Costly Discipleship in an Age of Consumerism

a chapter from the book Truth to Proclaim

Not long ago, I had an exchange with a young, bright, earnest, educated Singaporean Christian who was simultaneously critical of the “materialism” that captured the hearts of many Singaporeans, the stringency of controls of Singapore’s “old guard,” and the cultural pollution flooding Singapore as part of globalization. This mixed bag of complaints is probably typical of many Asian Christians in general and Singaporeans in particular. It would be easy to dismiss such sentiments as contradictory ramblings but there is something idealistically Christian in them, despite being out of focus.

First, many Christians here complain that society is being overwhelmed by a debased materialism. Few stop and define exactly what they mean. Few have the time between work and shopping! What I believe they mean is better designated (for reasons we shall see) “consumerism.” Sociologist Leslie Sklair defines consumerism as the ideology that holds that the meaning of life is “in the things that we possess.” If the culture of today’s consumerism had a catechism, it might begin: ‘What is the chief end of persons? To glorify themselves with as many things as possible and enjoy themselves for as long as they can.’ Sklair believes that this “culture-ideology of consumerism” is “the motor of global capitalism.”[1] In other words, businesses, especially transnational corporations, need customers to succeed. McDonalds could not grow if people were not made to feel they needed to consume not simply its food but its ethos. So McDonalds, along with Coca-Cola, Sony, Mercedes Benz, and a host of others have an interest in promoting the value of consuming and, hence, the values of consumerism. The problem for Christians, of course, is that we are committed to a Lord who blatantly rejected the values of consumerism.

“Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” — Jesus

Satan took advantage of Jesus’ legitimate need for food to tempt Him to use His divine powers for mere personal consumption. Jesus fended him off with a repudiation of not only the temptation but of the root values of consumerism, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”[2] When Jesus uttered those words, He had completed a forty-day fast. The temptation was to use His divine powers to change a stone into a loaf of bread for Him to consume. He fended off the temptation by quoting scripture, telling Satan that though He, as fully God, had the ability to turn a rock garden into a pastry shop, He was also a human being and human beings are not designed to live just for appeasing the appetites. Many religions try to empower their devotees to overcome the lure of “consumerism” by denying their humanity. Jesus repulsed the temptation to consumerism by affirming His humanity and God’s intention for all us humans.

Perhaps another sociologist will help throw light on the problem of consumerism. Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian who barely escaped execution at the hands of the Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1917, concluded that civilizations begin by being committed to some grand spiritual ideal. He called this “ideational.” He defined ideational culture as “A unified system of culture based upon the principle of a supersensory and super-rational God as the only true reality and value.”[3] But after a while, people who dissent from the orthodox faith arise. At first, they are subtle and perhaps they don’t realize they have made the crucial shift from theocentricity (God-centredness) to anthropocentricity (human-centredness). They seek to moderate and compromise the pure ideational culture with more humanistic (human-centred) ideas. Gradually, these people are capable of undermining the ideational culture and eventually, over centuries, replacing it with their own “sensate” one. The sensate culture is “based upon and integrated around this new principle: that true reality and value is sensory.”[4] Sorokin believed that a chaotic and barbaric Europe was put back together again by a Church that, despite its faults, held up an ideational culture. But through the humanistic excesses of the renaissance, the so-called “Enlightenment,” and the general loss of faith in much of the West, civilization was captured by the sensate under which it is enslaved to this day. The sensate culture says that true reality is sensory and that translates, for the common folk, to living a life seeking meaning in the things we possess. Consumerism, then, is the fruit of this sensate culture. And it is, we must not forget, fundamentally in opposition to the Christian life.

