First, a bit of consumer self-disclosure.
I sit, this Nashville morning, in the Freon cool of a Borders café, wearing a wrinkled oxford-cloth shirt, dingy cargo shorts, and flip-flops. My BlackBerry Pearl sits beside my MacBook. I wear a yellow-gold wedding band. I have no other jewelry, visible tattoos, or piercings.
In other words, I look just like a writer-activist, which is, unfortunately, pretty much the case. I say unfortunately because this means I am evidently complicit with the consumerism of which I have recently written a book-length critique.
There are only two immediately obvious pieces of cognitive dissonance to my public identity. First, I am drinking the house brew. This is not because I do not like lattes; it is because I cannot rationalize paying for coffee what bars charge for beer.
Second, I do not have a cool haircut. I have the haircut of a factory foreman from 1969 who grimaces every time he thinks about bell bottoms. I like going to my barber and saying what I want in seven words: “Short on top, shorter on the sides.” It makes me feel like a throwback. So my uncool haircut is cool to me the way some people dig Buddy Holly glasses. (You’d probably guess that if you watched me long enough.)
The point is this: You would know, with one passing glance, a great deal about who I am. In fact, if you or anyone in your youth group walked into the Nashville Borders this morning, you would be able to peg my social location, education, and economic class almost perfectly. If we talked, you would probably be surprised by very few of my likes and dislikes.
They would not surprise you because you can read me like the walking catalog of consumer choices that I am—despite the fact that I have made a habit of removing brand logos from everything I own.
I know this is true because, while I guarantee that I don’t have a fraction of your youth group’s consumer savvy, it takes me a nanosecond to read everyone else at Borders. Take the middle manager in the corner (Dell laptop, black golf shirt, nice chinos, good hair, muscular). Or the votes-Democratic community organizer next to him (big silver jewelry, brought her own travel mug, loads of keys on a carabiner keychain, sensible fleece jacket and umbrella with a playful print).
I don’t know them. But I know them. Thus, the definition of a consumerist society like ours: You are what you buy.
When my grandparents were growing up, there was no such thing as brand consciousness. It was the Great Depression, after all—nobody had any money to buy anything, let alone consumer goods that would let you “express yourself and your style” to the world. You knew who you were by where you came from and who your family was—not by the stuff that you bought to create your ever-changing self.
(An aside: Lest we wax nostalgic for Yore, remember that it wasn’t called the “Great Depression” for nothing; and it was a pretty lousy time to be non-white, a woman, or a draft-eligible man with good arches. We’ve all got problems.)
How does all this relate to youth ministry?
Kids in today’s churches face the historically novel and existentially staggering task of inventing themselves. They have to create identities in a society where there is a dizzying array of options open to them. This singular fact of existence in a consumerist society will have concrete effects on patterns and behaviors of living, both in and out of the church.
The ministers entrusted with shepherding young people through discipleship ought to be aware of these patterns, for two reasons. First, they need to be able to identify and deal with the points of friction between consumerism and Christlikeness. Second, if they aren’t careful, consumerist practices—which are, let’s admit it, attractive and fun—will be adopted by the church. This is already happening, and it cripples our ability to call Christians to be a holy people. We’re shaping disciples with the same methods the world shapes consumers.
Toward that end, I’ve tried to identify three principal traits of consumerist society to which youth workers might pay special attention.
A Customized World
One of the aspects of Internet living is the world we inhabit becomes tailored to our individual preferences. We can read blogs we agree with, watch media designed for increasingly narrow target audiences, see ads prepared specifically for us based on browsing history, and—in online worlds like Second Life—play God with our own digital bodies and surroundings.
Advertisers recognize the fact people increasingly demand a customized life. Take ATT’s brilliant “Where Do You Live?” campaign, which suggests each ATT customer occupies a unique space on the planet, populated only by him or her. Live in Kansas, work in Kentucky, take your leisure in California? ATT informs you that you inhabit Kantucornia, Population 1. Take that, community!
Young people formed in these patterns will be less and less inclined to put up with the minor annoyances of living in a real world that isn’t designed for their pleasure.
Leave aside for a moment the fact that our sin makes us unfit to design our own universes. Beyond that, there is a profound spiritual danger to being overly comfortable; in a fallen world, after all, blessed are those who mourn for God’s kingdom.
