Part 1

We do not understand the role of women in ministry because we do not understand the role of men in ministry. We do not understand the role of men in ministry because we do not understand the church. We do not understand the church because the consumer culture has eviscerated the familial category necessary to understand it.

Some wise person said, “If you want to know about water, the last one to ask is a fish.” Just as water is to fish, so are the big ideas, the presuppositions, the meta-narratives, what Mark Dever has called “the mental background noise in a culture” to us. Those ideas, like individualism today, act “as the grids though which we interpret everything: our experience of the world, life, relationships, work, even religion.”¹ So is consumerism. It is so much in our cultural air, we scarcely recognize its existence. “Consumers take [consumerism] for granted.”² So, we do not see how it has bent our perception of the church.

Consumerism

What is consumerism? “Consumerism” is a new term, coined in 1922 by Collier’s magazine for the protection of consumers’ interests. Two years later, the magazine celebrated their new term:

Coined words are often spurious. When assayed they lack the pure gold of true meaning. But here is one, minted by an engineer named Sidney A. Reeve, which looks like legal tender. As the bank tellers say, it stacks. The word is “Consumerism.”³

Soon it began to be ambiguously applied to living in a capitalist economy, including for high levels of consumption, even for the indulgent and frivolous collecting of products, what we might just as ambiguously call “materialism,” sometimes in the service of Marxist propaganda against capitalism. In a 1955 speech, John S. Bugas (1908 –1982), second in command at Ford Motor Company, reinterpreted the new term to more positively characterize “capitalism” in the on-going ideological debate of the Cold War.

The term consumerism would pin the tag where it actually belongs – on Mr. Consumer, the real boss and beneficiary of the American system. It would pull the rug right out from under our unfriendly critics who have blasted away so long and loud at capitalism. Somehow, I just can’t picture them shouting: “Down with the consumers!”⁴

Bugas’ definition emphasized consumer sovereignty. In consumerism, as the business axiom pithily puts it, “The customer is king.” But not all anti-communists embraced the ethic behind the new word. Vance Packard (1914 –1996), America’s “forgotten post-war conservative,” countered the positive spin on consumerism, in his 1960 book The Waste Makers, by connecting it to excessive materialism and waste. He regarded it as an attack on the traditional American life-style, blaming it for breaking down communities, creating shopping malls as the only venues for young people to socialize, centering social life around the market. In his 1972 book, A Nation of Strangers, Packard raised the alarm against the “attrition of communal structure” spurred by the demands of consumerism. Americans’ growing propensity to move, often because of corporate ladder-climbing, dispersed extended families.⁵ Consumerism is acidic to the family.

Consumerism as a Way of Life

To take the fullest advantage of the market’s overflow of goods and services, sacrifices have to be made. Those sacrifices eventually transform all of life. “While consumption is an act, consumerism is a way of life.”⁶ In consumerism, argues Craig Bartholomew, “the core values of the culture derive from consumption rather than the other way around.”⁷ That is, rather than what we choose to consume being determined by our values, our values are determined by consumerism itself. And consumerism tells us to consume everything.

One of those core values, reinforced by every purchase, is the sovereignly self-creating individual, described by Carl Trueman: “consumerism makes us believe we can be whoever we want to be….”⁸ Thus consumerism fueled the rise of the modern self as consumers are encouraged to be committed “first and foremost to the self,” to be “inwardly directed.”⁹ Nothing outside the consumer should restrain him, not a wedding vow, a familial relation or a church covenant. “The consumer has become a god-like figure, before whom markets and politicians alike bow. Everywhere, it seems, the consumer is triumphant.”¹⁰

Hence, the consumer must be free to pursue his present perception of happiness. In consumerism, “the market is seen to offer infinite freedoms, one unleashed freedom leading to another.”¹¹ “Being a consumer,” claims Zygmunt Bauman, “means falling in love with choice.”¹² Thus, “choice is the consumer society’s ‘meta-value.’”¹³ It is a core value that must not be infringed upon.

So far, the American conservative Christian may be tempted to wonder what is the problem. People should be free to choose the occupation, house, car, internet service provider, restaurant, cereal, etc, they want. Freedom leads to a vibrant economy, efficient wealth creation and thus the alleviation of poverty. True. But our problem is that the values of consumerism, unless subservient to higher ideals, to what Pitirim Sorokin called a “ideational culture,” do not confine themselves to the market.¹⁴ Capitalism maybe a great way of making a living. It’s a horrible way to make a life.

In Revelation 18, the great prostitute Babylon is decried for consuming everything: understandably gold, jewels, pearls, fine linen, cinnamon, spice, wine, oil, but it didn’t stop there. The great prostitute – who by definition sells what should not be sold – dealt in, literally, “the bodies” (σωμάτων, sōmatōn) and souls of men. Somaton literally means “bodies” but was a Greek term for slaves. Consumerism had reduced some people to slaves who were called simply σώματα (“the bodies.”) Slavery was the commodification of human beings and thus a fruit of consumerism. Even souls, like what should be covenant relationships, are consumed. The love of the freedom to consume things at the heart of consumerism, doesn’t stop at material. Many a divorcee will testify that that love lasts longer than the love pledged at the wedding altar. It also consumes churches and the purpose of the ministry.