There can be a religious revival in a sensate culture, a fact that fools some Christian leaders into believing consumerism isn’t so bad after all. Although there is much that is helpful about the church growth and “seeker sensitive” movements, to the degree that these strategies for reaching the world surrender to consumerism, they introduce a deadly virus to the church. A sensate religion is merely the final step on the hierarchy of needs. Psychologist Abraham Maslow taught that people have a hierarchy of needs, with basic physical survival as the base. Once that is in place (and most of us take it for granted), then less basic, but still “sensate,” needs are fulfilled. Finally, once people have fulfilled their physical and psychological desires, they may seek to meet their spiritual needs. They may try religion but perhaps as only the “frosting on the cake.” Nobel prize winning economist Robert W. Fogel notes that when many people in developed countries are saturated with consumer goods, then they turn toward religion. But such people are probably approaching the faith as another consumer good, an accessory to brighten their lives, a source of entertainment to fill some (but not too much) extra time. When they “survey the wondrous cross” they see a piece of art, a great story about love and sacrifice all for them rather than something demanding “my soul, my life, my all.” Hence, the sensate consumer culture may promote religion, even Christianity, when it is neutered and domesticated. But Aslan will not be tamed.

Now, I will not say that we ought to turn these kinds of people away at the church doors. Let them in. Perhaps God is using their consumerist approach to the faith to get them in the way of grace and call them to a higher form of discipleship. But I will say that if we who fill the pews do not understand that Jesus calls us to carry our cross, to be willing to give up all the other forms of fulfillment that psychologists say normal people put first, then we do not understand the cost of discipleship. When we consume Christianity we destroy it. We must, rather, be consumed by it.

The False Alternatives

So far my young, bright, earnest, educated Singaporean Christian friend would be shouting hearty “amens” to all I’ve written. Yet we must be careful. Consumerism is, indeed, a cancer but it is a cancer that has wrapped itself around other parts of social life that are vital and good. It takes a skilled surgeon to cut away the cancer while not damaging the vital organs. For too long Christianity has suffered from clumsy ax wielders whose approach seems to be to amputate everything in which a cancer might someday grow. Anti-materialism, mysticism, and other-worldliness are all attempted solutions to temptations of the sensate – the world and the flesh. Here Western and Chinese civilization have similar experiences. Christianity has had to repudiate, time and again, Gnostic denials of the reality of matter or the significance of what our senses tell us. Even today, the so-called “Faith” movement (the name-it-and-claim-it crowd) tells us to ignore what we see. The Chinese have the same in Buddhism and philosophical Taoism. For Christians, though, “materialism” is not as much a problem as anti-materialism. God, after all, did create matter. No less a theologian than the great John Calvin wrote:

The use of God’s gifts is not wrongly directed when it is referred to that end to which the Author himself created and destined them for us, since he created them for our good, not for our ruin . . . . Did he not endow gold and silver, ivory and marble, with a loveliness that renders them more precious than other metals or stones?[5]

In other words, Calvin believed that God created gold beautiful so that we could simply enjoy its beauty. The Puritans, who followed Calvin, believed creation was God’s other book, besides scripture, and it too was worth the most intensive study. Increase Mather articulated their view succinctly: “the [natural] Works of God have a voice in them, as well as his Word.”[6] “Materialism” is often used in place of “consumerism.” But let’s be careful about what we are condemning. If nature – matter, that is – was created by God and is even a way through which God reveals Himself (under scripture) then “materialism,” literally speaking, has a place in the Christian life. It is the consumerism that we want to cut out.

Let’s look at wealth creation, for example. Because of the tendency of people to over-extend the principles of capitalism, to turn it into mammon, it has been confused in the minds of many with individualistic greed. This could not be further from the truth. The seminal sociologist Max Weber wrote, “Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still less its spirit.”[7] The capitalist, after all, must be able to reject the temptation to squander his wealth on immediate pleasures because he has to gather it and then invest it in some enterprise. The capitalist is not the prodigal. True capitalism, then, is not possible without certain virtues and those virtues must be rooted in some ethical sys­tem. “Materialism cannot account for its own idealism.”[8] There must be a pre-existent value system that causes people to believe in the reality and importance of material reward. There is no reason why a pure consumerist would deprive himself of short-term pleasure – like turning rocks into bread or squandering his savings on a racy sports car –- for some long-term gain. And yet, this is exactly what both Christianity and capitalism require, only Christianity’s reward is even more long-term. Thus capitalism, far from being a base lust for more material, is actually only made possible by virtues that it cannot produce: deferred gratifi­cation, hope, hard work, and rationality. Protestant Christianity, unwittingly perhaps, provided the idealism and social capital in which capitalism could take root. Confucianism has supplied nearly the same virtues for East Asians.

