.S. market smoked. Such overproduction was the rule, notthe exception, throughout the economy. From flour manufacturers to stovemakers,there was a widespread and acute recognition that the amount of goods availablehad far surpassed the number of buyers for those goods. Further, new productsemerged for which markets needed to be developed. For instance, when HenryP. Crowell of Quaker Oats (benefactor of Moody Bible Institute, where a buildingis named after him) built an automated mill in 1882, most Americans ate meatand potatoes, not cereal, for breakfast.

There was, in short, a huge gap between production and consumption. How toclose it? Industrial production's momentum had already built up, so cuttingproduction was not feasible. Manufacturers decided instead to pump upconsumption, to increase demand to meet supply. But they realized consumptionwas a way of life that had to be taught and learned. People had to move awayfrom habits of strict thrift toward habits of ready spending. To be adequateconsumers, they had to depart from a dependence on traditional skills, onproduction by families and artisans and local merchants. They had to learnto trust and rely on a multitude of products and services manufactured andpromoted from far away by complete strangers.

By trial and error, manufacturers arrived at methods for reshaping people'seconomic habits. They instituted money-back guarantees and credit buying.They created brand names and mascots to give their mass-produced goods anappealing "personality." They introduced mail order and, as in the case ofSears, coached and reassured semiliterate customers to order by post ("Tellus what you want in your own way, written in any language, no matter whethergood or poor writing, and the goods will promptly be sent to you"). And,of course, they advertised.

The cultivation of consumers
Many other factors were important in the rise of consumerism, but sinceadvertising is the most insistent and undisguised face of advanced consumption,it merits special attention.

Until the late nineteenth century, advertising had been mainly informational.Advertising pages in eighteenth-century newspapers looked like the classifiedsin today's papers. There were no pictures and, rather like news items, theads simply did such things as announce when a shipment of rice would arrivefrom the Carolinas. But faced with a mass market and the crises ofoverproduction, manufacturers by the late nineteenth century initiated anadvertising revolution. New advertising departed the realm of pure information,incorporating images and a host of persuasive tactics. It was, and remains,a primary tool in teaching people how to be consumers.

Early twentieth-century advertising, for instance, was used by Colgate toteach people who had never heard of toothpaste that they should brush theirteeth daily. King Gillette, the inventor of the disposable razor, coaxedmen to shave daily and to do it themselves, not see a barber. Thus his adsincluded shaving lessons, with leads such as "Note the Angle Stroke." EastmanKodak advertising tutored the masses in making the portable camera their"family historian." Food manufacturers published cookbooks training housewivesto cook with exact measures of (branded) products. Newly enabled by preservativesand far-flung distribution networks, Domino Gold Syrup sought in 1919 explicitlyto "educate" people that syrup was not only for wintertime pancakes. Saidthe sales manager, "Our belief is that the entire year is syrup season andthe people must be educated to believe this is a fact."

The effectiveness of advertising in selling any specific product remainsdebatable. What cannot be doubted is that early advertising successfullyintroduced an expansive array of products and services, playing a key rolein the replacement of traditional home production by store-bought commodities.Furthermore, advertising and related media have served and still serve asimportant shapers of an ethos that has the good life attained through acquisitionand consumption, and that would have its inhabitants constantly yearningfor new products and new experiences.

Indeed, advertisers soon recognized that they must not simply cater topre-existing needs, but create new needs. As Crowell of Quaker Oats noted,"[My aim in advertising] was to do educational and constructive work so asto awaken an interest in and create a demand for cereals where none existed."And as The Thompson Red Book on Advertising put it more generallyin 1901, "Advertising aims to teach people that they have wants, which theydid not recognize before, and where such wants can be best supplied."Consequently, one newspaper reader in 1897 said that not so long ago people"skipped [ads] unless some want compelled us to read, while now we read tofind out what we really want."

Advertisers did not act alone in training consumers. Government began inthe early twentieth century to solidify and boost the newly emerged strengthof business corporations, capping this alliance with Herbert Hoover's expansionof the Department of Commerce in the 1920s. Schools quite self-consciouslycooperated with corporations in molding young consumers.

One 1952 Whirlpool short-subject film, for instance, featured three teenagegirls around a kitchen table, at work on a report about the emancipationof women. Did emancipation equal winning the vote? Assuming property andother legal rights? No, the girls decide, as the host rises from the tableto attend a shiny washing machine. Real emancipation came with release fromthe drudgery of chores, with washing machines and dryers that liberated womenfrom clotheslines and "dark basements." Business Screen magazine gaveclear instruction for the film's use in its review: "Some good clean sellingtakes place during this half-hour. . . . The film will have special appealto women's groups of all kinds and to home economics classes from teenageon up."

