Brand Jesus

Christianity in a Consumerist Age

Tyler Wigg Stevenson

• Publisher: Seabury Books
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781596270497
• eBook ISBN: 9781596271746
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

In this provocative book, the author argues that American Christianity, especially evangelicalism, has been corrupted by the dominance of consumerism in modern life. The church's mostly uncritical adoption of this secular condition has resulted in an idolatrous morphing of the message of Christ into just another brand. With Brand Jesus, Wigg Stevenson names the growing concern felt by many Christians at the commodification of their faith.

Using Paul's letter to the Romans as a starting point, Wigg Stevenson 'reads' the letter to today's church, speaking to our consumerist situation through the parallels with Paul's Rome. Though rooted unapologetically in a love for the church, Brand Jesus does not shy away from provocative claims about the melding of Christian faith and consumer ideals; the rise of market-driven theology; the blurring boundaries between the law and religion; and other topics. Wigg Stevenson describes the current situation of both church and society and issues a challenge to it: When faith is a product for consumption, how can the church be faithful to Christ as living Lord, instead of as Brand Jesus?

Part I

PAST AND PRESENT

Chapter 1

Point-of-Purchase Devotion

There’s a store downtown in the city where I live. Perhaps you’ve got one, too. It’s a Christian store, and you might want to call it a bookstore. But as you walk up to the front door, and the sky is reflected from the floor-to-ceiling windows, all you can see is what’s immediately inside the window displays. And that is a lot of Christian knick-knacks. Angel statuettes, fish-shaped paperweights, clocks with Edenic, pastoral scenes painted on them — the place has the works.

To step inside this store — or any like it — is to step into the world of Christian retail, and to gain a glimpse of the particular consumption patterns of some Christians today. Once you actually enter, you can see that some of this bookstore is indeed devoted to books, most of which are of the Christian self-help variety. The majority of the floor space is devoted to other goods, however: music, Christian-themed art, and accessories like clothing and jewelry. In the Christian retail industry, these are known as “Christ-honoring resources.”

It’s no surprise that such effort is made to selling this kind of gear. These days, after all, the stuff that we choose to buy says a lot about who we believe ourselves to be. We buy things that will let us “express ourselves.” We “show our individuality” through our preferences as consumers; indeed, we are what we like to buy. I suspect that if you knew what kind of car I drive, brands of clothing I buy, type of jewelry (if any) I wear, music I listen to, and food I eat, you’d have a pretty good idea about who I am — or, at least, who I want to be.

In other words, the Christian bookstore is doing a significant trade in the everyday goods that all of us, Christian and non-Christian alike, use to tell the world who we are. At this store, however, such goods — and their consumption — are branded with religious significance. The store offers the trappings of a Christian lifestyle to anyone with the money to buy.

In recent years, the Christian market has meant big money. This is a new phenomenon. Until the end of the twentieth century, Christian retail stores were primarily independent, local ventures. They sold church supplies, religious-themed goods, and books that were little known outside church circles. The industry generated some crossover hits: Hal Lindsay’s end-times romp, The Late Great Planet Earth, was one of the best-selling books of the 1970s. But mostly it was nickel-and-dime stuff.

That all changed in the 1990s. The success of some breakaway best-selling books — like the Left Behind series, The Prayer of Jabez, and The Purpose-Driven Life — is an indicator that the Christian lifestyle industry has arrived in force. Today a wide variety of guilds covers the spectrum of the Christian niche markets, the uncontested champion of which is the Christian retailers’ group, the CBA. With well over two thousand member stores, the fifty-six-year-old association represents Christian retailers in an industry worth $7 billion in 2005.¹

Seven billion dollars: no idle amount, and a figure that is even more striking when we realize that it comes from sales of relatively low-priced items: books, T-shirts, compact discs, popular art, and so on. Seven billion dollars is a lot of paperbacks and shirts, even when a few bestsellers are responsible for a disproportionate percentage of the revenue. What possible conclusions might we draw from the massive and increasing trend of specifically Christian consumption?

The easiest conclusion, assuming that buyers of Christian products are Christians themselves, is that there is a growing market — in other words, America has more Christians. But this is actually demonstrably false. Between 1990 and 2001, the percentage of Americans who self-identified as Christians declined.*

Another option is that sales of “Christ-honoring resources” indicates (or is causing) a nationwide improvement in the quality of our discipleship — that is, these goods are helping us to become better Christians. But this scenario fails the truth test, too. In Ron Sider’s recent book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, he reveals that Christians are living just like their non-Christian neighbors by nearly every ethical standard. We’ll look at this state of affairs in more detail later.

So, if we observe on the one hand that more Christian goods are being bought in America every year, and on the other that American Christians are neither increasing in percentage of the population nor demonstrating an improved overall quality of Christian witness, we are left to infer the rather sad conclusion that the growth in sales is due to the fact that Christians are simply buying more Christian things. “Christ-honoring resources” appear to “honor” Christ simply by being purchased, since no other demonstrable effects can be seen. In other words, they’re a point-of-purchase devotional act.

