by Os Guinness
This is hardly what the American founders and the early American Christians bargained for, but it raises the old question with a new vengeance. What is the basis of American unity and legitimacy if there is no established religion? E Pluribus Unum (“out of many one”) may be a stirring national motto, but it is a demanding and costly ideal to live up to. As this dawns on people (often half-consciously), the way is opened for us to promote the thrust toward civil religion. “Under God,” however vague and however controversial, provides a point of potent unity that somehow transcends difference.
For seen from one angle, civil religion is a kind of halfway house. It stands between what Americans see as two extremes: on one hand the dangers of a state Church and an established religion, and on the other the dangers of a public life without any values at all (a “naked public square” as one of them put it). At first this halfway solution seems useful to both state and Church. It helps the state because, if public values are not to be imposed from above (an essentially authoritarian solution), they must be nourished from below. It helps the churches because it allows them to contribute to public life, if only in general terms. Civil religion is thus a compromise solution that allows the Church to exist as an entity that is neither established nor proscribed. Jefferson’s wall is porous, as it were, and some faith seeps through. There is no national god in America, and the President is his prophet.
Like many compromises, however, the solution is unstable, and public debate demonstrates a series of restless and violent swings between these two extremes. One extreme is, sociologically speaking, idiocy—the idea that the social order needs no moral basis at all. This might be true if the U.S. were a totalitarian country like the former Soviet Union. But since the country is as free as it is, the outcome would be plain: a spiritual void, moral confusion, social chaos, and national decline.
Fear of that possibility rears its head in different ways at different times (the call for “law and order,” the condemnation of “all these illegal aliens,” and so on). Whenever it does, it automatically fosters a swing to the other extreme, the one we are really after—civil religion. For without a doubt, civil religion is indeed an extreme and not a meek and mild compromise if seen from the correct angle. Civil religion is an extreme because it is, spiritually speaking, idolatry.
Our achievement here is phenomenal because, as you know, the heart of the Jewish and Christian faiths is a radical monotheism—“There is one God. There is no god but God. So God alone is to be worshiped.” It is this central and vital demand that civil religion undermines subtly but devastatingly.
So once you see the dynamics of the swing from idiocy to idolatry, you can see that, for American Christians, civil religion is a case of out of the melting pot and into the fire. As things proceed well, we push to make civil religion such an unholy alliance of faith and flag that Christian ideals and American interests are welded inseparably. The Adversary then becomes the court chaplain to the American status quo, and ringmaster to the American dream. A dire case of “God on their side”? That is not the half of it. Civil religion is idolatry for one reason only—in raising what unites them to the point of reverence and then worship, Americans are literally worshiping themselves. The god of civil religion is dazzling because it is wrapped in red, white, and blue, but the god of civil religion is still themselves.
Consumer Religion
Both historical and current conditions in America are ideal for breeding civil religion, and the same is true of the second counterfeit: consumer religion. This is religion shaped by the priorities and demands of the economic order—service of “Mammon” outstripping service of the “Master,” to use the Adversary’s terms again.
Have you heard the story of Samuel Goldwyn’s attempt to secure the film rights to George Bernard Shaw’s plays? Seeking to impress Shaw, he put exaggerated emphasis on his concern for cultural excellence and absolute artistic integrity. Shaw listened politely but finally refused.
“No,” Shaw said, “there’s too much difference between us. You’re interested in art. I’m interested in money.”
That is worth remembering when you approach the heat and din of the debate surrounding consumer religion. The lines are not always drawn where you would expect. The politics of envy or sour grapes on one side can sometimes seem as strong as the theology of affluence or egotism on the other. Even well-placed denunciations often do little more than harden the identification of the moneychanger with his wares.
Anything as elementally powerful as religion was bound to be commercialized. History is littered with examples. But what religion is supposed to be more at odds with Mammon than the Christian faith? Jesus made a big point of driving out the moneychangers. The house of prayer, he said, was not to be a warehouse for loot. Martin Luther attacked Tetzel’s indulgence sale. Grace was being priced out of the market.
Yet such is our success today that consumer religion’s “best practices” are best demonstrated by the very disciples of Jesus, those who would pride themselves on being the heirs of Martin Luther and the truest sons and daughters of the Reformation. Driven out of the temple 2,000 years ago, moneychangers are now resurfacing in American churches with all the latest methods of Madison Avenue and the Harvard Business School to make up for lost time.
As always, our approach is through cultural assimilation. Consumer religion is an unholy amalgam of convictions and consumption that creates a sacramental materialism in the name of God. Forget for a moment the wild and ludicrous examples—the crass theologies of “health and wealth,” the laughable “prosperity doctrines,” the pastors driving Cadillacs as evidence of their “success spirituality,” the fraudulent offers of prayer for money, the inflated emotional hypes, the self-glorifying building projects, the “holy hardware” and the “Jesus junk.” These are easy to list, but really only symptoms. What few people analyze are the forces behind them. They fail to see the powerful undertow of commercial forces in America that suck down all claims to be “good news” to the level of one more television jingle. If consumer religion had not existed already, some American entrepreneur would have lost no time inventing it.