The irony, of course, is that it is precisely the enormous success of capitalism that has made today’s consumerism possible. We noted earlier that sociologist Leslie Sklair believed that consumerism was the motor of capitalism. It was the ideology that made capitalism so powerful. True. But there is a synergy between the two. Without the success of capitalism today’s consumerism could not be so bloated. Yet capitalism would probably not be so successful if Christianity in the West and Confucianism in the East had not disciplined its people to be what Max Weber called “inner-worldly ascetics.” Lee Kuan Yew notes that South Korean President Park Chung Hee probably made that country’s economic development possible by forcing Koreans to save and denying them certain luxuries, such as color televisions, which they exported around the world.[9] Hence, in his own way, Lee sees what Weber saw: that vibrant industrial capitalism requires a certain amount of self-denial, even asceticism. It is capitalism without consumerism that is required to overcome poverty. The problem, of course, is that human beings are lured by the sensate. As the psychologists saw, once basic needs are met, consumerism takes over. Then the values that made the initial success possible, the values of inner-worldly asceticism, are jettisoned like the first stage of a rocket.

Unfortunately, many Christians respond to the dominance of sensate consumerism in the marketplace by building a spirituality into which they can flee to escape the world. One popular evangelical leader came to Singapore and told Christians here that Jesus was not concerned for politics or money and neither should we. The heart of Jesus’ message was indeed about our relationship with God. Yet for anyone who takes the Lordship of Jesus seriously, God’s Word does have direct relevance to our approach to money and all of society. The speaker’s comments were simply wrong on Biblical content and misguided in pastoral guidance. The gospel Jesus brought first spread the Kingdom of God by making the repentant right with God. Eventually, those who repented put an end to infanticide and the gladiatorial games. About a millennium and a half later, other disciples of Jesus would put an end to slavery. I suspect that those who tell us that we can be disciples of Jesus and also ignore the real needs for reform in this world are selling us a consumer’s version of discipleship. We are unlikely ever to have to suffer for our faith if we hold to a “narrow pietism”: praying, reading the Bible, attending church, singing hymns, but in every other way submitting to whatever the culture tells us to do. That way, we can consume the faith, feel great about how spiritual we are, and yet never really have to face any sacrifice.

One prominent American evangelical spokesman said regarding the Christian and politics: “For Christians, the vision of worldly power is not a calling, but a distraction.”[10] This statement exemplifies the privatization of religion. Discipleship, as many modern Christians misunderstand it, is a private thing; it has nothing to do with public issues. The temptation, which many Christians have succumbed to, is abandoning the task of applying our ideational faith to all areas of life. Instead, such “narrow pietists” focus exclusively on the faith’s spiritual core. With such a spirituality as a presupposition, the solution to every problem is the same: more evangelism, more sentimental personal piety; engagement with social problems – the natural instinct of the inner-worldly ascetic – is a “distraction.”[11] True Biblical faith, however, is like a whole, healthy body. A whole body must be more than the heart. It must have brains and arms and legs too.

“The majority of the church is not critiquing capitalism; it is passively accepting it.” — Os Guinness

A fruit of this narrow pietism, I believe, is a dearth of serious application of scripture to life in the marketplace. The result is, on one hand, a majority of conservative Christians who unthinkingly accept all the realities of capitalism, including the excesses of consumerism, and a small minority of socially concerned Christians who over-react to the expressions of human sinfulness allowed by capitalism by embracing some form of socialism.