Consumers, in short, were made, not born.

The deification of dissatisfaction
Into the nineteenth century, then, advertising and consumption were orientedto raw information and basic needs. It was only in the late nineteenth andthen the twentieth century, with the maturation of consumer capitalism, thata shift was made toward the cultivation of unbounded desire. We must appreciatethis to realize that late modern consumption, consumption as we now knowit, is not fundamentally about materialism or the consumption of physicalgoods. Affluence and consumer-oriented capitalism have moved us well beyondthe undeniable efficiencies and benefits of refrigerators and indoor plumbing.Instead, in a fun-house world of ever-proliferating wants and exquisitelyunsatisfied desire, consumption entails most profoundly the cultivation ofpleasure, the pursuit of novelty, and the chasing after illusory experiencesassociated with material goods.

Sex appeal sells everything from toothpaste to automobiles. (Recently, acancer-detection ad on the back of a Christian magazine headlined, "Beforeyou read this, take your clothes off." Then, in fine print, it counseledhow to do bodily self-examinations.) Often, cigarette and alcohol ads donot even depict their product being consumed, but instead prime us to associatethem with robust cowboys and spectacular mountain vistas. By 1989, the AmericanAssociation of Advertising Agencies explicitly stated that consumerperceptions "are a fundamental part of manufacturing the product-asmuch as size, shape, color, flavor, design, or raw materials."

In 1909, an advertising manager for Winton Motor Cars representing the oldschool had declared, "When a man buys an automobile he purchases a specificentity, made of so much iron, steel, brass, copper, leather, wood, and horsehair,put together in a specific form and manner. . . . Why attract his attentionto the entity by something that is foreign thereto? Has the car itself notsufficient merit to attain that attention? Why suggest 'atmosphere,' whichis something he cannot buy?"

But by 1925, "atmosphere" no longer seemed beyond the reach of the market.In that year advertising copywriter John Starr Hewitt wrote, "No one hasever in his life bought a mere piece of merchandise-per se. What he buysis the satisfaction of a physical need or the gratification of some dreamabout his life."

In the same year, Ernest Elmo Calkins, the cofounder of the Calkins and Holdenad agency, observed, "I have spent much of my life trying to teach the businessman that beauty has a dollars-and-cents value, because I feel that only thuswill it be produced in any quantity in a commercial age." Calkins recognizedthat, in his words, "Modernism offered the opportunity of expressing theinexpressible, of suggesting not so much the motor car as speed, not so mucha gown as style, not so much a compact as beauty." All, of course, with adollars-and-cents value attached.

Thus speed, style, beauty, sex, love, spirituality have all become for themodern consumer categories to be evoked and sampled at will by selectingfrom a vast array of products, services, and commodified experiences. ColinCampbell considers contemporary tourism a prime example. Tourism as an industryand a commodity depends for its survival on an insatiable yearning for "ever-newobjects to gaze at." The same can be said for shopping, spectator sports,concert-going, movie-viewing, and other quintessential "consumer" activities."Modern consumers will desire a novel rather than a familiar product becausethis enables them to believe that its acquisition and use will supply experiencesthey have not encountered to date in reality." Moreover, as those many nowblissfully lost in cyberspace will attest, reality can be decidedly moreinconvenient and less purely pleasurable than virtual reality.

In 1627, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis dreamed of a utopia in whichtechnology could adjust growing seasons and create synthetic fruit tastierand better looking than natural fruit. In our culture, the New Atlantis has,after a fashion, come into being, and its plenty includes cosmetically enhancedfruit, artificial sweeteners, nonalcoholic beer, and fat-free junk food.

Yet, as Campbell reminds us, actual consumption is "likely to be a literallydisillusioning experience, since real products cannot possibly supply thesame quality of perfected pleasure as that which attends imaginatively enjoyedexperiences." So we modern consumers are perpetually dissatisfied. Fulfillmentand lasting satisfaction are forever just out of reach. And if we cannotescape completely to cyberspace, we reach for and grab again and again theproduct or commodified experience that provides temporary pleasure.

We are profoundly schooled and thousands of times daily reinforced-remember,the average American is exposed to more than three thousand sales messagesdaily-in an insatiability that is, as the theologian Miroslav Volf remarks,"unique to modernity." Insatiability itself is as old as humanity, or atleast the fall of humanity. What is unique to modern consumerism is theidealization and constant encouragement of insatiability-the deificationof dissatisfaction.

