Consumerism: the Downfall of the American Church and Family
How a Silent Enemy Destroyed our Mediating Institutions, and What Might be Done
How a Silent Enemy Destroyed our Mediating Institutions, and What Might be Done
Consumerism works against family and church as a person-shaping liturgy. It is action, not doctrine… your familial relations and church membership are irrelevant at best. Often, they are liabilities.
No time to read? Podcast form….
The family and the church have fallen on hard times, and nothing tried thus far has been able to stem the tide. Marriage rates are down. Church attendance is abysmal. Was it the Beatles? Drugs? TV? Pluralism? Democrats?
Eh… no, although those things didn’t help. My contention, is that the single biggest contributor to the dissolution of the family and the church in America, and maybe elsewhere, is that we forgot our most basic vocation. Our creational purpose is work. We have rejected that, and replaced it with a self-appointed calling to consume. “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” While scripture calls for “producerism,” the church, and the Western world, have gone all in on “consumerism.”
(Producerism movements have existed before, but they are not what I’m proposing)
In a consumerist culture, the “good life” is one filled with comfort and entertainment. For the consumerist, work is a means to an end. Most Christians are consumerists and thus they have rejected their God-given purpose, leading to the wide-spread loss of personal identity, family, and church. There is no political party, or significant religious movement, naming and consciously seeking to combat this culture-shaping secular liturgy at scale. Neither Liberalism nor Conservatism comprehend its danger.
What I wish to do is lay out a case for how consumer culture snuck in and silently undermined the family and the church by sleep-walking us through a daily and weekly anti-family and anti-church liturgy of life.
Until we recognize it for what it is, and make the necessary corrections, we will continue to reap the same bitter fruit. Why have families? Why have churches? The silent liturgy of consumerism has taught us that there is no good reason for either and thus destroyed both. Here’s how.
Consumerism: A Silent Teacher
When I speak about consumerism I mean the state of ongoing human affairs that exists when people think that their primary purpose in life is to be happy, and that being happy consists in leisure and consumption, and a society is thus ordered. This is what James K.A. Smith called “Cultural Liturgies”. It is not recognized by us for the same reason a fish does not comprehend water. It exists in unspoken assumptions and unquestioned actions.
Consumerism pervades family life and teaches us that the family itself is purposeless and thus unimportant. So why do families exist? What is their mission on a day to day basis? For an army company, the mission is known; you get orders to sweep a village or take a bridge, execute, recover and be ready for follow-on missions. When there is no mission, something has gone terribly wrong. For too many Christian families, there is no mission. They can’t say why they exist. If we analyze the actions of most Christian families, we find that their mission is to consume, just like the rest of society, with an inexplicable break once or twice a week for some unrelated religious duty. That needs to change.
Some might think that “the Gospel'' is the family's mission: save some souls before it all burns. While there is a serious duty for all Christians to reconcile people to God through the Gospel, that work is not the first duty of humans or families. The first calling of people, made in the image of God, the Creator, is to work and keep the Earth, making wilderness into garden, Gen 2:15. It is prior to the Fall and to the Gospel, and it hasn’t gone away. It’s more like breathing, when the Gospel is like escaping Alcatraz. We should help people escape the Alcatraz of sin, and we should not forget to breathe (funny video) while doing so. Not breathing has dire consequences.
How did we forget to breathe?
The Great Pivot
Pre-industrial cultures spent a lot of time working. That work was usually done in the context of immediate and extended family. It wasn’t efficient by our standards, but there was generally a healthy connection between work and reward that incentivized virtue as well as order and familial collectivism.
Industrial and post-industrial cultures, on the other hand have, by and large disregarded any need to serve, or be served by, the family and thus have weakened the institution. Beyond simply weakening a faceless institution, it has made wives feel inferior and forgotten while their husbands feel powerless and unappreciated. It has made their children groundless and detached.
It would be easy to simply pile blame on “the Left,” which has indeed made an industry of abolishing the mediating institutions of family and church. Yet many useful idiots of the Right have been wise to the bait of philosophical materialism while ignorant of the net of popular consumerism in which they stand. As Niel Postman would say, they have attacked the message while oblivious to the medium and metaphor. While philosophical materialism may be the most obvious enemy, consumerism is more stealthy and lethal.
