Philosophy Documentation Center Business & Professional Ethics Journal

Reflections on Consumerism in a Global Era
Author(s): Max L. Stackhouse

Source: Business & Professional Ethics Journal, Vol. 23, No. 4, Christian Perspectives on
Business Ethics: Faith, Profit, and Decision Making (Winter 2004), pp. 27-42
Published by: Philosophy Documentation Center
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BUSINESS & PROFESSIONAL ETHICS JOURNAL, VOL. 23, NO. 4
Reflections on Consumerism
in a Global Era
Max L Stackhouse
Latent Desires
The day that Martha Stewart, the stylist of classy consumption for the
masses, was found guilty, her company lost twenty-three percent of its value
on the stock market. It even lost more before it made its surprising recovery.
Corporations are like churches; they are hard to kill (although they can be
bought out more easily). Now, after her release, sales of her household
goods continue to flourish, television shows sponsored by the corporation
are developing further the kinds of products she offers, and she has become
the pop-heroine of entrepreneurial capitalism. In the long run, people want
what she offers: a sense of style in the ordinary things of life?food, home
d?cor, gardening, entertaining, and business opportunity.
Now here is a question: Did her corporation create that desire by ad
vertising, or did she build her fame and fortune by serving the unarticulated
wants of the general population? Advertising can help define new wants
and articulate new desires; but as I understand it, advertising campaigns do
not always work. They have to connect with a latent range of desires
already present among the populace. Think of Christmas as a time of
massive buying. It was not always the case that purchases were so high for
that holiday that they equaled another fiscal month for merchants, so that the
overall earnings for the season determined whether profits for the year went
up or down. There are studies of these things. Leigh Eric Schmitt, in his
? Business & Professional Ethics Journal 2004. Correspondence may be