Economics and the consumerism it serves is, as the economist Robert Nelsoncandidly admits, "our modern theology." Modernity is that age that has believedin the future against the past, in limitless progress that would eliminatenot just the practical but the moral and spiritual problems of humanity.Many of the major concerns and practices of classical Christianity wereaccordingly redefined along economic lines. Material scarcity and the resultingconflict over precious resources were seen as the sources of human sinfulness.So economic progress and the building of consumer societies has "representedthe route of salvation to a new heaven on earth." Economic efficiency hasfor many replaced the providence of God.

Christian missionaries traveled to spread the gospel; economic theology hasmissionaries such as the Peace Corps and international development agencies,delivering the good news of "economic progress, rational knowledge, and humanredemption." Christianity saw the coming of Christ as history's supremerevelatory moment. Economic theology, or a theology of consumption, considersit to be the discoveries of modern science and technology. And twentieth-centuryreligious wars are no longer fought between Roman Catholics and variousProtestants, but "among men often inspired by Marxist, fascist, capitalist,and still other messages of economic salvation" (Robert Nelson).

III. The Importance of Character
"Whoever has the power to project a vision of the good life and make it prevail,"the historian William Leach writes, "has the most decisive power of all.In its sheer quest to produce and sell goods cheaply in constantly growingvolume and at higher profit levels, American business, after 1890, acquiredsuch power and has kept it ever since."

Since consumer capitalism-today not just in America but around the world-soeffectively promotes its version of the good life, and since consumers aremade rather than born, a Christian response demands a consideration of character.

Every culture or way of life requires a certain kind of person-a "character"with fitting attitudes, skills, and motivations-to sustain and advance thegood life as that culture knows it. Thus Sparta was concerned to shape itscitizens in the character of the warrior; Aristotle hoped for a polity thatwould make aristocrats; and twentieth-century America charged its publicschools with the task of instilling the American way of life in their students.

In the postwar boom days of 1955, retailing analyst Victor Lebow echoed hisadvertising predecessors, declaring, "Our enormously productive economy .. . demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert thebuying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction,our ego satisfaction, in consumption. . . . We need things consumed, burnedup, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate."

Can there be any doubt that we now live in the world Lebow prophesied anddesired? That shopping has become a conspicuous ritual profoundly indicativeof our social ethic is facetiously but tellingly betrayed in such slogansas "I shop, therefore I am," and "They came, they saw, they did a littleshopping," scrawled on the Berlin Wall shortly after East Germans were allowedto pass freely into West Germany.

Planned obsolescence, installment buying, and credit cards-all creationsof this century-were key means to making consumption a way of life. Now,as with President Bush a few years ago, public officials dutifully appearon the evening news buying a pair of socks to inaugurate the Christmas season.

Our language is one significant indication that consumption is a way of life.We are encouraged to see and interpret more and more of our activities interms of consumption. In the language of marketers, people who go to moviesare not "audiences," but "consumers"; those who go to school are no longer"students," but "educational consumers." People who visit a physician areno longer "patients," those who go to church are no longer "worshipers,"those who go to libraries and bookstores are no longer "readers," those whogo to restaurants are no longer "diners." All are as frequently designated"consumers."

The church must examine and challenge consumerism at exactly this point.What sort of people does consumer capitalism want us to be? What are thekey character traits of the consumer par excellence? And how do these stackup against the standards and aims of Christian character?

The character of the consumer
The consumer is schooled in insatiability. He or she is never to be satisfied-atleast, not for long. The consumer is tutored that people basically consistof unmet needs that can be appeased by commodified goods and experiences.Accordingly, the consumer should think first and foremost of himself or herselfand meeting his or her felt needs. The consumer is taught to value aboveall else freedom, freedom defined as a vast array of choices.

One of the most striking ways we are trained and reinforced in the consumptiveway of life is exactly through a flood of ever-proliferating choices. In1976, the average American supermarket carried nine thousand products; todayit stocks thirty thousand. The typical produce section in 1975 had 65 items;today it stocks 285. The median household with cable now picks up more than30 tv stations. During the 1980s a new periodical was born for every dayof every year.

Certainly this plenitude of choice is not all bad. Eating fresh foods inthe winter transported from California or Florida or being exposed to thefoods of other ethnic groups are not negatives. As a movie lover, I can tellyou that the typical video store stocking 5,000 videos is more likely thanone stocking 1,000 to carry first-rate foreign films. Most of us can affirmmuch that is right about the undergirding philosophy of freedom as noncoercivechoice. And surely the diversity of commodities and commodified experiencescan foster increasing openness to people and cultures different fromour own.

