The pornography of consumerism.
A friend recently shared this video of Susan Boyle performing at Lakewood Church. SuBo as usual delivers a moving performance, although I think she is better in a venue constructed on a human scale. I’ve also recently viewed this video of Dr. James K.A. Smith speaking about liturgy.
What do the two have to do with each other, apart from the fact that they’re both shot in churches, the second being a more reasonable sized one?
Well, watching Susan’s performance impressed me with the sheer scary scale of Lakewood, and my wife and myself decided to watch some of a sermon recorded there from Joel Osteen. We lasted about three minutes, and the last two involved distinctly gritted teeth. I’m not linking to that; I wouldn’t want to impose the experience on any friends.
Dr. Smith was talking about how liturgy, repeated constantly, forms us psychologically, and focuses our attentions (hopefully, and if we’ve been paying attention – or possibly even if we haven’t, subliminally) in a Christian mindset. He contrasts this with the experience of visiting a mall, which focuses our minds in the direction of consumerism, and describes that as an alternative liturgy. He doesn’t actually channel Walter Wink and label consumerism as one of the “Powers that Be” to be battled as if Satanic, if not an actual manifestation of Satan’s work in the world (for those who accept a personal immaterial force of evil approaching the status of a second god), but the tendency is definitely there.
I look at Lakewood and I don’t see Christian liturgy or the ways of Christian formation, I see consumerist liturgy, a machine developed to deliver a mass-market product. I hear Joel Osteen talk (preach?) and I hear positive encouragement towards consumerism, towards the wish to accumulate more and more stuff.
Me, I’m with Jesus when he speaks in Matt. 19:16-20. This is the parable of the rich young man who asked Jesus what he needed to do to get eternal life (which, frankly, was the wrong question in the first place) and which ended with him going away sadly as he was unable to contemplate selling everything he had and giving it away to the poor. I know few things, if any, so destructive to following the way of Jesus as accumulating riches, accumulating stuff, and I say this as someone who has huge problems with the concept of abandoning the security of having possessions and money; the nearest I get to this is expending a lot of time and rather less money in the service of the Kingdom from a position of reasonable financial security. I have been close to having nothing – at one point, six years ago, I had debts far exceeding my possessions – and I found this remarkably freeing in some ways. Some of that freedom stays with me, despite the fact that I am now moderately comfortable.
What I see at Lakewood leads determinedly away from that way, to a kind of pornography of consumerism. To be honest, it makes me feel slightly sick.
Henry Fielding said “If you make money your god, it will plague you like the devil”. I worry about where Lakewood is pointing people.