How did we get here?
My grandfather, D.C. Phillips, was born in 1920 in Cullman County, Alabama and lived and worked on the family farm until he joined the Navy in 1940. When the Navy recruiter asked him why he wanted to join, he said, “I’m tired of followin’ ole’ John.” This meant that traveling the world on a ship seemed like a superior alternative to plowing with a mule, and likely better than fighting in the army if (when) a war kicked off. He would later find out that naval warfare which included kamikazes was no joke either.
After the war, he and many of his generation built a life somewhere other than the family farm they had previously inhabited. They were promised lives which included less time working and more time playing. Having survived the trip to hell and back, they figured they deserved it, and the offer sounded pretty attractive. Vacation, pension, weekends, no Ole’ John, just less work and more fun for as far as the eye could see.
Their families took vacations, went to church, went to the movies. Life was easier than ever. As time passed, there were more and more opportunities to trade money for entertainment. TVs were purchased and watched daily, at least while the short news programs were on, with the kids catching another hour or two a day of Rawhide and Gunsmoke. But then a strange thing happened. A substantial portion of “greatest generation’s” kids declared their pleasant valley suburban upbringings to be bovine fecal matter (B.S. for you non-Latin speaking folks), went to Woodstock, took drugs, passed out naked, woke up, and voted for Reagan. They also destroyed families at rates previously unimagined, and that kept right up in subsequent generations until they just stopped having them.
By the time I came around consumerist choices were expanding and cable TV was more common. My mom set strict limits on our TV consumption. I got one rerun per day of Lassie or Flipper, but not both. One hour, then get your butt outside. Occasionally I heard statistics in some preacher’s sermon about misguided and brain-fried children whose TV intake was nearly unlimited. Atari and Nintendo came. I didn’t get one, and mainly I was OK with it.
I played T-ball, swam competitively, did gymnastics for a bit, and did short stints in middle school football and wrestling. We went to Disney World several times before I left home. I golfed a bit in high school. I saw one professional football game in person. I could count the number of times I went to a movie theater on one hand, and the highlight of the event wasn’t the movie. That was my taste of consumerism, trading money for fun.
All this was made possible by the advent of industrialization and post-industrial information technologies. Gains in efficiency meant that our waking hours need not be filled with toil in order to survive. Since my childhood (I was born in 1982, three years before Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death) the possible ways to trade money for entertainment have expanded dramatically and the largest time suckers now seem to be virtual. And many of these you don’t pay for, you sell yourself to them. For those who have retained a desire for active sport, it can be done to previously unimagined excess with travel leagues.
What all of these things have in common is their lack of productive value. They take effort to produce, but then serve to make people unproductive. I’m not saying that recreation is evil, but I am saying that it has moved out of its place. Instead of merely being a revivifying respite from labor, it has replaced productive labor as our point of self-realization. That’s not a recent advent. It’s always been a temptation, just not a realistic one for most people. The military industrial leisure complex was not yet pumping out cheap quality entertainment in dangerous doses.
When industrial scale leisure really hit its stride, few were equipped to analyze it critically. Sure, the Puritans were suspicious of it way back when, but for the non-aristocratic class, nature and the need to survive placed sufficient limits on it anyway. If it wasn’t displacing Sunday worship, it was hard to see a lot of danger. So when church attendance really started slipping in the last century, one of the first reactions was to adopt entertainment in the church; make church fun. This meant that church itself became a liturgy of consumerism even as it peached against secular materialism.
The results that plagued western society as a whole ravaged the church in the same way. I encourage everyone to read this article by Joshua Coleman in The Atlantic.
“...starting in the late 19th century, traditional sources of identity such as class, religion, and community slowly began to be replaced with an emphasis on personal growth and happiness. By the second half of the 20th century, American families had gone through changes that, Cherlin said, were ‘unlike anything that previous generations of Americans have ever seen.’
Deciding which people to keep in or out of one’s life has become an important strategy to achieve that happiness.”
The uptick in adult children estranging themselves from their parents has been spawned in a psychological milieu of souls who have been taught to abandon familial duty and honor. Duty and honor are due only to one’s psychological self-identity and happiness. Unmoored from the world of real things and real struggles, educated in the liturgy of self-realization and individual happiness, families came unglued. Survival provided a good motivation to work and cooperate in pre-modern times. But when survival was more or less assured atop a raft of hyper-productive industry and welfare states, work and familial cooperation fell by the wayside as grounding instruments.