Yet we are so trained and reinforced in freedom as choice that we fail toquestion if many of our choices are actually significant. Is quality of lifereally bettered by having four rather than two brands of catsup to choosefrom? Is rock troubadour Bruce Springsteen too far from the mark when hecomplains of TV that there are "57 channels and nothing on"?

It is no less important that we fail to notice a whole array of significantpossibilities that are eliminated when consumer choice rules all. As AlanEhrenhalt relates in marvelous detail in his book The Lost City, theworship of choice and spread of the market mentality has without doubt weakenedcommunities. These developments have dissolved locally owned banks, newspapers,grocery stores, and restaurants. As late as the 1950s, "The very act of shoppingwas embedded in the web of long-term relationships between customer and merchant,relationships that were more important than the price of a particular itemat a particular time. The sense of permanence that bound politicians toorganizations, or corporations to communities, reached down to the most mundanetransactions of neighborhood commercial life."

This is a way of life that we can no longer choose, even should we want to,for it is practically obliterated. Instead, as Ehrenhalt eloquently concludes,"Too many of the things we do in our lives, large and small, have come toresemble channel surfing, marked by a numbing and seemingly endless progressionfrom one option to the next, all without the benefit of a chart, logisticalor moral, because there are simply too many choices and no one to help sortthem out. We have nothing to insulate ourselves against the perpetual temptationto try one more choice, rather than to live with what is on the screen infront of us."

The character of the Christian
Classical Christianity, as we have observed, was very wary of insatiability.There was, in fact, only one acceptable sort of insatiability: insatiabilityin relationship with the God of Israel and Jesus Christ. In the psalmist'swords, "As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, OGod" (Ps. 42:1). Augustine would surely consider our consumer compulsionsa symptom of disordered desire, of the sort of desire that should be directedonly to God but instead is directed to God's creatures. This is theologicallya serious matter, since this disordered desire can verge on, if not become,outright idolatry.

Additionally, though Christianity can be a tremendously fulfilling way oflife, it does not teach or promise fulfillment construed in individualisticterms. The church ultimately hopes and yearns for the fulfillment of allcreation through the rightful worship of God and fulfillment of God's kingdom.Thus the initial petition of the Lord's Prayer beseeches (in the first-person,plural), "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thykingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Likewise, Paulsees the church as a formative community whose members are variously giftedby the Holy Spirit "for the common good" (1 Cor. 12:7). The Christian hopesurpassing evil and death is not, according to the New Testament, for theescape of the individual soul to heaven (or of individual pleasure fulfilledin a consumeristic heaven on earth), but for a new heaven and earth and thecorporate resurrection of all the blessed.

The consumer way of life fosters a number of values antithetical to manyChristian virtues. Can we simultaneously seek and to some degree realizeboth instant gratification and patience? What about instant gratificationand self-control? Is gentleness cultivated in an ethos that must become evermore coarse and gross to excite overloaded, jaded consumers, or joy cultivatedby an economic system that deifies dissatisfaction? Since these virtues areat the heart of Christian character, they deserve more extensive consideration.We can explore these matters in more detail by turning to a related, cardinalChristian virtue in which the other virtues are all rooted: the virtue offidelity.

Fidelity and the consumer way of life
A central virtue of biblical faith is fidelity. Christians aspire to beenduringly faithful to one particular God, not to a succession or collectionof gods. Likewise, the Christian practice of marriage is an exercise in thevirtue of fidelity. A Christian marries and commits him- or herself exclusivelyto a particular mate-"till death do us part."

The consumer, on the other hand, marries because marriage will serve hisor her interests as he or she understands them at the moment. Commitmentin the Christian way of life is an ideal and a goal; commitment in the consumerway of life is more exclusively an instrumental and typically temporary good.Marriage in the consumer ethos is too often open to reevaluation. If at anypoint it fails to promote the self-actualization of one or another spouse,the option of ending the partnership must be available.

In the Christian way, lifetime monogamy makes sense. In the consumer wayof life, serial monogamy (a succession of mates, one at a time) is a muchmore sensible practice. Highly increased divorce rates signal many things,but one of them surely is that consumption is our way of life.

Another sign that consumption is our way of life is the profound societalconfusion and ambivalence about children. Although we idealize children asinnocents and perhaps sentimentalize them more than any other society inhistory, as sociologist David Popenoe bluntly says, "American communitiesare strikingly unfit for children." Children want and need social stability,yet our communities are "transient, anonymous, diverse and increasinglyunfriendly to children." Children need communities in which they are physicallysecure, yet even those of us in comparatively safe suburbs can hardly allowour younger children to walk to school by themselves. Children need communitiesthat are accessible to them, yet there are few self-contained neighborhoods,so that most activities require an automobile, and thus adult transportation.

