Keeping the Con in Consumerism

The modern Western tendency to express our beliefs through our purchases

Recently, I made a visit with my family to our local Moe’s Southwest Grill. This may not seem like a promising start to an article. I did not even consider it a promising start to a meal! And yet, as I sat there munching on an Adobo chicken bowl no doubt filled with thrice my daily allowance of sodium, inspiration struck, for there on the wall beside me was a declaration more fit for a room full of eighteenth-century Deists and Free Masons than the employees of what seemed to my untrained eyes to be a basic fast casual restaurant.

“The refusal to be ordinary. To go along. To fit in.” Here was a motto fit for our hyper-individualist society! “The belief that you don’t achieve greatness unless you stir the pot.” Truly, Rosa Parks would be proud. “That your tortillas can be round but still break the mold.”

It was at this point that I came to the unavoidable conclusion that they were talking about…tacos. As in, the things college students devour at two o’clock in the morning when they have left their term paper until the last possible minute. The things that are used to draw in diners on a normally slow Tuesday evening, because what’s cheaper than a taco? Yes, the things I serve my family when I wish to devote little time or money to the venture. This was how the restaurant intended to “fight conformity and blandness with swagger and a spatula.”

I confess that I laughed out loud. Not for the first time in our marriage, my husband wondered what was wrong with me. So, I explained to him that the restaurant was hoping to convince people to purchase burritos by appealing to their love of self-expression. Overbearing elders getting you down? Eat a burrito with toppings of your choice. That’ll show ‘em!

Most ridiculous of all is the fact that Moe’s is but one example of a widespread phenomenon in the United States and much of the global West. Advertisers rarely promote a product on the basis of necessity alone. After all, if all you cared about were your necessities, you would put much of that money in the bank! Instead, advertisers sell you a vision of life, most particularly the way your life would look and the kind of person you would be if you bought their product.

Perhaps the biggest trick advertisers ever pulled on consumers was getting consumers to do the advertising for them. Hence, the graphic t-shirt. The most affordable item at any luxury clothing store is a simple t-shirt with the designer’s logo emblazoned on the front. Presto: free advertising! When I take a summer stroll with my son at the park, I see people advertising sports teams, classic television programs, political movements, and even their local church on their clothing. In a culture where self-expression and creature comforts are worshipped as twin deities, it is no surprise that we think our dog needs a shirt that reads “Let’s Go Brandon!”.

One of the most conspicuous ways this consumerism has seeped into Western life is the creation and monetization of holidays. Gone are the feast days and saints’ days of old. Instead, we have a new calendar with a different month to celebrate every segment of humanity and social cause.

The most prominent of these to arise in recent years is Pride Month. Over the past decade, it has grown by leaps and bounds. What do people do to celebrate pride month? Well, they might host a podcast episode on historic LGBT+ figures, lobby for more constitutional protections, or watch an LGBT+ themed series. But more than all these things, they will be encouraged to make purchases: rainbow plush toys, “Love is Love” crop tops, or a seasonal Frappuccino at Starbucks filled with a gram of sugar for every year of oppression endured.

A few years ago, I found myself growing skeptical of these promotions when I noticed that the Starbucks locations in Boston were covered in Pride Month related advertising, but the ones in my own suburban Ohio community were not.  Could it be, I wondered, that the corporate gurus were not attempting to capture the hearts and minds of the public as much as the money of a newly identified consumer demographic? It would not be America if retailers failed to encourage the public to express their beliefs through consumer purchases or make shopping a central part of their holiday plans.

A frequent complaint among American Christians during the final two months of the calendar year is that the broader culture is “taking Christ out of Christmas,” and the holiest time of the year has been turned into a consumer bonanza. (This is, for the record, the only time of year that Christians are likely to preach about the dangers of consumerism.) However, while the consumerist nature of the modern holiday cannot be denied, it is somewhat debatable whether our culture has truly cut down on displays of religious belief, and not only because outdoor nativity sets are still a popular yuletide purchase.