The church might have had an advantage, but by and large it didn’t. Missing from the church, when the wave of zombie-inducing leisure activities swept over the land in the 20th century, was a competing principle. I don’t mean a limiting principle, or a line not to cross, but an axiom to tether to, an ideal to pursue. While there is no Biblical command to abstain from leisure, there is a command to work. In fact, as previously stated, it is mankind’s primordial purpose. It’s the axiom around which to order Christian society, especially the family. Most of the evangelical church was promoting individual Bible study, individual evangelism, and age appropriate “worship experiences.” They were not promoting productive families.
Thus by the 1990’s the church had adopted its own liturgy of consumerism in the attractional church model, teaching Christians to shop for the highest quality religious entertainment to achieve the highest level of religious enjoyment: pleasure as purpose. It became a weapon of self-destruction. What it said was irrelevant. What it did is what mattered.
Modern Liturgies of Consumerism
“Family values” was a hot term among conservative rhetoricians when I became aware of, and a bit entranced by, politics in the early 90’s. In those days the hot social issues were abortion, sex education, and the laughable idea of gay marriage, which all mainstream Democrats assured us was merely a straw man set up to make them look crazy, like this guy Joe Biden did way back in 2006. Certainly the entertainment industry was assaulted by many a Pat Buchannan, but it was the content, not the form they critiqued. Remember Postman and Smith again.
The damage was done to the American family long before those days. It was done when families left the farm and the small family business theologically illiterate, without an understanding of why the family or work mattered, and certainly missing why it mattered in an age when “evangelism” was everything and Jesus was definitely coming back next Tuesday. The trap was set, and Americans walked right into it. The post-war economy had everything it needed to slice and dice the family and church into oblivion, and few saw it coming.
The industrial model required men in men’s work, women in women’s work, and children in ever larger state-run schools, away from the home for all but a few waking hours each week. This left the family unit two small spaces in which to exist: recreation and church. Theological liberalism had already gutted and defanged the mainline church. Conservative churches never gained influence in the elite educational establishments. Higher education, even in America, became openly hostile to religion and sent its disciples to be local public school teachers. This left recreation as the sole unchallenged domain of most families. The cultural result is what we recognize as contemporary consumerism.
The Great Dissolver Takes Flight
There are three classical spheres of authority: the church, the state, and the family. The church is the kingdom of God which exercises spiritual authority: ordering worship, proclaiming the Gospel, discipling the faithful. The state bears the sword, that is, it has a monopoly on the use of force to protect life, liberty, and property… or at least so says Locke. The family acts under the authority of the patriarch who, with the help of the matriarch, produces and nourishes offspring who carry on the work of mankind, increasing their inward and outward estates, and assisting others toward a flourishing community.
Consumerism works against family and church as a person-shaping liturgy. It is action, not doctrine. In concert with the industrial and post-industrial economic model, it ushers the members of families away from each other for the vast majority of their waking hours each week, teaching them to exist as individuals, yet without ever saying so. In the factory, the tech company, the university, the high school, and the daycare, and the inter webs, your familial relations and church membership are irrelevant at best. Often, they are liabilities.
If Deuteronomy 6:7 is to be obeyed, “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” then we’re going to need these sorts of lives, because we’ll actually need to be with our kids “when we walk by the way…” etc. Are we really doing that when we’re full participants in the consumerist culture?
Instead, the school buses the children away from the family and baptizes them into “the consumerist system,” which knows no competing institution, except its overlord the state, which runs the school. Encouraged toward fashionable performative acts of individuality, the student consumers become indistinguishable faces in a herd, pursuing meaning in a false self-constructed individuality - just like everybody else. “For as many of you as were baptized into education have put on the state. There is neither Smith nor Wang, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in the state, and the bathroom.” This is the gospel of consumerism. It is ultimately statist.
The industrial consumerist amusement complex does not stop at church and family. It wipes the landscape of all mediating institutions and civic organizations because they provide no quality entertainment and produce no profit. They don’t even babysit. There is no room for them. And during that small sliver of time in which the family unit might yet coalesce around a single book or meal, there is the individual hand-held cyber-ward, the smart phone, to ensure that their momentary unity will be no more than geographic proximity. The disintegration is complete.