What are the forces behind it? Where these forces are present, consumer religion seems as natural as motherhood (as you can tell by the shock when it is attacked). Where they are absent, as in the less-developed world, consumer religion can be seen from a distance for what it is—a particularly crass form of cultural captivity.
One contributing force is the same American pattern of Church-state separation that has broken up the monopoly powers of the former state churches.3 As we have seen, representatives of what were formerly “established churches” in Europe arrived in America to find themselves “ex-Churches,” and in the process they were forced to change their stance from one of coercion to one of competition. With no state sword or purse behind any of them, each church was on its own, forced to carve out its own market, win its own clientele, and beat the drum for its own appeal.
Put differently, disestablishment acted on the churches in a manner that is parallel to de-monopolization in the economy, and churches experienced a marked shift to stances very like those in the laissez-faire capitalist market. They were no longer monopolistic authorities; more and more they acted like marketing agencies. One nineteenth-century critic observed, “Our metropolitan churches are, in general, as much commercial as the shops.”4 But as Tocqueville and others noted earlier, this was neither new nor accidental.
The major force contributing to consumer religion, however, has been America’s role in leading the world from an economy of production (in which things were valued according to what it took to produce them) to an economy of consumption (in which things are valued according to their capacity to satisfy consumers’ needs and desires). Among a myriad of results is a marked shift from the “virtues” of the Protestant ethic to the “narcissism” of the consumerist desires, with fatal consequences in areas ranging from citizenship to faith.
One o
bserver sums up America’s consumer society acidly: “Hence, the new consumer penchant for age without dignity, dress without formality, sex without reproduction, work without discipline, play without spontaneity, acquisition without purpose, certainty without doubt, life without responsibility, and narcissism into old age and unto death without a hint of wisdom or humility. In the age in which we now live, civilization is not an ideal or an aspiration, it is a video game.”5
For our purposes, consumerism has two main effects on religion that allow us to corrupt it entirely. One is the pivotal shift from meeting genuine “needs” to fulfilling “desires, wishes, and fantasies”—“taking the waiting out of wanting,” as an early ad for credit cards put it well. The other is the unexpected outcome that is called “infantilization” or induced childishness. With the ability to produce more goods than people need, consumer capitalism has to make children into consumers earlier and keep them at it longer. Hence contemporary America, a culture of perennial adolescents.
All this represents a bonanza for us, as faith is confused with the American dream just as it is with American civil religion. Religion, you remember, has been confined increasingly to the private sphere at the very time when the private sphere has become the sphere of individual gratification and consumption. This special configuration has produced a surge of conspicuous consumption in religious guise.
You can find examples without end. “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve,” one television preacher promised his audience in his latest variation of “possibility thinking.” “Turn scars into stars,” another offered from his self-help arsenal. Slogans like these are designed for plugging into the Apostles’ Creed or the American Creed or both. The good news and the good life, the Christian Way and the American Way are all serviced under the same franchise: Brand Jesus. And as for the induced childishness, witness any of the “happy-clappy” “worship experiences” that Evangelicals take for worship these days.
The result is a spectacle for our eyes and ears. Theologies compete brazenly to rationalize wealth, success and material blessing. Prosperity doctrines gush forth from rallies, radio and television. (“God’s got it, I can have it, and by faith I’m going to get it.”6) Even Psalm 23 has been revised (“The Lord is my banker, my credit is good.… he giveth me the key to his strongbox. He restoreth my faith in riches. He guideth me in the paths of prosperity, for his namesake.”7 Gutter-to-grace testimonies have become rags-to-riches testimonials, and fantastic expenditure is poured into showcase projects that are flagships for the showman commanders of the new empires.
Without seeing why, thousands of individual Americans are flocking to this Good Life Gospel and thus doing obeisance to consumer capitalism. They “consume” faith and church memberships as they would vacations or restaurants, “surfing” churches to find better satisfaction with more congenial music and the like. They even rise socially, not only from being bank clerks to bank presidents, but from being Pentecostals to being Presbyterians or Episcopalians. (Believe it or not, a correlation has been found between denominations and the likelihood of obesity. Episcopalians, like upper-class people generally, being the leanest.8)
A third, more recent, force contributing to consumer religion is the highly commercial nature of the American media that are shaping its Christian users. China is typical of the world’s authoritarian type of communication system, just as the BBC stands for a more paternalistic type. The other main type of system is commercial, and nowhere has this been developed further than in the U.S., especially in the day of the multiple channels and blogs.9 (The average American child, for example, sees over 20,000 commercials every year and spends more time in front of the television than in the classroom.10)
In some ways the commercial system is unquestionably the freest. But its hidden snags lie in the remorseless logic of its economics, since first and foremost it is a marketing medium. It requires vast capital, sure results and quick returns, so it has a built-in bias against the small, the risky, the innovative and the controversial. Yes, almost anything can be said on commercial TV, but only if someone can afford to say it and if one can say it profitably. In other words, not everything can be said on commercial television.