Take the perennial youth group theme verse, “I can do everything with the help of Christ who gives me the strength I need.” What comes right before it? The textual precursor is Paul’s thoughts on true contentment: “I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything with the help of Christ who gives me the strength I need” (
Youth workers should be very cautious about the ways in which their flocks customize their lives and look for ways to shape, instead, that unchanging peace of which Paul speaks.
There’s no one way to do this, of course; but here’s one idea: Lead your group in a fast from personal preferences. Refuse to exert your will over your environment. Stop shopping; stop thinking about your likes and dislikes; don’t supersize, exchange, or substitute anything. Take what life gives and do not complain. Do this everywhere. The resulting discomfort might yield interesting—and sanctifying—results.
Brand Me
I already mentioned that a unique characteristic of consumerist society is that you have to invent yourself in it. Those who refuse, who opt out of consumption, are viewed as freaks: off-the-grid types who grow kale in old oil barrels and keep pet goats. The rest of us are engaged, to varying degrees, in the project of ourselves.
This is nowhere more evident than among adolescents. In a consumerist society, the normal adolescent urge toward self-definition happens on steroids. Think about the variety of vehicles on which teens can establish identities: blogs, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, Second Life, cell-phone texting. These are simply digital identities, having no necessary connection to the old standards of school, church, home. That’s a lot of self-expression they have to worry about.
The quite-predictable result of this simple fact is a pervasive narcissism. You can’t spend as much time on anything as we do on ourselves and then expect not to be at least mildly obsessed with it.
This is, of course, a spiritual problem. Paul urged us to regard others more highly than ourselves. Jesus informed us flat out that self-interest and self-promotion are not kingdom values. The point is we’re not the point. Yet the consumer culture reinforces the notion that we are each the focus of the universe.
Worse, there are all kinds of ways this value system gets reinforced in the church, starting with the spatial metaphor of “inviting Jesus into your heart.” Behold the believer as the center of the spiritual universe, with Jesus dashing over to take up residence. Counter this with the biblical model—the Christian as one who is “in Christ”—and you see how even the way we introduce the lifelong walk of discipleship reinforces the self-importance endemic to consumer society.
The solution isn’t quick, but it’s thorough: In each and every aspect of Christian life, reinforce to the believers the student is formed in the image of the Master. This means the more you look like Jesus, the less concerned you are with personal self-expression.
Having Two Masters Doesn’t Sound So Bad
Here’s the stickler that your youth group parents do not want you telling their children: There is something wrong with being rich. It comes at a spiritual cost. Sinners mentioned in the gospel routinely choose Jesus over their old lifestyle—except the rich young ruler, who “went away sad.” By contrast, exemplary uses of money would be considered unwise by any financial planner: room and board for a wounded stranger, a lavish party for the poor instead of your friends, expensive lotion for a condemned man.
The church, being comprised of fallen humans, has for the centuries of its existence attempted to dilute Jesus’ teachings on money. Consider they are just as plain as His teachings on sex—but which topic is addressed with greater fervor in your congregation? (And why will these sentences make many people angrier, perhaps, than the far more strident declarations on the same topic that Christ makes in the gospels—say,
It’s quite one thing to buy and sell goods, to earn, give, spend money. There’s nothing integrally wrong with this. But money divides people, too, such that Paul calls the love of it “the root of all kinds of evil” (
Much is being made, of course, of the rediscovered evangelical social conscience for the poor. As I read this phenomenon, though, there’s not a great deal of recognition that lifting the poor up entails, to some extent, the humbling of the rich—a la the Magnificat. Charity—giving out of abundance—is one thing—giving until it hurts is another.
In a consumerist society, any questioning of the value of wealth will be met with unnaturally elevated hostility. This is because in a society where you are who you buy yourself to be, money serves an existential need. This means our young people are being raised with an unhealthy affection for filthy lucre. (Consider how hard it is to imagine anyone referring to money so negatively these days.) Of all consumerism’s effects, none alarms me and depresses me as much as this. For the very brave, let me propose considering how your church or youth group could go past counter-culture and become a counter-economy.
Can’t imagine what this might look like? Start with a series of messages on money-related passages in the gospels and finish in Acts. Here’s the trick: Jesus doesn’t need you to apologize for Him. So, preach the texts as literally and with as much zeal, as you would the sections on sexual purity, and see what happens when the Word of God is unleashed.
This would be an important start, because the church will really have nothing of substance to say to a consumerist society’s pop culture until we begin to live far more simply than we seem willing to do.