Os Guinness told me, “The majority of the church is not critiquing capitalism; it is passively accepting it. The real challenge is to critique capitalism but not from a socialist position. We need to take the discussion out of tired old left wing rhetoric and take it back to the Christian ideas of a benevolent society of the nineteenth century.”[12] (I believe we need to go back two centuries further!) The ways in which first the Puritans in New England and, in this century, Lee Kuan Yew married an essentially capitalistic system to a morally concerned state may be one way out of the “tired old” positions of the past.

Lee shows us how capitalism can be put on a leash. Both Christianity and Confucianism advocate lofty values that capitalism should serve. Capitalism was made for humanity not humanity for capitalism. But when this domesticated capitalism gives way to rabid consumerism, it begins to take slaves or pay fan dancers more than a scholar sees in years.[13] Consumerism eventually devours itself because it lacks the virtues that Christianity and Confucianism supply. As Os Guinness wrote, “Without continuing habits of ethical responsibility and mutual trust, capitalism diminishes humanness, destroys the cohesion of society, and produces conditions in which even the market itself cannot thrive.”[14] The Bible teaches those values and provides the means for escape from consumerism. We seem to have lost those teachings. But a few centuries ago there arose a Christian movement that knew them well and lived them out.

The Christian Alternative: Vocation

“Consumerism” is not really new. Many economic historians have argued that exactly the same kind of “Consumer Revolution” occurred during the early eighteenth century.[15] This had created what historians Harry S. Stout and T. H. Breen call the “language of consumption.”[16] According to Colin Campbell, this turn toward modern consumerism is a fruit of post-Puritan developments, especially a rejection of the theological beliefs of the Reformation about human nature. The great leaders of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others, believed that the Bible taught that human nature was essentially depraved. That is why salvation must be by grace, not works. Because human nature was so marred by sin, even “all our righteousness is as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). The practical implications of this Biblical doctrine are important for returning to the Christian approach to consumerism.

If human beings are sinful, then just because they prefer something or will buy something does not mean it is necessarily good. In fact, what people like is often evil and debased. But, at the time of the first “consumer revolution” in the eighteenth century, many philosophers, theologians, and even church leaders were teaching that people were not necessarily sinful or even dependent upon God for knowledge about what is right and wrong. This movement of “Enlightenment,” as they self-servingly called it, purported to be a freeing of human reason from doctrines of depravity and divine sovereignty. Western culture became enamored with “Enlightenment” doctrines of “self-evident” truths and a “romantic” belief in unaided human ability.[17] Historian Colin Campbell believes that it was just this human-centred environment in which consumerism thrived. Like Max Weber, who taught Reformed Christianity’s belief in human depravity created “inner-worldly asceticism,” which made large-scale capitalism possible, Campbell believes that the new affirmation of human goodness, “the romantic ethic,” made consumerism possible. When one affirms human abilities, one implicitly affirms the sinful choices people ultimately gravitate towards, including consumerism. If Christians today are going to overcome consumerism, they will have to, once again, emphasize their sinfulness before a holy and sovereign God.

Already on the scene when mass consumerism arose was the Christian movement that offers the best antidote to that cancer: Puritanism. Puritanism was a multifaceted movement, seeking a whole-hearted attempt to uncompromisingly follow the will of God in every area of life. The giant of Elizabethan Puritanism was William Perkins (1558-1602) – regarded by some as the greatest Puritan theologian. He influenced the leaders of Puritanism over the next generation, including those who braved the “rude waves” to establish a “City upon a Hill”.[18]

I do not believe the Church has seen such a disciplined, zealous, intelligent, and Biblically centered movement before or since. Although we may appreciate some of our modern fashions in music and comforts in church, for holistic Biblical teaching and living I believe we can find no better models than the Puritans. Key to their model was the doctrine of vocation. The Biblical doctrine of vocation, which the Puritans discovered and lived, helps Christians in our world of runaway consumerism in two ways. First, it directly confronts the approach that tries to make the Faith itself a commodity to consume; human-centered religion – God as the “frosting on the cake” – is antithetical to the doctrine of vocation. Second, it specifically offers guidelines on how a committed Christian should live in the marketplace. William Perkins was instrumental in developing the doctrine and so I believe he and his colleagues should be consulted respectfully today. Keep in mind that Christian teaching, unlike science, is based on revelation – the Bible – and since the Word of God has not changed, Christian teaching does not evolve; it does not inevitably get better. If they had it right four hundred years ago, we can only apply it to new situations; we cannot really improve it.

