4 - Consuming others

Summary

Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction in consumption … We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate.

(Lebov, quoted in Taylor & Tillford 2000: 42)

Capitalism works. It has turned things into rituals, consumption into spirituality, even using the language of religion to sell its goods, and has created within us a compulsion to consume in order to mark our place in the world and declare our personhood to ourselves and others. It is reported that, when asked what it is to be American, many teenage Americans said it was the freedom to buy goods, echoing Scott Fitzgerald, perhaps, who declared the difference between rich and poor to be that the rich have longer shopping lists and are happier for it. Given the devastating consequences of this wholehearted consumerism for the planet and many of the people on it, we wonder how religion ever gave ground and how theology has failed to find a usable response. Perhaps it is because there is something very comforting in consumption and many people do believe, and indeed experience, that they buy their way to happiness, especially when objects are endowed with almost spiritual significance. However, perhaps like indulgences before it, the buying culture of happiness, based as it has been in debt, is about to reveal that heaven is not for sale.