Righting the Ship: The Hard Turn
Here’s the really difficult part. As long as fathers and mothers are whisked away daily to compartmentalized work lives, children will be parceled out to the education mills, and the machine shall advance. The challenge is daunting, but we must resist. Every ounce of resistance, even though small and incomplete, is useful.
So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Ecclesiastes 3:22
We can see among the participants in consumerism that there are gradations, and this is instructive. The family is most intact and church attendance highest among the people where this liturgy is resisted with restraint and discipline: the wealthy. It is in the upper classes where church attendance and marriage rates are highest and resistance to media and entertainment saturation is the greatest. The rich tend to be self-disciplined and place tighter limits on media consumption for themselves and their children. They emphasize outdoor activities and fitness. They stay married, which is the most miraculous feat next to getting married in the first place, which they also do at higher rates. I don’t think this is incidental. Despite being taught Marxist dogma in Ivy League schools, they are the least shaped by the consumerist liturgy, and all the better for it. This tells us something about the direction we need to go, namely, away from consumerist culture and its idea of the good life.
But while upper crust bourgeois values can mitigate the damage caused by the consumerist liturgy, they only work through enlightened self-interest and delayed gratification. It’s like eating terrible food because it’s good for you. What we need is a different appetite, one that actually likes the healthy stuff; one that desires our divine calling.
Two Kinds of People
I’ve heard many attempts at dividing the world into two kinds of people. I’m going to give it a go myself. There are those who seek enjoyment, and those who enjoy work. Consumerism teaches us to seek enjoyment. The Bible tells us to enjoy work. If we don’t take big steps to follow the latter, the family and church are toast.
I’ll make the following personal comments in light of a recent Aaron Renn Podcast, “Where Should I Live.” His assessment, and personal choices, seem to fully reflect consumerist sentiment. Varying community typologies (urban, suburban, ex-urban, etc) were graded according to standard consumerist concerns: plentiful convenient opportunities to earn money away from family, and plentiful convenient opportunities to trade that money for fun. I really like Aaron’s stuff, and I do not think he is oblivious to these notions. He would likely agree with much of what I’m saying, or at least I hope he would. (So if you read this, Aaron, let’s have a beer sometime.) Aaron’s flaw is simply in being quite normal.
My own extended family is fairly functional, but also fairly consumerist (normal). Because of this, visits to my parents rarely last more than three nights, and then things get stale. The same is true when they come to visit us. A few days and boredom sets in. Being good Christian folks with a penchant for moderation (remember mom’s strict TV limits), we usually don’t go blowing money on entertainment very long, we just go home. Remember that saying about fish and company?
But don’t let that paint too drab a picture. My dad and I have a great deal of enthusiasm for politics and theology. Against the trend, our attachment to the church is still strong. Fortunately, for me, I was blessed with a father, who has a remarkable combination of intelligence, eloquence, and faithfulness. We enjoy talking for hours over good bourbon, scotch, and cigars, in moderation of course. After a four to six month separation, we have things to catch up on. The first and second nights are full of lively discussion and debate. It is truly enjoyable. The third is good, but never as good as the first two. One night for politics. One night for religion. One night for recreation. Back to separate worlds of work. We both love our respective work. His is in finance and mine flying helicopters for a large company. But they are too big and specialized to involve family.
In contrast to this my father-in-law and I, though very amicable, have never reached the vivifying conversational peaks to which me and dad climb. Furthermore, he doesn’t drink or smoke cigars (audible gasp!). When we visit we catch up pretty quickly, but then we start scheming. If at all possible, we start building. Does the house need repairs? Does the fence need mending? Could we construct a better watering system? Could we start a business? Could we take over the world? We may get tired, but not bored. Our productive activities are stifled by our lack of time, but our time will never be cut short due to a shortage of productive activities.