“A vocation or calling [as] a certain kind of life ordained and imposed on man by God for the common good.” — William Perkins

Perkins defined “a vocation or calling [as] a certain kind of life ordained and imposed on man by God for the common good.”[19] His emphasis on “the common good” preserved the doctrine of vocation from being construed as a license to do whatever feels right to the individual. One receives a vocation that is good for society. Once one has received a vocation one must pursue it with social welfare in view. “He abuses his calling whosoever he be that, against the end thereof, employs it for himself, seeking only his own and not the common good.”[20] William Ames, also one of the most potent influences on the New England Puritans, emphasized, “everyone is bound to procure the common good, and advance it as much as he can.”[21] That one must employ one’s calling for “the common good” became part of the warp and woof of the Puritan ethic. By 1646 John Cotton would describe a violation of the eighth commandment as “to take another man’s goods without leave or to spend our own without benefit to ourselves or others.”[22] In other words, just spending money for the pleasure of consuming was, in their view, the same as stealing.

Other prominent Puritans echoed Perkins’ portrayal of vocation. John Preston (1587-1628), Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and a Puritan leader highly respected by the New England settlers, wrote in Sinnes Overthrow,

The end of men’s callings are not to gather riches; if men make this their end, it is a wrong end; but the end of our calling is to serve God and men, the ground hereof is this: Every man is a member of the commonwealth; every man has some gifts or other, which may not lie idle; every man has some talents, and must use them to his master’s advantage . . . . Every man must attend his calling, and be diligent in it.[23]

Perkins wrote that the believer is to be content with merely necessary things, not to seek or enjoy luxuries. He described, in practical terms, the “moderation of appetite in the use of riches.”[24] “Man may with good conscience desire and seek for goods necessary, whether for nature, or for his person, according to the former rules; but he may not desire and seek for goods more than necessary; for if he does, he sins.”[25] How do we know what is “necessary”? “Things and goods are to be judged necessary and sufficient, not by the affection of the covetous man, which is insatiable, but by two other things; the judgment of wise and godly men, and the examples of sober and frugal persons.” However, we cannot impose one standard of material sufficiency for all persons. Sufficiency “varies, according to the divers conditions of persons, and according to time and place. More things are necessary to a public man than to a private and more to him that has a [family] than to a single man.”[26] A generation later, William Ames one of the most read Puritan theologians by the New England colonists, emphasized the call to “weaned affections.” Even when the capitalist lawfully obtains wealth, in Ames’ ethic, he or she is not free to squander it on luxury. We are to “employ our money in those things, which have a real use.”[27] Ames asks, “What kind of sin is luxury?” And answers, “Luxury does generally note any excess in the use of things, belonging to the decking of the body . . . . It destroys the soul . . . .”[28]

“Riches in abundance are as the knife in the hand of a child, likely to hurt.” — William Perkins

Unlike the anti-materialists who teach that possessions beyond bare essentials are evil, Perkins explains that wealth is good. However, it is good “only in part.” It is good “only in part,” not because of a deficiency in it but because of sin within us. His belief in the width and depth of human depravity are at the root of his warnings about consumerism. If he believed people were innately good, he would have had to believe our inclinations toward consumerism were generally good. But the Puritans held to the Biblical doctrine that “the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”(Jeremiah 17:9). So Perkins wrote that wealth is good in itself, but it is “not always good to us.” “Riches in abundance, are as the knife in the hand of a child, likely to hurt, if it be not taken away; because they are (in some men) occasions of sin, unless God in mercy prevent and hinder them.”[30]

When, a generation after Perkins, John Winthrop was listing reasons for the Puritans to try to build a Bible based society in Massachusetts, reason number five was that in England “we are grown to that height of intemperance in all excess of riot.”[31] England, in other words, was becoming too much a consumerist society for Puritans to dwell in. The Puritans certainly emphasized the virtues of hard work and diligence in one’s calling but they vigorously protested the worldly motives of the market – that is, consumerism. In order to get away from it, many of them packed up and migrated to New England.

