Christianity and consumerism: the dubious nexus

Apart from the function of rhetoric in oral cultures (because I come from a highly oral culture), I'm also fascinated by the often ignored relationship between our faith and capitalism. I tend to think that there's more causality in the relationship than we acknowledge. There are things in the modern expression of Christianity that are essential to not only to the succes of capitalism, but to it's establishment basic survival. Likewise, modern Christianity is largely influenced by what's going on on the market place. One need only look to the modern church's dependence on money, a key building block for a capitalism.

I don't think it coincidental that the exponential spread of Christianity has been closely matched by a similarly exponential growth of market capitalism. When the British colonized Zimbabwe, they rationalized western imperialism by claiming that colonialism brought the "Three C's" to the "dark continent": Christianity, Civilization, and Commerce. Maybe I am just a bitter post-colonial thinker.

Or maybe not.

It is striking to note that the mammon is the most frequent subject that Jesus talked about. He talked about it more than anything else with the exception of the kingdom itself! That those two rank one and two on Jesus' most talked about subjects doesn't suggest that they are or ought to be complimentary. On the contrary, Jesus talks about them because their antithetical to each other; they ought not to co-exist. Since I am not a theologian or a biblical hermeneutics expert, I will leave this subject to those worthy experts whose terrain this is.

I bring all this up because it there exits a dubious connection between our faith and rampant capitalism not only in our present epoch, but throughout time. In fact, there's a fair amount of evidence suggesting that the Christian work ethic and the Christian notion of complete emotional engagement were critical in establishment of conditions conducive to the emergence of the hyper-capitalism under which we live. Rodney Clapp, in this 1996 essay which appeared in Christianity Today eloquently frames the issues. Here's an excerpt:

Several essential features of today's capitalism were either unimaginable or positively condemned throughout most of Christian history. We no longer question the legitimacy of making money with money. But throughout church history, up through the Reformation, the charging of interest was proscribed. In earlier eras, the church would have regarded stock market speculation as nothing more than profligate gambling. We suffer no crisis of conscience, nor even a second thought, about consuming goods or experiences solely for relaxation and amusement. Yet Puritans and our Christian forebears of other strains understood consumption principally for pleasure as sinful indulgence....

...Much later, in the Boston of 1635, a Puritan merchant was charged by the elders of his church with defaming God's name. He was hauled before the General Court of the Commonwealth and convicted of greed because he had sold his wares at 6 percent profit, 2 percent above the maximum allowed by law.

One more example should suffice to drive home the point that capitalism and consumerism have not always been with us. Max Weber argued that while modern capitalist employers depend on the principle of increased "piece-rates," or more pay for more production, such a thing was not at all second nature to a traditional or precapitalistic way of life. Again and again, he says, employers in the early capitalist period found that raising piece-rates did not automatically raise production. For example, Weber observed that if a hired hand were offered an increase in wage per acre of hay mowed, he would not increase his production but would rather work until he made the same amount to which he was accustomed, actually reducing his production. "The opportunity of earning more was less attractive," said Weber, "than that of working less."...

...All this meant that, in the Christian-influenced West in which capitalism originated, for capitalism to succeed it required a theological foundation and legitimation. Capitalism had to be learned. Many important factors in addition to theology were at work, of course: technological innovations, the growth of cities, and other developments were necessary for capitalism to be born and to thrive. But pervasively Christian polities and people did not-in fact, could not-suddenly one day simply assume the rightness and goodness of profit-making, of taking interest on loans, of consumption for pleasure, of the accumulation of resources exceeding immediate needs.

The great article is here.