The visceral response of many Christians who have an authentic personal passion for their faith will be that the diagnosis of this book cannot be correct. Maybe they’ve never set foot in a Christian “bookstore,” and they think that the Christian gear — art, clothes, jewelry — is actually embarrassing. Or maybe they’re Christian retail regulars, but it’s a genuine part of their walk with Jesus. Both will say that their Christianity isn’t consumerist at all. But this book actually isn’t about Christian retail, however telling such trends may be (I explore them in depth in a later chapter).

No, this book is about consumerism: how it’s come to dominate the way we live as a society and how American Christianity has happily bought right into the pattern of consumerist living by making God into a commodity.

The order of this age is that we are what we buy, and Christians evidently like to shop as much as any other group. We’re just buying Brand Jesus.

*Precise numbers regarding the percentage of Christians are difficult to arrive at given the amendment of the official 1990 census population count, but the national percentage of self-identified Christians fell from 82 to 86 percent in 1990 to 75 to 76 percent in 2001. From the U.S. Census Bureau, “2006 Statistical Abstract,” www.census.gov/compendia/statab/population, items 11 and 69 (accessed October 4, 2006).

Chapter 2

Buy to Be, Be to Buy

Consumerism makes an easy whipping boy. If you read the right periodicals or books, or listen to the right social commentators and pundits, you will doubtless have had your fill of breezily expressed, unsubstantiated claims about America’s unhealthy love of material things. This is true whether the audience is secular or religious. It is, in fact, a truism that we live in a culture and age of consumption. When people make claims about our rampant consumerism, therefore, we aren’t expected to evaluate them — we’re just supposed to cluck in disapproving agreement. The woes of consumerism, it seems, don’t need the support of data, since the information you need to render judgment is presumed to be all around: Have you been to a mall recently? Have you seen the teenagers?

I am not about to discount the claim that America, along with much of the West, is in the throes of consumerism. Nor would I contest that consumerism is indeed one of the more profound identifying characteristics of our culture. This entire book argues that our consumerist tendencies are real, profoundly negative, and increasingly significant to who we are — both to ourselves and as a culture in the world. The popular, knee-jerk reaction against consumerism, however, does far more harm than good, for two reasons.

First, such a reaction elicits in us rather self-delusional judgments. I have yet to meet more than a handful of serious critics of consumerism who genuinely live a life free of its taint. I certainly don’t. Do you? I personally have never heard an anti-consumerist manifesto coming from the mouth of someone who wasn’t completely surrounded by consumer goods — the fellow typing his anti-consumerism screed on his brushed-aluminum Macintosh at the local Starbucks, for instance. As such, our problem usually isn’t with consumerism per se, but with other people’s consumption. Most of the time, when I tsk-tsk at some example of conspicuous consumption, like something I just know that Jesus wouldn’t drive — Humvees make easy targets, for example — I’m actually judging something I just happen not to like, rather than the consumption itself. Otherwise, why do I get so starry-eyed, rather than righteously huffy, over that classic Jaguar, with its dreadful gas mileage and Humvee-level price tag? Most of us are in no position to be casting stones as easily as we tend to do.

Second, and more significantly, when we respond unthinkingly against consumerism, we gloss over the magnitude of the very thing we’re criticizing. I’m sure you can imagine a rant of the vices of consumerism — how we love things too much, how we’re so materialistic, isn’t advertising just awful, can you believe the retail Christmas displays went up before Thanksgiving this year, and so on — whether listed in the pages of your favorite magazine or coming from the lips of your favorite cranky aunt. But this amounts to an easy way of getting worked up without really saying much. The common element in such litanies is that consumerism is an evil that everybody knows about and agrees upon.

But why is it so bad?

Sure, America is full of people who want to buy a lot of things. But pause for a moment and ask yourself what’s so wrong with that. Be honest: if you think about it, you probably buy a lot of things (this book, for example — tell your friends!) and you’re a pretty decent person, right? What is it about being a consumer in a consumerist society that is so self-evidently wrong? In our public conversations, one can find a great deal of condemnation of consumerism and very little defense of it, but usually these condemnations are the starting points of arguments — the presuppositions — rather than the conclusions. Usually, the evil of consumerism is the conclusion we already know. It is taken for granted. And this is the real problem.

When we assume from the beginning that consumerism is bad, we fail to take it out into the light of day and really look at it. We fail to examine its true significance. We realize its negative impact only in superficial ways (i.e., it makes us so greedy — as though people have not been greedy in times and places that are utterly devoid of consumer goods) and ignore the far more profound implications of our consumerist culture and personal impulses.