One of their leading ministers, Increase Mather, described their quest:

It was in respect to some worldly accommodation that other Plantations were erected, but Religion and not the World was that which our fathers came hither for . . .. Pure Worship and Ordinances without the mixture of human inventions was that which the first fathers of this colony designed in their coming hither. We are the children of the good old non-conformists.[32]

In other words, it was glorifying God that was their chief purpose, not making money or enjoying consumables. John Winthrop, their first governor, preached to them while they crossed the Atlantic, in 1630, that they were going to set up a “City upon a Hill.” The society they were to build was supposed to be a “model of Christian charity.” They were serious about that, too. When one of their merchants was found to be price gouging, they did not excuse it as just a function of the market-place. They tried him in court and censured him in church. To prey on one’s neighbor is an offense against the God we pray to. For the first generation, they were able to continue this great experiment in holistic Christian living. However when King Charles II of England was restored to the throne in 1660, he slowly began to try to bring New England under the heel of Old England. By the mid 1680s, London completely took over this Puritan experiment. The Puritans no longer controlled their own government and so did not have the power to keep out unChristian influences – just as globalization today makes it difficult for nations like Singapore to keep out immoral entertainment. Gradually the “City upon a Hill” began to look more and more like the consumer society they left behind. This was especially so because the Puritans turned out to be extremely good at business. They took a very unpromising land – New England had little to offer besides trees – and made it prosper.

The more prosperous they were, the more they were connected with Europe and its “Enlightenment” philosophy, and the more consumables they could buy. The more they absorbed the new human-centered philosophy, which told them they were naturally good and the more they bought into the consumer culture, the more they moved away from the “model of Christian charity.” More optimistic views on human impulses and consumerism arose in New England hand in hand. English imports to North America increased nearly eight-fold from 1700-1773.[33] The “liberalism” inspired by the British Enlightenment held that the unrestrained pursuit of individual economic interests best serves the economic welfare of all. Those who believed this new ideology of basic human goodness also believed that the common good would be safeguarded by the “laws of the market” and their automatic functioning. They did not believe the economy should be interfered with for compassionate or religious reasons. Those ministers and teachers who had forgotten or rejected the Biblical doctrine of human depravity generally advocated allowing the economy to run according to its own laws because they believed people, being naturally good, would, on their own, create abundance for every one. They assumed that the poor deserved their fate and should be left in it as a warning to the rest of us. The old Puritan balance between requiring work of the able-bodied but providing care for the down-and-out was lost. Consumers are rarely concerned for their neighbors. This process took over a century. Near the end of it, Cotton Mather, the son of Increase, wrote, first in Latin and then in English:

Religio peperit Divitias, Filia devoravit Matrem; Religion brought forth prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother.[34]

This should be alarming for us. If such a vibrant Christian movement could be undermined by consumerism in the very society it built from scratch, how much more vulnerable are we today? Our understanding of the doctrine of vocation is so much weaker, our commitment to holistically living out scripture in every area of life is arguably already shallower, our vision of an ideational society is much dimmer, and our adversary, runaway consumerism, is stronger than ever. But by God’s grace, we can be restored to the strength of the original Puritans.

However, we have some modern hurdles they did not have to cross. First, there is the promise of modernity that we can be “free” and unrestrained and still have a virtuous society. We must see that lie for what it is: a statement of faith in human goodness. The Apostle Paul was not mistaken when he began his description of the gospel in the book of Romans with emphatic proofs of human sinfulness. Human depravity is utterly essential to understanding the gospel and everything else Christian, including God’s blue-print for society.