In the olden days, it was traditional to give money to the less fortunate around Christmas time, as it was at every other time of the year. What was less traditional was seeing the anniversary of Christ’s birth as an obligation to present numerous items of dubious necessity to all one’s relations. It was not traditional to send dozens or even hundreds of brightly decorated cards around the globe, nor to spend a week’s salary redecorating one’s home in red and green. Are these things morally wrong? Not necessarily, but they are the kind of things people in a consumer driven culture with disposable income tend to do.

Let’s move beyond Christmas, a time of year when consumerism tends to be obvious, to the other nine months of the year. (Or perhaps the season has now expanded even further!) Christians of all stripes use their consumer purchases to reflect and proclaim their religious beliefs, but the trend is perhaps most pronounced with evangelical Christians of the “low church” variety, who are furthest removed from the Church’s traditional calendar and modes of spiritual expression.

Here we find a group that, despite its sense of self as a heavily persecuted minority, wields considerable power of the purse. Their beliefs are channeled through the consumption of repackaged hymns sung by increasingly aged white dudes, women’s Bible study workbooks with teal flowers on the cover, faux rustic signage from Hobby Lobby containing snippets of Bible verses, nuggets and waffle fries from a certain fast food restaurant, and even pumpkin spiced lattes served from the church’s own on-site coffee shop. (Yes, the mega church near us has one of those.)

At which point, one has to wonder, is the consumerism merely an incidental aspect of religious adherents’ lives, or is it part and parcel of the religion they practice?

In her popular historical work, Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes Du Mez noted, “Many evangelicals who would be hard pressed to articulate even the most basic tenets of evangelical theology have nonetheless been immersed in this evangelical popular culture,”¹ and concluded that, “Rather than seeking to distinguish ‘real’ from ‘supposed’ evangelicals, then, it is more useful to think in terms of the degree to which individuals participate in this evangelical culture of consumption.”²

Likewise, Karen Swallow Prior’s recent book on The Evangelical Imagination contained a chapter on “Materiality” that dove deep into evangelical kitsch. She wrote, “To be fair, this culture of objects, their production, and consumption—the knickknacks, the kitsch, the plaques, the WWJD bracelets, the floppy hats and tall boots, the skinny jeans, and designer coffee drinks ubiquitous among evangelicals—merely reflects the larger late capitalist, conspicuously consumeristic culture.”³ So, is capitalism the cart driving the horse of our religious expression? And if so, how big of a problem is it?

This is the point in the article when I usually provide something like a solution to the problem, but there is no easy solution in this case. Is modern capitalism itself, an economic system that ensures the survival of the “fittest” business, part of the problem?

Economic growth is relatively stagnant in the West. Businesses are increasingly forced to plumb the depths of their own domestic consumer base rather than sending their products overseas. Even the American government encourages us to spend, spend, spend! For if we stopped expressing our beliefs through purchases, stopped chasing the good life through consumerism, and especially stopped buying things we do not technically need, businesses would end the year in the red, the very thing they hope to avoid by emphasizing consumerism at Christmas time.

We complain that there are no more creative pop culture productions, but only re-treads of old series, sequels inferior to the films that came before them, and a bunch of actors in spandex uniforms. But as long as we continue to pay for that content, we will continue to receive it, for that content is cheaper and easier to produce.

As it goes with streaming services, so it goes with society as a whole. Only if we demand something different will the market change its offerings. Only if we dare to live a different kind of life will the forces of society be forced to adjust. Until then, we will feel pressured to express our beliefs not in carefully nuanced discussions with our neighbors, but trite sayings that can be printed on a $10 bumper sticker.

We may even be forced to see Tex Mex food of questionable quality proclaimed as the height of out of the box thinking.

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1. Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2020), 7.

2. Du Mez, 8.

3. Prior, Karen Swallow. The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023), 153.