Consumerism is bad. It is very, very bad, indeed. But it is no worse than humans are, and we are no worse than we have always been. If we are to deal genuinely with the problem of consumerism, we need to answer the question of how its evil influences our world and our lives.

This book is primarily intended for Christians, though I hope its observations might prove compelling to interested non-Christians as well. As such, it is an attempt to work through the theological implications of our consumerist ways. By theological, I mean: How does it really matter to God, and how does it matter for us in respect to God, that we are consumers? What does our consumerism mean for us as an American culture? And, because I am a Christian writing primarily for Christians, what does it mean for us as individual disciples of Christ, and collectively as his church, to contribute to and to be so profoundly influenced by such a culture?

But before we ask theological questions about the place where we’re standing, we have to know where “here” is. And to understand where we’re at, we first need to understand from whence we’ve come.

A Story about Stories

For most of human history, in most times and places, your identity — that is, who you are as a person in society — has been pretty well established for you before you were even born. Your people have done things in such-and-such a way for generations? You will do the same things in such-and-such a way. You were born in this town? You’ll live and die in this town. Your family worships this god? You’ll worship this god. Your family is upper, middle, or lower class? You’ll be upper, middle, or lower class. Your father is a farmer, shoemaker, builder? You’re going to be a farmer, shoemaker, builder. Your father owned this land? You’ll own this land. You don’t have a father? You probably won’t be around for your own children. And that’s just half the population. If you’re born a girl, you’re going to be a wife, mother, and likely, a widow, and you’re going to hold on to the hope that life and a male-dominated society won’t treat you as badly as they probably will.

Furthermore, all these givens will probably make sense to you. This is because what you understand as your identity is your place in a cultural story, bigger and older than you as an individual, which you inherit. This story — your metanarrative — is one that explains everything. It tells you where you’ve come from, who you are, and where you’re going. It helps you make sense of the world into which you are born and it gives your life meaning — whether that meaning is good or not. It forms you as you grow and defines how you will live and die.

And, setting aside scenarios like the one depicted in The Matrix, a people’s particular story is not simply a concoction that enslaves them without their knowing. It is deeply related to the reality of their situations. The inherited story is the essence of our identities; it is the essence of culture, of religion, of heritage, of roots. In other words, the stories we tell about ourselves are at the heart of all that we love and hold dear.

In twenty-first century America, however, we don’t inherit such stories. Or, perhaps it is more precise to say that though we may inherit any number of cultural stories, in the United States, there is a bigger story — the American Dream — that trumps them all. The American Dream is the story that rejects other stories. As Americans, we inherit a story that says all inherited stories, no matter where you come from, pale in comparison to the power of freedom in this country.

Your people have done things in such-and-such a way? You invent a better way. Your father is a poor immigrant who doesn’t speak English? You work hard in school, get a job in some company’s mailroom, and someday you’ll be the CEO. You’re from a rural area? Make your life in the city. Your family is this religion, or no religion? Make sure the religion you finally pick, if you pick one, meets your spiritual needs. You’re not white, or you’re a woman (or both)? That doesn’t matter, because we’re all equals here.

Now, as we all realize, sometimes the American story doesn’t match reality. If your family is poor, you are likelier to be poor, as are your children. Our equality is an ideal, not a fact, given that white men have an undeniable leg up in practically every undertaking. But whether or not the American story is actually true for most people, it is still our story, and it is the story we tell each other. Abe Lincoln was born in a log cabin, and look at what he did. Fatherless boys from Hope, Arkansas, do grow up to be president. The American story is that no matter what story you’ve inherited, only you can stop you from doing whatever you want with your life.

The price of that freedom is a certain rootlessness, a particular instability. It is a daunting ideal to live up to. If the story you are born into doesn’t hold you in place, the burden is on you to make a story for yourself. And if you don’t reach your dream, the story tells you, you have only yourself to blame — in other words, get cracking.

The Death of Big Stories

This situation is particular to America, but it hasn’t always been the case to such an extreme degree. To understand the connection between the American lack of inherited stories and our topic, consumerism, we have to begin by looking at the twentieth century and the world wars.

It is difficult for those of us who did not live through the wars to comprehend how completely destructive they were to the world’s inherited senses of order. Men died in previously unimaginable numbers. Horrors like the Holocaust gave us new standards for recognizing evil. Countries were wiped off the map and redrawn as if the earth was a chalkboard. A bomb was made that could and did destroy entire cities. And for the first time in human history, one event — World War II — enveloped the entire globe. This fact made the world an entity, a perceptibly singular thing, in a way it had never truly been before.

To appreciate the magnitude of the change, just imagine what it was like to have known the world before and after the wars. You start as a twenty-year-o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Past and Present
• Part II America Romans 1:18-32
• Part III Church Romans 2:1–29
• Part IV Brand Jesus
• Part V Fast and Pray Romans 12:1–2
• Notes