Sex Sells

At the core of the consumer’s life is himself and his appetites. On the throne over a consumerist society is human lust. Meanwhile, Jesus calls us to take up our cross and deny not the reality of matter or even the legitimacy of our physical needs but their claim to rule us. Our wealth, our property, and even our bodies do not exist for disciples of Christ to use merely for our pleasure. Our first calling is to seek how we can glorify God in them. Christians engulfed in a society of consumerism must remind themselves of this call even more than earlier Christians had to. But Christians in Asian societies that have not yet let themselves be taken over by the rabid consumerism of Western culture should take advantage of their nations’ traditional values. In many Asian countries, an old political guard has tried to protect their young people from the worst of runaway consumerism by restricting what kinds of foreign influences, especially entertainment, can come in. What is allowed in has been subject to censorship. And here, my young, bright, earnest, educated Singaporean Christian friend was simply wrong. Chaffing under the restrictions, he wanted looser standards and yet somehow, he also thought the moral standards of Singapore would be improved. If you asked him directly, he would know his Christian doctrine well enough to tell you that people are indeed fallen and sinful at heart. And yet, because the consumerist society is committed to the dogma of human goodness, even such intelligent Christians think like the consumerist world on these points.

The truth is that “sex sells.” Advertisers typically use scantily clad women to sell everything from air conditioners to shoes. Television reveals more and more skin to get more and more people to watch so that they will also see the advertisements with more and more scantily clad women (or men). Who uses chastity or modesty to advertise? Advertisers use sex because they know sex sells. But along with the shoes and air conditioners it supposedly sells, such advertising also sells sex itself. They make it seem normal to be promiscuous, immodest, and focused on the “sexy body.” Out of control, such a culture does not cultivate modesty, chastity, humility, or self-denial because such virtues don’t make for an eye-popping 30-second commercial. Advertisers know people are bestial and don’t care. Christians should not be so naïve as to think more of unrestrained humanity than do the people who make their living catching their attention.

Consumerist cultures celebrate human freedom because they believe, as a matter of their human-centered ideology, that people are good. Because they are good, when they are left free to express themselves, they will express good things. If there is enough of a market for pornography, the conclusion is that pornography must be a legitimate consumer product. The only “evil” is with those prudes who want to oppress others, who believe that certain human desires are wrong. If only people were freed from all such inhibitions, there would be great beauty and fulfillment. History – not to mention scripture – tells a different story. Societies with strict censorship have given us Leonardo da Vince, Johann Sebastian Bach, William Shakespeare, and many more. Consumerist, sensate societies have given us Jackson Pollack, the Beastie Boys, “Hannibal”, and even worse junk. The truth is that societies (and individuals) that hold to some lofty ideal beyond consumer-centered fulfillment produce great art, on the one hand, and suppress what is abominable to their ideals, on the other. The ideational culture inspires and suppresses. The sensate simply wallows in its filth.

Even my young, bright, earnest, educated Singaporean Christian friend apparently did not quite see the implications of the Biblical teaching of human sinfulness for life in a consumerist society. But that doctrine has direct relevance to everything from politics to child rearing. Unfortunately, my Singaporean friend and many other Christians believe that the old strictures could be lifted and still a “thousand flowers” would bloom. The truth is that when a gardener stops rooting out weeds and killing insects, he gets nothing more than a patch of ugly weeds. Until we are glorified and rendered not capable of sin, we humans will require, unfortunately, the use of external discipline to preserve righteousness and keep the weeds down – weeds that, incidentally, consumerism panders to. Asians wooed by American romanticism over “free-speech” and human goodness need to be reminded of this most of all.

Confucianism has a “legalistic” wing that provides strong virtues that can help Asian societies economically progress just as Calvinism helped parts of Western society progress. Unfortunately, it also has a soft, humanistic wing that assumes that “man is the measure of all things.” One wing encourages capitalism. The other wing will, by emphasizing the goodness of human nature, encourage consumerism. If Christians in Asia are going to confront consumerism, they will have to uproot all such tendencies to human-centered religion and ideology.