Under the sway of the consumer ethos we have shifted from child-centeredto adult-centered families, fostering higher divorce rates and constructingcommunities that often subordinate the needs of the young to the needs (andfelt needs) of grownups. Frankly, consumption as a way of life renders itdifficult to make sense of having children. The consumer ethos, again, isabove all one of individual self-fulfillment and autonomy, of keeping choicesopen.

This makes it irrational to bear a child, since children represent the commitmentof a lifetime. In the wonderfully apt phrase of novelist Michael Dorris,children "hold us hostage to the future." They limit a parent's mobility,their needs dictate how much of their parents' money is spent, and they create"agendas" a parent otherwise would never have imagined-let alone have chosen.Attempting to stay true to consumption as a way of life, we soberly builddaycare centers that label children Precious Commodities, fixate on the monetarycosts of rearing a child from diapers through college, and seriously wonderwhether or not we should "force" our faith and morality on our children.

Beginning the resistence
There are aspects of consumer capitalism Christians can certainly appreciateand defend, but it is so dominant and unquestioned in our setting that Ihave emphasized characteristics and tendencies that bring it into tensionwith the faith.

Consumer capitalism grew over centuries; it will not change overnight. Peopleof faith living amid overweening consumerism have a responsibility to resistwhere they can, to cultivate the good life as it is understood in the Christiantradition. So we are impelled both theologically and strategically to devoteattention to the peculiarly and explicitly Christian formation of character,to build a Christian way of life or culture.

To get a sense of how Christians can undertake such a resistance "on theground," I visited believers who represent three socioeconomic classes: theaffluent (Malcolm Street), the middle class (Lendol and Kathy Knight Calder),and the voluntary poverty of intentional Christian community (the Bruderhof).The financial means and lifestyles of some of these folk are closer to myown than others, but I learned something from each about Christian responsesto consumerism.

Intentionally vulnerable
Malcolm Street grew up in the wealth of a Texas oil family. In financialterms, he has always been well off. Yet he is anything but a comfortableperson. During our three days together, he repeatedly prodded me to ask himthe hard questions, to push the line of faith-filled logic past the pointof his own comfort. Congruently, his reading is engaged and critical. Browsingthrough thoughtful Christian magazines in his apartment, I found marginsladen with scribbled comments ("enlightened social policy won't get it. OnlyLordship will") and grades ("B+," "A+," "A++") assigned articles in the tableof contents.

With such glimpses of Street, I was not surprised to learn that his vigorousconfrontation with consumerism and the temptations of wealth grew out ofdetermined questioning and examination.

During the fifties, while studying finance in college, he had a summer jobat a bank in Fort Worth. The summer job led to a full-time position, andby the time he was in his late twenties, Street was an upper-level officer.It was then that he had a "conversion" that brought to life the Methodismin which he was reared.

He noticed that several of the older, economically successful men and womenhe counseled financially were deflated, sometimes despairing, wondering (inthe words of the old Peggy Lee song), "Is that all there is?" Street says,"All their lives they had focused on climbing the ladder, only to find whenthey got to the top that it was leaning against the wrong building."

This began a process of re-examination for the young banker. Intense andself-critical, Street reacted to the prologue of 1 Corinthians 13 by decidinghe had a "calloused heart." He realized, among other things, that it wastoo easy for the affluent to be disconnected from the pains and needs of"ordinary" folk. "If the public school goes downhill, we send our kids toa private one. If the neighborhood gets violent, we move behind the wallsof a peaceful one. If we don't get satisfactory medical care, we switch doctors."

Now 53, Street has in the intervening decades repeatedly exposed himselfto the neediest of the needy, with mission trips to such places as Haiti,Liberia, and Honduras. He devotes 30 percent of his time to service on theboards of Christian organizations. He believes that money has a purpose-"tomake friends for God"-which in practice means that business is about "maximizinghuman benefit, not profit." Profits, he says, "are essential if servicesare to be proportional to human needs, but they are not the ultimate 'bottomline.' "

In keeping with this perspective, Street has over the last 13 years builtand operated "assisted living" apartments for the frail elderly. Determinedto make himself vulnerable to the needs of those who are not "insulated"as people of means are, he lives on the premises of a Fort Worth complexcalled the Courtyards, where he leads a weekly Bible study for residentsand meets monthly for a breakfast with male residents.

