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.

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 common anthropology vs. just a modern Western phenomenon?

Christians confess that there is an inherent hunger in human beings that cannot be satisfied by what the material world offers.  The human condition is such that we live with a kind of openness directed toward possibility in the world, always becoming.<a title="" href="#_edn1">[i]</a>  This does 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.  It’s akin to what Marx called fetishism and Freud later described as the surrogate object of desire.

The most troubling fact is that this desire is very difficult to control. In his book <em>No Rising Tide</em>, Perkins School of Theology professor Joerg Rieger discusses this very question and argues that  the drive to consume is sustained by economic mechanisms and reinforced by the advertising industry.  Moreover, Rieger contends that economic and religious desires 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.  The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach made a similar argument in the 19<sup>th</sup> Century.

As Rieger further explains, 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.

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.
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<a title="" href="#_ednref1">[i]</a> Wolfhart Pannenberg and Duane A. Priebe, <em>What Is Man? Contemporary Anthropology in Theological Perspective.</em> (Fortress Press, 1970), 8.

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