<p>I’m usually pretty good about being conscious of what I buy and what I eat – taking an interest in where things are made, by who, for how much, and so on.  And yet, I’m still a consumer.  Sometimes it just feels like the air we breathe.  I might purchase fair trade coffee and chocolate, but I’m still addicted to coffee and chocolate.  My wife tries to shop only for clothes made in the U.S., but she still really likes to shop.   So I started wondering how much of this is just human, and how much of it is culturally constructed.</p>
<p>Despite the fact that many Christians themselves get caught up in this pattern of behavior, there seems to at least be some level of awareness in the church about the problem.  This is a good thing.  Less understood though is the extent to which societal messages are able to increasingly produce in us an insatiable desire for consumption in the first place.  In their genuine intent to encourage counter-culturalism, we might hear pastors talk about innate human drive to always want more.  But how much of this is rooted in a universal anthropology vs. just a modern Western phenomenon now gone viral?  The issue is also called materialism, but this could be a misnomer.  Material-ism implies the absolutization of the material, when in fact the lie we are fed is that the material will bring much more - happiness, fulfillment... a certain image or experience.</p>
<p>Christians confess that there is an inherent hunger in human beings that cannot be satisfied by what the material world offers.  There is a difference between our basic needs and our desires.  Accordingly, the human condition is such that we live with a kind of openness directed toward possibility in the world, always becoming.  This does not have to be a bad thing.  Some have called it the "God-shaped hole."  But there is another level of desire that is perhaps more artificial or at least less natural - namely, the desire that is harnessed by the power of globalizing market forces in such a way as to induce complacency in our individualism and trivialize any concern about our unsustainable standard of living.</p>
<p>The most troubling fact is that this desire is very difficult to control or restrain.  Theologian <a title="Joerg Rieger homepage" href="http://www.joergrieger.com/" target="_blank">Joerg Rieger</a> argues that the drive to consume is propelled by economic mechanisms and reinforced by the advertising industry.  The deceit of this system is increasingly taken for granted - so much so that one of my former seminary professors Roger Olson recently felt compelled to write a blog post <a title="Roger Olson: Can a Christian Work in the marketing field?" href="http://http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2011/10/can-a-christian-work-in-the-marketing-field/" target="_blank">here</a> raising the question of whether Christians should even work in the marketing field at all!  Moreover, Rieger further contends that economic and religious desires often parallel each other.  This is illustrated by the way we often project our desires and ideals from the material world onto the divine and thus replace the transcendent God with an idol.  If desire is shaped by the production of wealth in a given society, this process can have a subconscious effect on people’s deepest convictions and ultimate values.  This means that the way culture teaches us to view wealth has a tremendous impact on the kind of people we become - not to even mention the irreversible social costs incurred on society as a whole.</p>
<p>As communities that are supposed to be convicting, healing and nurturing us on the path to holiness, churches have a vital part to play in resisting co-optation by the marketplace.  Sadly it’s not uncommon though for Christian congregations to become complicit in the cycle of consumption as well, even if only in very subtle ways.  To a degree this might be unavoidable - but it’s imperative for us to be sensitized and attentive to how we succumb to addictive desires.  I’m interested in how the church can be a place that enables Christians to subvert the status quo in this regard.  I know there are many tangible ways to do this, but I’m curious as to what others have seen and discovered about how our local practice can transcend systems that resist and suppress change.   This is the other questions I'm really wrestling with right now: should our faith communities primarily strive to create alternative economies under the shadow of empire, so to speak, or should we actually strive to have transformative agency at the state political realm?  or both?  Does the latter usually risk too much division/compromise?</p>