Take, for example, the practical life of the family. Now that women are free to exercise as much political and economic power as men, there are many people, including those in the church, who strive to appeal to this new market. “Evangelical feminists” tell us that we can confess faith in the Bible as God’s Word and ignore what it says about male headship in the family and church (1 Cor. 11:2-17; 14:33-38; Eph. 5:22-33; 1 Pt. 3:1-7).[35] Could it be that the reason so many supposed evangelicals are abandoning what the church has regarded for nearly its entire history as the self-evident reading of numerous scriptures on the role of women is not some supposed breakthroughs in exegesis but consumerism itself – tailoring the Biblical message to suit the consumer?

Similarly, corporal punishment for children is assailed even among Christians. Even though the Word of God is clear in prescribing corporal punishment as a way of training children (see Prov. 13:24; 23:13; 29:15), it is commonly thought by sophisticates to be an archaic, unenlightened practice. I once heard a church deacon in Singapore tell a friend that he was horrified at the idea of spanking a child.

Folly is bound up in the heart of a child,
but the rod of discipline drives it far from him. — Proverbs 22:15

The assumption is that children are essentially good or, at worst, a blank slate onto which one can write anything. They fear that using “the rod” will teach an otherwise innocent child that violence is an alternative to reasoned instruction. The truth, though, is that a child is born sinful, depraved, and fallen. A parent does not have to teach his toddler the concepts of individual ownership or rights – as long as it’s the property and rights of the child! But most children have a hard time learning about sharing and their responsibilities toward others. “Folly,” the inspired sage tells us, “is bound up in the heart of a child . . . .” As sinners bent on their own way, children do not respond naturally to dispassionate reason. Hence, the “rod” is needed to drive folly away and bend the child’s obstinate will toward instruction (Proverbs 22:15).

A mark of godliness was “a well governed family.” — Cotton Mather

Historian Philip Greven has described the kind of child rearing that the Puritans practiced as “evangelical child rearing.” The Puritans’ approach to raising children, built on the Biblical doctrine of human depravity, focused on breaking the child’s independent will.[36] The modern psychological fad of flattering one’s “self-esteem,” a natural inclination of sinful people, was not tolerated. The Puritans believed that the Christian parent had a duty to intrusively shape the child’s will according to the parent’s Christian standards. Cotton Mather wrote that a mark of godliness was “a well governed family.”[37] The great Puritan missionary John Eliot, in 1676, decried the “false and pernicious principle that many people and parents are tainted with, viz., that youth must be suffered awhile to take their swing, and sow their wild oats . . . to follow the fashions, company, and manners of the times, hoping that they will be wiser thereafter.”[38] Consumerism trusts people to make the right decisions; Biblical Christians do not. A society that assumes that people are naturally good and that their tastes are expressions of a benevolent “invisible hand” is also a society that will spoil its children by indulging their every whim. Christians, who should know better, must resist the consumerist approach to all areas of life, including the raising of children.

Conclusion

So we see that my young, bright, earnest, educated Singaporean Christian friend was right to protest consumerism, even though he inaccurately labeled it “materialism.” He was certainly correct to be concerned about the influences of sensationalist entertainment on Singaporeans. But he was naïve to believe we could eliminate the government’s role in suppressing such influences and rely on religious exhortation alone. That dream – that people are good enough not to need restrictions – is the illusion upon which consumerism is built. The good news of Christianity, however, is prefaced with the bad news of human depravity. But even that preparatory bad news, if heeded, frees us from the pain and error that comes with following our lusts; it enables us to let go of our own contrivances and cast ourselves upon the mercy of God. Then, humbled before the God whose word we must alone live on, we can enter the joy of our Master and be consumed by His fire.

footnotes available upon request

• “Costly Discipleship in an Age of Consumerism,” Truth to Proclaim (Simon Chan, editor; Trinity Theological College), 2002.

  John B. Carpenter is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church.