We recently had some family friends over. They are probably the highest net-worth people that I know and regularly see. We were dealing with complicated plumbing issues, and despite my wife’s suggestion that I ask my friend if he had a certain specialized tool I needed, I didn’t want to center our night around sewage. Yet not 15 minutes after their arrival, he and I were discussing projects and problems, and he was lamenting the fact that I hadn’t asked him to bring the tools. He would have enjoyed tracing sewage lines more than sipping my fine locally sourced Chambourcin Reserve.
My friend and I had plenty to talk about, but the list of productive activities that might have drawn us together is endless. Work is a powerfully and sustainably uniting thing. That’s why it must become the domain of the Christian family again.
A Living Heritage: Learning from Agrarianism
Agrarianism has a liturgy which is contrary to that of consumerism. While all other lawful employments serve to produce and protect in some way, that is, they perpetuate human flourishing, farming is the most basic and unmediated form of our call. That doesn’t mean it is our call’s only proper embodiment. But it can instruct the way we choose and execute our other specific vocations.
Traditional idyllic farming keeps the family together and gives opportunity and value to all its members. It facilitates the education of children close to home in practical skills. Its seasonal ebbs leave space for fireside skolé, the Greek word for leisure and restful learning which we transliterate as school. This skolé occurs in togetherness, building a common culture on shared literature, history, and art. However we structure our work, it should make time for this.
When dad is getting covered in last year's lettuce (sewer problems are truly awful), the kids won’t be far away. Skills are learned. Collective memories are formed. When a new pasture is being planned, charted, fenced, and sons and daughters are helping and dreaming at every step, each individual is pulled with magnetic force into a unified family calling to “work and keep the garden.” This living heritage of capability is far better than any trust fund one might inherit.
The Productive Family After the Farm
Because so many jobs today are with larger companies that don’t make room for involvement by children, one area that can become a beachhead in the war against destructive consumerism is entrepreneurship. Small businesses, or any profession that allows children to share a stake in the work of the family will serve the purpose. Furthermore, businesses run on these principles can become safe havens for outside employees who may lack the wherewithal to be self-employed, but who wish to similarly order their lives. This is especially true for the poorest, who often have both parents working far away from the home, children in daycare and then public school, and are regularly forced to work when they should be resting and worshiping. They need Christian bosses that act like Christian bosses. (Sabbath keeping is a powerful cultural shaping instrument here)
I have a friend who owns the local trash service. He’s been hauling trash his entire life. His calling came when he decided to clean up a nearby creek as a child. It was a big job that became a career. Now he has several trucks and employees, but he’s still passionate about “keeping the garden.” Trucks break. Hydraulics bust. Dumpsters need welding. Records need kept. A kid can learn to be a competent and confident entrepreneurial MacGyver in that kind of environment.
I met another family near Atlanta who had a coffee shop and an accounting business in the same downtown building, and those weren’t their only enterprises. Every employee was family or a friend. Kids were always there. Three generations of extended family were usually present. Odds are, though, that you don’t have that job. You are likely years away from making it a reality even if you start now. But you can take steps to distance yourself and your family from the destructive dance of consumerism.
Even if it’s not immediately and economically efficient, it’s time for knowledge workers to get on Youtube and figure out how to do home renovation and repair, pulling the kids along as early in life as possible. If that means less time available for the sort of “family time” events that didn’t exist 100 years ago, so be it. What time is left should be devoted to skolé, that good kind of leisure that comes after exertion. The point of this essay is to give you a theological and practical framework to defend those actions or underpin the decision to make more radical changes. Combine that with homeschool or a religious school and church, and you have family life as it was meant to be, with work and education fortifying the family and the church instead of tearing them apart. The state could nearly vanish and no one would notice.
This is post-consumerist Christianity, Biblical Producerism. If we wish to stop hemorrhaging our offspring to the world and return to normal life, as it was for millennia, we need to recognize the destructive culture we possess, and abandon it for a culture of producerism. It is our default calling. It is a psychologically healthy baseline of obedience. It is a culture of people enjoying hard work, vibrant worship, rightly ordered recreation, and good sleep.
What’s your context? How can you keep your family united through work? Please tell me. I’m going to be tending this field for a long time.
It is not just a good essay, it poisons consumerism and fertilizes family production. We are doing that a little bit in Uganda among presbyterians there, but here with wife and me it is happening only with family and some in the church, but with writing you have done it will expand. Thank you, Keith!
May your field-tending be ever productive! Good essay.