Consumerism, Identity, Piety

It seems many of the churches (and my) attacks on consumerism focus on the pursuit of pleasure. We posit that the key problem with consumerism is selfishness, and so we urge ourselves and others to live more selfless lives. While this is true, I’m wondering whether there is another key problem of identity and story.

People don’t buy things simply for comfort or pleasure, but also to express, confirm or construct their identity. We want there to be some kind of meaning to the daily grind we go through, and with few other options, we find that meaning in stuff.

Personally I find the temptation to buying stuff (or being worried that I”m uable to) is strongest when my sense of identity is weakest, or when I forget the wider story that my life is involved in.
The times when stuff just isn’t an issue is when I have a stonger sense of identity and purpose within a wider story.

A christian response to consumerism then, should probably involve both a frontal attack on consumerist values, and a subtle reshaping of our identity. Hauerwas tells us we need to recapture the sense of Christianity being an adventure.
“The Good News tells of the adventure that humans have been made part of through God’s grace, through Christ, and through the church. God made each christian part of God’s sacrificial life so that the world might know it is not abandoned and that there is salvation”
Hauerwas Reader, 530
Not an adventure in the ‘Wild at heart’ kind of way, but the adventure of being shaped into the likeness of Jesus Christ, and the adventure of being part of his renewing of lives and the world.

The difficulty I have, is that I see this among the college students I am with, but not so much in the pews. My worry is that we have reduced the adventure of christian formation and living to a particular path into a particular type of paid ministry. We tell the people in our pews that that is the only real christian adventure. We have lost our doctrine of vocation (except for those in verbal ministry), and we have lost our sense of the incredible witnessing power of pious lives. This is due partly to historical battles with liberals, who want to deny the importance of verbal ministry, and partly through rejection of individualistic piety of evangelicals. While I’m no big fan of ‘simply read your bible ,say your prayers’ piety, we do need to recapture the sense of christian living as an adventure of character formation.

Or, to get back to the start of this rant, we need to show people the importance of their identity in Christ and their place in his story. Not simply in a textual, ‘lets go through Biblical theology’ way, but in a way that recognises and cultivates meaning in the various aspects of their lives.