Street's way of life demonstrates that a kind of intentional vulnerabilitycan help revive sensibilities and empathies dulled by satiating overconsumption.A degree of affluence not only insulates us from a keen awareness of ourlimits and mortality, but, through indulgence, it can coarsen the sensesof sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch so that we require increasinglygross stimuli to experience pleasure. We can-both to help others and to reawakenour truest senses-regularly draw close to those suffering from want, sickness,or loneliness.

Street has also learned from spiritual director Henri Nouwen the importanceof periodic spiritual retreats. To withdraw for a weekend of vulnerabilityto silence, away from television, radio, and bookshelves, is to force areconnection with things deeper than the inundating ephemera of mass consumerculture.

Malcolm Street emphasizes that generosity is a crucial, life-enriching habitfor wealthy Christians. "Giving proportionately to your ability is a wayto force yourself out of the insulation of affluence, beyond your comfortzone. For the upper-income Christian, a 10 percent tithe is just the thresholdof your capacity to give 'to the least of these.' "

Hearing the water speak
Lendol and Kathy Knight Calder lived near New London, New Hampshire, whereLendol taught history at Colby-Sawyer College until they moved last summerto a college in Illinois. I visited them at their New Hampshire home, nestledin the White Mountains-a five-minute walk from a breathtakingly beautifulmountain lake.

Kathy and Lendol, who met in a college InterVarsity chapter, have had theirsensitivity to consumerism heightened by Lendol's doctoral dissertation.Their modest New Hampshire home, also occupied by their two small children,is filled with wall-hung quilts and furniture passed down from family.

They worry that consumer culture tends to mediate all "reality." People ina mass consumer society watch television and movies created, promoted, anddistributed by other people; they listen to prerecorded music rather thanmake their own, and they buy birthday cards instead of writing a poem. Consumerreality is secondhand and often sanitized; you can, for instance, "play"basketball by watching Michael Jordan without ever straining a muscle ortouching a ball. Lendol is struck that most of his students can look outtheir dorm windows at mountains that they might hike, ski, and climb, butinstead spend their time watching television and listening to cds. Likewise,on a splendid spring day in New Hampshire, "in the safest place in the world,"he says, residents of his town exercise on a treadmill inside a gymnasium.

In contrast, the Calders try to take full advantage of their naturalsurroundings. Lendol runs, bikes, and mountain-climbs. He and Kathy takefrequent walks with their children and pass summer evenings at the lake.They encourage the kids to appreciate and participate in the wonder of creation.(One afternoon we walked to the lake, still and serene as a mirror, andthree-year-old daughter Abigail proclaimed that the lake was not talkingor laughing today. Lendol explained that they have discussed how differentparts of creation "speak" to God.)

Kathy and Lendol agree that consumer culture reigns partly because it sothoroughly defines time for most people. In response, they try to pay moreattention to natural and liturgical rhythms. As Episcopalians, they prizethe church year, believing it provides a significant alternative to consumerholidays and the values they promote. In Kathy's words, the weeks leadingup to Christmas are in the church year a time for penitence, not "stuffingyour face." During Advent, the Calders eat more simply so that they mighttruly feast on Christmas.

Such appreciative celebration is reinforced by the cultivation of gratitude.Consumer culture would have us feel constantly unsatisfied. In response,Kathy practices gratitude as a kind of spiritual discipline. In difficulttimes, or times of temptation due to dissatisfaction, she sometimes listssimple, basic things she has enjoyed that day but has easily taken for granted."Thank you for the roof over my head," she prays. "Thank you for the good,warm bed I slept in last night. Thank you for the cup of tea I had at breakfast.Thank you for my husband." As the list lengthens, she finds herself lessdesperately in need of a new dress or book.

Like Malcolm Street, the Calders emphasize the importance of generosity.The consumer mentality focuses on the immediate and ceaseless gratificationof our own desires. Lendol and Kathy have found gift-giving an excellentand enjoyable way to resist that constant inward pull. They present giftsnot just on birthdays, but to friends on special occasions with no expectationsof the gifts being reciprocated.

I was perhaps most impressed that the Calders' down-to-earth attempts toresist and reshape consumer culture were undergirded by a profound sensethat they, and other Christians, must accept that we are in this strugglefor the long haul. Lendol suggests one of the best analogies to resistanceof consumer culture is the challenge of Eastern European Christians andintellectuals to communism.

Christians under communism did not, in the apparently "small" and mundaneactions of their lives, set out to overthrow the system. In fact, many havesince said they expected to live the rest of their days under the sway ofcommunism, recognizing that they were a part of a system they consideredthe Big Lie. Yet they stood against it when and where they could, and onething eventually led to another.