What, for instance, would be the ratings appeal of one of their old prophets such as Jeremiah or Amos? Or what would be the appeal of what they used to call “the offense of the cross”? Commercial television is for profits, not prophets, and the televangelists and megachurch pastors have been quick to learn the difference. “It’s not about you,” they repeat like a litany now. But who is kidding whom? Even those who say it do not escape the fact that it is almost all about them.
There is also a fourth factor, a force that is carrying consumer religion right into the big league: We are seeing a new rage for “culture creation.” With the perceived failures of both a privatized and politicized faith, Christians now realize they have to move out of the closet and into the culture. Many of them have all the starry-eyed naiveté of a Johnny-come-lately. They want to catch up and make up for lost time. And notice whom they ask to countersign their excesses.
“Why should the devil have all the good music/art/jobs/success/life?” they argue reasonably, before shedding the inhibitions of centuries and plunging into freedom like new converts to hedonism. Or, if you ask them how they reconcile all that talk about money with their Christian faith, “It’s easy,” one of them explains. “I believe God made the diamonds for his crowd, not for Satan’s bunch.”11 Only a towering naiveté could think such freedom is a gain.
So we might go on but the point is sufficiently established. Examples of the brash worldliness of consumer religion will be all around you, nowhere more than in Southern California. But leave it to others to get bogged down in fascination with the particular examples. Our job is to see broad trends and isolate forces so we can analyze and exploit them. Many of the sternest critics from the other side have failed to analyze the underlying trends. This gives us a critical edge.
Christians overlook the fact that to become a significant market is as much a source of problems as a sign of power. They might have learned from the youth market in the ’60s, which was the immediate forerunner of the Evangelical market in the ’70s. The principle is simple: the stronger the subculture, the more powerful its commercial potential. The so-called counter-culture came to express its protest and its aspirations in the rock music and blue jeans that became the sound and style of the movement. And in the process a vast new market was created.
Once these things were on the market, however, they could be sold by anyone and bought by anyone. As a result, counter-cultural symbols lost their distinctiveness and became fashionable, then empty and open to manipulation. Who could take radicals seriously when their rhetoric was interrupted by the jingle of a million cash registers? “Every thrust at the jugular,” as one of them put it, “brought forth not blood but sweet success.”12
That was partly why the counter-culture did not succeed. It was co-opted by Madison Avenue. In the end it was not even a permanent subculture, only a way station for youth. We are bringing the same Midas touch to the current Evangelical renewal, so that through the amalgam of convictions and consumption a market is made out of a movement, congregations are turned into customers and the gospel is groomed to gross well.
This is proving easier than we expected, as a glance at a recent trend in advertising will show you. Bob Hope once told a story about flying across America in a plane that was hit by lightning.
“Do something religious!” shrieked a little old lady across the aisle.
“So I did,” he wisecracked. “I took up a collection.”
But the relationship between the Bible and the bucks is no joke today. It’s big business. It’s the right button to push, whether in jest or in earnest. A recent ad in The New Yorker ran, “After 20 years of driving Volkswagen religiously, the Reverend Dr. Gray-Smith converted.… Le Car has turned millions into true believers.” Can you imagi
ne Renault advertising like that in France? In secular Europe their little joke would have all the resonance of a wet cardboard bell.
In America, however, the joke is now told not only behind Christians’ backs but also to their faces. You do not need market research to tell you that conservative Christians have a biblical text to justify whatever they do. So how has El Al, the Israeli national airline, advertised in a leading conservative Christian magazine? “In 10 Hours We Fly You to Where Jesus Walked,” ran the headline over a shot of Lake Galilee with the text, “Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.” You’ve come a long way, baby, to buy that one so solemnly. But the El Al “Pilgrimage Department” winks all the way to the bank.
You can see how the course of consumer religion is Operation Gravedigger in miniature. Late American Evangelicalism is partly descended from English Puritanism, but between them are three centuries, two worlds and a complete theology. The earlier movement saw covetousness as the master sin, the essence of the lust of the spirit. Such Puritans were dangerous. They treated riches with a disciplined inner detachment and regarded poverty as infinitely preferable to prosperous worldliness.
Their heirs have neatly reversed this. They see the official master sin (if there is one at all) as the lust of the flesh, not the spirit. Unofficially, poverty and failure are even worse, whereas riches are glorified and equated with blessing. “It is the duty of every man to be a prosperous man,” exclaimed a nineteenth-century trailblazer for this truth.13 “God’s will is prosperity,” echoes today’s telepriest as he thanks God for his “blessed Cadillac.”14 Such high buffoonery is harmless to us, though an invaluable contribution to the decline of the modern Church, if not the West itself. Late American Evangelicalism is early Puritanism in its dotage, the Protestant work ethic gone to seed. Even the “Christian Booksellers” have changed their name to “Christian Retailers,” a change that is as accurate as it is revealing.