Consumerism’s Age

Since the term is new and the vast surfeit of consumer goods it seems to depend on is a post-World War 2 phenomena, some assume that consumerism is new. But Ecclesiastes is right: there is nothing new under the sun (1:9). Revelation 18:11-13 describes consumerism brilliantly, even as early as the first century. All of history can likely be told, from one angle, as a tug-of-war between consumerism, like Rome painted as the great whore of Babylon, and the ideational culture, most purely in Christianity.

Today’s consumerism is different only in scale from that which has been lurking in our culture for centuries. As early as the seventeenth century, John Winthrop, when recruiting colonists for his “City Upon a Hill,” listed reasons “justifying the undertakers of the intended plantation in New England,” reason number five that in England “we are grown to that height of intemperance in all excess of riot.”¹⁵ That is, he encouraged devout Christians to forsake old England for America to escape the corruptions of consumerism.

Hence, several economic historians have argued that exactly the same kind of “Consumer Revolution” occurred during the early eighteenth century that some sociologists imply is only recent.¹⁶ This created the “language of consumption.”¹⁷ The conclusion, then, is that consumerism is not new; that it has been applying an increasing influence on our culture for centuries. That means, as Talcott Parsons described, it “has existed for a long time in [our] society at strategic points.” Thus, it has exerted a steady influence so as to “canalize attitudes.”¹⁸ That is, consumerism has already deeply impressed itself onto our culture.

Consumerism’s Paradigm

Having “canalized” its values onto our society, like a river digging out a canyon, consumerism provides the interpretative grids through which we see all of life. We accept no fault divorce or “at will employment” for pastors in which they can be fired for any or no reason or the lack of covenant commitment to a particular church as normal because those are the values of consumerism.

To the person shaped by consumerism — which is nearly everyone in our modern society — the church is intuitively approached as a service provider, like the restaurant and the theater. The restaurant provides food; the church provides religious nourishment. The theater provides entertainment; the church provides liturgy. The school provides education; the church specializes in religious curricula. If told to shut down during a pandemic, it insists that its services are essential. It might argue that it is as useful as the grocery store but it rarely argues that it is something that is beyond consumerism, something that cannot be consumed, akin to the family.

Consumerism has, like a wild fire, burned up everything in its path, even the institutions, like the family and the church, we thought, at first, it would serve. Consumerism’s modern-self bends institutions to become “servants of the individual” so that they “cease to be places for the formation of individuals…. They become platforms for performance.”¹⁹ The local church, then, is seen as akin to a community theater: the venue for the consumer to demonstrate his or her piety or aspiring actors to try their talent and for theater-goers/church-attendees to get their entertainment. When they no longer serve the purpose they were bought for, they can be discarded — thus Packard’s waste culture. “Relationships . . . rather than being the basis for an economy, start to become a marketable product.”²⁰ Even piety, the relationship with God, is marketed as a product with the church being its retail out-let. As David Wells lamented, “In the marketplace, everything is for us, for our pleasure, for our satisfaction, and we have come to assume that it must be so in the church as well.”²¹ As such, the consumer can’t imagine how the ministry, including the roles of women, could be determined in any other way other than what serves his immediate desires. “If the woman can preach better, then let her preach,” is the conclusion of the consumer.

So, the consumer walks into the church. What does he see? What does she expect?

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John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell substack.

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1. Mark Dever, The Message of the New Testament (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2005), 170. ↩︎
2. Stephen Miles, Consumerism As a Way of Life (London: Sage Publications, 1998), 5. ↩︎
3. “consumerism,” Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed August 10, 2021, citing Collier’s, March 1, 1924, quoting the magazine’s editorial of June 3, 1922. ↩︎
4. Gail Robinson, Mass Communication and Journalism (Waltham Abbey Essex, UK: Ed Tech Press: 2019), 110. ↩︎
5. Addison Del Mastro, “America’s Forgotten Post-War Conservative,” The American Conservative, December 6, 2017, accessed August 10, 2021. ↩︎
6. Miles, Consumerism As a Way of Life, 4. ↩︎
7. Craig Bartholomew, Christ and Consumerism: An Introduction (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 2000), 6. ↩︎
8. Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to the Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 165. ↩︎
9. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self 49. ↩︎
10. Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang, The Unmanageable Consumer (London: Sage, 1995), according to Miles, Consumerism As a Way of Life, 31. ↩︎
11. Miles, Consumerism As a Way of Life, 33. ↩︎
12. Mark Davis, Freedom and Consumerism: A Critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology (Ashgate Publishing: Burlington, VT, 2008), 73. ↩︎
13. Davis, Freedom and Consumerism, 74, quoting Bauman. ↩︎
14. Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age. Oxford, England: Oneworld Publications Ltd., 1941. ↩︎
15. “Reasons for Forsaking England,” The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620-1730, Alden T. Vaughan, editor (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 27. ↩︎
16. References on the birth of the consumer society from at least the 18^th century are available upon request: john.berry.carpenter@gmail.com. ↩︎
17. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1991), xviii. ↩︎
18. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York: The Free Press, 1937), 537. ↩︎
19. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 49. ↩︎
20. Bartholomew, 7. ↩︎
21. David Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 114. ↩︎