Likewise, we Western Christians cannot escape consumer culture. We are partof it and in many ways (not all for ill) molded by it. The Christians ofthe East remind us that even small resistances are significant. They openour imaginations, and who knows where that will take us-or our children,or our children's children?

VCRs and song
The Bruderhof is a collocation of eight communities in the Eastern UnitedStates and England descended from the Anabaptist tradition of the HutterianBrethren. Each 'hof, as the communities are called, consists of 300 to 400men, women, and children. Members hand over all personal wealth (includingautomobiles and inheritances) upon entering the community and make majorlife decisions (such as where to live) with the assistance of the 'hof. Ivisited the Woodcrest and Pleasant View communities in upstate New York.

What most forcefully struck this outsider is that the Bruderhof is a kindof family monasticism. Marriage is vigorously encouraged and, since membersdo not practice birth control, most families have six to eight children.Children are prized as children, but also as exemplars of true Christianspirituality; Bruderhofers take very seriously Matthew 18:3: "Unless youchange and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

The Bruderhof's very radical response to consumer capitalism underlines howprofoundly pervasive and penetrating that system is. The Bruderhofers inno way think consumerism can be completely "escaped" or avoided, nor thatall aspects of it should be. They operate thriving businesses that manufacturefurniture and play equipment for preschools. On visiting their operationsat Woodcrest, I found twenty-some men and women seated at computers, thewomen wearing telephone headsets over their characteristic Bruderhof headscarves, all taking orders from around the country. I overheard two computerspecialists discussing how they might find an out-of-print book via the Internetand talked with the Bruderhof equivalent of a business manager (they don'tgo for titles) about what he called a looming "paradigm shift" in preschoolfurniture.

Still, the Bruderhof's communitarian way of life enables members to be muchmore judicious in their appropriation of consumer technologies and lifestylethan is the typical North American Christian. When I asked elder ChristophArnold for an example of a consumer technology that the Bruderhof tried andthen quit, he thought only briefly before he replied, "vcrs. We had vcrsfor a while, but then we noticed the children weren't singing. They weren'tplaying and running and making up songs. They wanted to put in a tape andsit in front of the tv. So we locked up the vcrs. Now the children are singingagain."

In such ways the Bruderhof exemplifies the importance of a culture thatencourages and supports alternative practices to a pervasive and powerfulconsumerism. Although most Christians may not be prepared to relinquish thedegree of autonomy necessary to be a Bruderhofer (I confess I am not), wecan take steps toward an openness and accountability that may loosen theuncontested stranglehold of consumer attitudes.

After all, focusing on consumption as individuals plays right into theconsumption ethos (which was partly created by an overly individualized andintrospective Christianity). For instance, one of the most popular and enduringChristian responses to materialism has been the counsel that the Christianmay hold any amount of possessions so long as he or she has the right attitude-aninner detachment-toward those possessions. There is surely much value inthis approach, but we have at the same time left the assessment ofgenuine inner detachment up to the isolated, individual Christian.(Ask yourself how much you actually know about any other believer's salaryor tithing.) Thus any authority the faith has for our economic behavior isentirely privatized.

As Robert Wuthnow indicates (and Bruderhofers would surely agree), what thisindividualism and privatism amounts to in practice is complete capitulationto consumerism. Attitude and behavior are not so easily separable. Nor arewe wise to think that we can accurately assess our attitudes in solitude,apart from the counsel and discernment of others. With such powerful socialforces as the market and the media constantly exhorting us to excesses ofconsumption, it is ludicrous to think the most viable and faithful responseis to face these forces as an isolated individual or family.

Yet the taboo on discussing what we do with our money is so strong that,according to Wuthnow's data, churchgoers are less likely than the generalpopulation to discuss their finances with someone else-and less likely yetto discuss finances with a fellow Christian! Consumerism will continue toexercise undue influence over Christians until we desecrate this unholy tabooand stop regarding our economic lives as an entirely private matter, findingways to open our wallets and checkbooks in front of trusted Christians.Christians need what Wuthnow calls a "critical and collective resistance."

IV. Priestly Stewardship
Malcolm Street, the Calders, and the Bruderhof are all fine examplesof what I call priestly stewardship- of spending time, money, andthe resources of the earth for the service and praise of God. We are priests.We are chosen of God to declare and exemplify the will of God to creation,and in turn to represent the needs and praise of all creation to God-thecore job description for priests. This was expressed most concisely whenMoses was told by Yahweh that while he is creator and owner of the wholeearth, Israel "shall be for me a priestly kingdom" (Exod. 19:6). Likewise,the church was designated "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation"(1 Pet. 2:9).

