A crowd gathers. Bells ring. Bright colors flash everywhere, fast paced marketeers tell you that things are looking good for the future. People tell you that you can be happy, and that your future can be brighter than your past. The doldrums of everyday living can be alleviated. For a small price, you can buy something, an idea, a plan, to make things better for you and your loved ones. In conjunction with this scene, strange spectacles pepper the place. Oddities, objects, stories, sensations, dramas, tragedies – you can see objects associated with celebrities, you can even buy them for towering sums. You are surrounded by promises that can be fulfilled in return for the contents of your wallet, and stories that tell you how and why that is so. Over all this, there are beautiful looming words. Fulfillment. Freedom. Solidarity. Holiness. These are the expressed purpose of the hubbub.
Sound like a flea market? An infomercial? Any single hour of television watching? The weirder parts of a county fair? What about a day spent in the Vatican in 1490? You got it.
I often hear about the concerns of people for the well being of Christianity. From people like Bob, and Preemptive Karma. They ask about the state of the church in modernity. About how the church has capitulated to contemporary commercialism, become too like “the world,” and lost its spiritual foundations. It is true that today, with the rise of Corporate industry and media to a new level, the church has seen a growth of materialism within its ranks. But I do not believe this to be a new phenomenon. In fact, Christianity is in many ways the founding source of this tirade of commercialism. In the age of indulgences which Martin Luther rebelled against, a saint’s toes could be seen on display, or the foreskin of Christ, or any number of celebrity worship icons and relics. The difference, we tell ourselves, is that today... well... there isn’t much difference, actually. A piece of gum which was supposed to have been chewed by Brittney Spears was sold on E-Bay for thousands of dollars. This is not so different from the general fascination with the undergarments worn by a particular saint in the late Middle Ages. And still, to this day, the worlds abounds with promises of how your life can be better, if you buy this or that self help book, or sign up for this or that program. We should not be asking so much why the church is a part of it, but why it started it in the first place, and why it remains in the thick of it. It is not a new thing for the endeavors of people’s hearts to be so intertwined with and manipulated by other people’s desires to fatten their wallets. We think for some reason that Christianity should be different, above it all. but in truth, our spirituality and our economic meanderings have never been so separate, at least as a culture. The question that I think is more pressing is an individual one. Everyone wants the world to change. But no one wants to change.
One of the interesting things about this information age in comparison to the age of the Holy Roman Empire is the sheer ease for anyone to learn. And one would think that by this sheer factor, considering the surpression of public knowledge in the old age (the Bible was only in Latin, preventing anyone outside the clergy from reading it), that we would finally see through such gimmicks. Yet the fact of their continued existence shows that people still buy them, hook, line and sinker.
I found out recently that MIT and several other notable universities are in the process of making all of their classes available online, for FREE. You can take the whole class, any class that MIT offers. You can do it all online, and learn everything they teach. However, you don't get credit for it. But if you pay the tuition price, you can take the whole class, you can still even do it online, and you can get credit for it. So what you pay for is really the transcript. Not the education. The reason I bring this up in a post about Christianity and consumerism is that it is a distinction between classes, in the same way that there was distinction made between the clergy and the laity through their ability to read the Bible in the Middle Ages. If you can pay, then you get the credits. If not, you are likely one of the seventy-five percent of American adults who are without a college education. Such things as this being decided by the accumulation of material wealth seems ludicrous. But ultimately, it is the same problem as is asked about in this common question of "How did the church get like this?" And as our cultural sense of spirituality informs our material wealth, so our wealth, certainly, informs our spirituality, as can be seen in books by the unpalletable Joel Osteen, who promises that through prayer and spirituality you can become rich. Or Amway, or any number of organizations and mindsets. This is not new.
The better question to ask is "Why do class and materialism and class taint our sense of what is supposed to be transcendent to them?" We have lost our reckoning with the more recent developments in History, of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emmerson, who proclaimed a new spirituality transcendent of such things in his address to the Harvard Divinity School in 1838. A spirituality which remained unfettered by attachment to success. Saint Paul wrote, "all that I once thought gain, I now count as loss." Jesus overturned the money changer's tables. John the Baptist's head was presented on a platter, and Ralph Waldo Emmerson was labelled a heretic, and lost his job at the Harvard Divinity school. If one were to ask why, the answer would be "the same reason that megachurch preachers are becoming millionaires, Africa is starving, and we still can't stand the Commies." The decency and generosity of good people will always be challanged with the malice of those who do not wish to change. Yet as I said before, we all want the world to be a better place. Even the megachurch millionaires. The question that could really change the world, is "How can I change myself?" This is the question which Henry David Thoreau answered by going into the wilderness in the style of John the Baptist. He then wrote "Civil Disobedience," which DID change the world, as later on it was read by both Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.
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