We are stewards. We are called to serve as caretakers of God's good creation(Gen. 1:26, 28). Although the concept of stewardship has been oneof the church's main Christian responses to the problems of materialism andthe environmental crisis, it has come in for considerable (and effective)criticism. Stewardship has at times been perverted by Christians who assumethat the world and its resources are at our human disposal, to use or abuseas we like. Thus we are tempted to treat the world's resources as "dead"matter fit merely for human manipulation and, yes, consumption. While thesecriticisms and perversions of stewardship are based on faulty understandingsof the biblical concept, combining stewardship with priesthood restores theGod-centered nature of our stewardship, that our role as caretakers of creationis on behalf of God the Creator.

Having the job description of priestly stewards helps us as we try to shapelives that are formed by something other than consumerism.

Although priestly stewardship has an individual component, it is mostfundamentally a communal stewardship. In our consumeristic world, stewardshipis too easily understood as simply an individualistic concern: How much willI tithe? How can I pollute the environment less? Priestly stewardship reinforcesthe truth that the fundamental Christian witness is not that of the isolatedindividual, but of the church. The church, not just isolated Christians,is called to form the alternative vision of life to the consumer ethos soprevalent today.

Priestly stewardship suggests that creation is not just for us, that it haspurpose independent of the uses we can make of it. All of creation-humanand nonhuman alike-exists ultimately for God and to the praise of God.Significantly, God in Genesis 1 pronounces the rest of creation "good"before humanity is created. The psalmist and the prophets Isaiah,Jeremiah, and Ezekiel can speak of mountains, trees, sun, and moon praisingGod. Unlike an office complex or gymnasium, which have no value if peopledo not inhabit them, creation can glorify and bring God delight apart fromhuman presence. Plants, animals-and the Calders' mountain lake that "talks"to its Creator-exist first and foremost not for human use or enjoyment, butfor God's pleasure. Christians can affirm much of the environmentalist agendain its effort to preserve creation for its own sake.

Priestly stewardship is quick to admit and encourage appreciation of God'swonder and delight in his creation. After all, it emphasizes that the rightend and ordering of all creation is doxological, oriented toward the praiseof God.

While priestly stewardship sees all creation as the sign and means of God'slove, wisdom, and power, it understands that humanity has a special rolewithin God's creation--precisely the role of priest. Commenting on Romans8 ("We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains untilnow," 8:22), C. E. B. Cranfield suggests that the universe is unable to doits part in praise of God unless humans do their part. So faithful peoplearticulate the praise of all creation; they pronounce the resounding andthankful "yes" every grateful creature would utter to its Maker, Sustainer,and Redeemer. Since the stones and trees and cats are not as articulate aswe are, humanity praises God on behalf of stone, tree, and cat.

Priestly stewardship also stresses that nature and human society are fallen.Stewardship language can obscure and neglect the great hope of redemption.It can imply that nature or a particular society as we know it is basicallyin fine shape. Then all humans need do is tend to things as they are, andotherwise stay out of the way of its "natural" tendencies. But all ofcreation-even innocent "nature"-is awry and in need of redemption. Moreover,creation suffered its fall before it reached maturity and fullness. Christianshope for a redemption, then, that is much more than a return to the Gardenof Eden. Fulfilled, consummated creation will be grander and richer by farthan the unsullied but also unripened creation of Eden.

In such a spirit of priestly stewardship, the church father Irenaeus poeticallyanticipated grapevines that would grow each vine with ten thousand twigs,each shoot with ten thousand branches, each cluster with ten thousand grapes,and each grape yielding 225 gallons of wine! He wrote, "And when any of thesaints shall take hold of one of the clusters, another cluster shall callout, 'I am a better cluster; take me, and bless the Lord through me.' " Throughsuch a vision lies the way toward what Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard calls "consecratedconsumption."

Consumption is by no means necessarily bad. We must consume to live, andwe can consume Christianly. We- and all creation--are creatures of a wonderfulGod, and as Christians inheritors of a bountiful, glorious, and hopeful faith.It is a faith that calls and equips us to act as priestly stewards, preservingand enhancing the other parts of creation given into our care. Doing so,we not only look back to Genesis, but ahead to the coming kingdom of Godin Christ. Then lion will lie with lamb, and no child will want for bread,and every act of consumption will be an act of praise.

Rodney Clapp is a senior editor at InterVarsity Press and the author ofFamilies at the Crossroads (1993) and the forthcoming A Peculiar People:The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society (1996). He lives in Wheaton,Illinois.

Last Updated: October 2, 1996