sent to Max L. Stackhouse, Princeton Theological Seminary, 64 Mercer
Street, P.O. Box 821, Princeton, New Jersey 08542; or via email to
maxstackhouse@ptsem.edu.
28 Business & Professional Ethics Journal
book Consumer Rites (Princeton, 1995), has shown that advertisers have
tried to promote Thanksgiving and Easter, Father's Day and Mother's Day,
and several other national holidays. Except for clothing at Easter, flowers
on Mother's Day, and now kiddy costumes for Halloween, nothing matches
the shopping fury of the Christmas season; and that, ironically, does not
involve shopping for the self, but for gift giving. We may want to take com
mercialism out of Christmas; but the planning, thought, expense, and care
that goes into Christmas gift-giving seems to suggest that a range of cultur
ally, even religiously legitimated desire was already planted in the heart of
the West. And now it is becoming a custom in Shinto Japan, Maoist China,
and Hindu India. This suggests that a deep ethic of gift giving is more
universal than a cultural creation, and it affects a whole economy, although
without overt or even (for some) conscious theological overtones.
It is fascinating to note what is most wanted by the people. We can
discern these wants by asking what is most advertised, because it is likely
that more people will want to buy something concretely portrayed in ads,
and advertising tells us where to get what we may already vaguely want
better, faster, or cheaper. Look first at what is advertised. No one does mass
advertising for a product that only a very few want, or that is not available.
Such things cannot be sold and thus not consumed. Needs and wants,
shaped by fashion, image, attractiveness, value and status consciousness,
enhance desires. Advertising, and word of mouth, enhances awareness.
Marketing and visibility enhances availability, and status consciousness is,
of course, exceedingly widespread. You can see all these factors in play in
every daily newspaper. They contain extensive ads, even whole sections
advertising housing, cars, electronics, clothing, and artistic/cultural/enter
tainment products. Accompanying them are messages about the corporations
who made them?recognizable by brand and corporate name that makes
them available?plus endorsements from People magazine notables. (I must
confess that I seldom pay any attention to newspaper ads, but once one
begins to consider the question of consumerism, one can hardly avoid seeing
them and thinking about what they mean.)
The most advertised products are brought to us by multinational and
local business corporations. They are the items that not only appeal to mass
interests, but according to economists, they are the consumer items that have
kept the economy from collapsing during the recent down-turn, after the
dot-com bust, and through the loss of confidence in the economy due to
recent corporate scandals.
Reflections on Consumerism in a Global Era 29
What irony: consumers want what these corporations produce, but they
distrust the corporation. The reasons are obvious. Lack of ethically guided
oversight at the highest levels of corporate leadership has become conspic
uous. Directly related to such malfeasance is the loss of investor money,
crippled production, lost jobs and retirement benefits, and a deflated confi
dence in the whole market system. Indirectly these circumstances have
made it more difficult for government to collect taxes and for families to
flourish and give to charity. Most importantly, they have eroded trust, and
the largest part of this kind of economy rests on trust. Do you always check
the quality of every item you buy? Do you always count your change? Do
you rely on your bank statement to correct any errors in your checkbook?
Of course, the system of trust is backed by a largely invisible but mostly
functional accountability system. The very paper of which our money is
made expresses nothing but a good-faith promise that it represents actual
value. Our whole economic system operates on trust, and the question of
who one trusts (and who is viewed as trustworthy) turns out to be function
ally decisive in the economic well-being of whole societies, as Francis
Fukuyama has argued in his marvelous book on the subject (Trust, Free
Press, 1995).
Nonetheless, in spite of these high visibility figures and the moral
crisis of corporate leadership, the evidence of people's felt needs and wants
is before our very eyes. Check out not only the daily newspaper and tele
vision ads, but log on to E-Bay, or go to the nearest supermarket and browse
the magazine racks. One finds a heavy dose of information about home and
garden, beauty and fashion (mostly for women), technology and body-build
ing, sports and automotive (mostly for men), and many, many items that
have to do with popular culture, i.e., Hollywood and TV, popular music,
entertainment, and self-improvement (diet, exercise, etc.). We may balk at
the stereotyped jokes that a woman can spend more time at the mall than a
man can spend in Home Depot, but as Click and Clack, the Car-Talk guys,
say, "We love stereotypes; they are right sixty percent of the time, and that
is better than our usual average." Advertisers know it.
There is another level to this question of consumption that is also
obvious. While you are at the supermarket or the mall or the hardware
store, do a little unobtrusive people watching as well as product and adver
tising watching. As an amateur anthropologist, make some mental field
notes about what you see. It appears that consumption is not only a struc
tural reality, but also a personal one. Something is amiss. Some of our gals
look anorexic, and some guys seem to be on steroids, and many of us are
obese. Is all this because of the artificial wants, beyond basic needs,
constructed by our corporate culture? Surely it is so in part; McDonald's
has down-sized its fries recently, due to public discussion of this problem,
and it is slashing its lineup of burgers for chicken salads, yogurts, and
chopped fruit in sixteen countries, according to the Financial Times in
March, 2004. Previously servings got bigger due to popular wants. Now
they are getting smaller. Meanwhile, corporations continue to spoil us by
giving us what we want, when we want it, like doting grandparents. And
with the accent on customer service and on-line shopping, they will give it
to us immediately, like fast foods.
Global Considerations
What is this consumer world we live in? How did it come into being? What
makes it so powerful? And what should we as Christians think about it?
One question leads to another.
I will suggest in a few pages where I think the basic pattern came from
in our own culture, but first I want to say that I am not sure that it is a matter
of our culture alone. Some thirty years ago, when I had my first sabbatical,
I volunteered my time to the mission board of my church. They sent me to
India, where one of the colleges needed a teacher in my field while one of
their own students came to America to get advanced training. I have been
back there a dozen times in the last thirty years. At other times, I was sent
also to Burma, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia for shorter periods.
More recently, since I became involved in a research project on what Chris
tianity has to offer to the dynamics of globalization, I have been sent to
Central America, South Africa, Eastern Europe, and China. It is wonderful
to have a job that puts one into contact with the world church, and, for my
purposes in this lecture, it also has put me in contact with the world's
cultures. I think that it is fair to say that in all of these places, whenever
choices become available?as they are now becoming so at an incredible
speed?people's sense of want and need begin to shift. It is not that they
did not want before, and they certainly had needs. (Petty jealousies over
very little are the sources of great conflict in every traditional society I have
visited.) But now, in all these places, the middle classes are growing (often
lower-middle class by US standards, but clearly higher levels of dis
cretionary funds are available).
Incidentally, while many speak of the growing gap between the rich
and the poor around the world, that is only part of the truth. The best ev
idence I have seen {WorldBank Annual Reports, available online at www.
worldbank.org/annualreport/2004/) indicates that larger and larger percent
ages of the population are moving up in income and with greater access to
food, clothing, and housing. To be sure, some are moving up faster than
others, creating a greater distance between the top and the bottom quintiles
of the population. But the more remarkable development around the world
is the fantastic growth of the new middle .classes, which are both the most
productive and consuming classes. This development is as obvious as
advertising and malls; cell phones and obesity appear with factories and
expanded markets. On the streets, kiosks feature fashion, beauty, and movie
magazines on one side and sports, motorcycle, and pop-music magazines on
the other. Video and CD shops appear. As people move from subsistence
economies of scarcity to more productive and consumer economies with
expendable incomes, gift giving increases and diversifies. In fact, the
flaunting of the relative affluence is often more obvious than what we see
in the USA.
And so I ask: What is going on here? As a Christian ethicist, one of
my tasks is to identify the dynamics and operating values present in an
ethos, and our ethos is now global. Is this the Americanization of the world?
Is it the imposition of the MacDonald and Wal-Mart models of consumption
everywhere, while paying burger-flippers, part-time clerks, and third-world
sweatshop workers exploitative wages? There is some truth to aspects of
this picture in some places, as anti-globalist activists would surely have us
know. But that is not the whole story. For one thing, people flock unco
erced to these stores selling multi-national products when they open in non
Western countries. For another, businesses tailor their offerings to the tastes
and cultural sensibilities of the people. There is, for example, no beef sold
in the McDonald's in Delhi. In Beijing, McDonalds sells pork and noodles.
Likewise, Indian, Chinese, Thai, French, Italian, and Caribbean restaurants
are now in almost any town of size in the Western world, and they all adjust
their recipes to local standards. The Wal-Marts in Mexico have all the
equipment for making tortillas and enchiladas, with little kitchen stoves that
burn corncobs or charcoal, while products from around the world are present
in our supermarkets and gift shops.
We must, however, dwell for a moment on the possible exploitation of
workers in the developing countries that are making the goods that come
back to our malls and department stores. As a former missionary who has
served several terms in India and South-East Asia, as I mentioned above,
plus having participated in several conferences on globalization in China as
it joined the WTO, I want to say that loving the distant neighbor by out
sourcing is an enormous benefit to people in those places. Is it difficult for
the unemployed here? Yes, and we may have to develop better policies to
aid them. And, yes, the working conditions in these other places are some
times nearly like the early mills in England or factories in the industrializing
US after the Civil War, and sometimes like sweatshops in LA or NY
garment districts are still. The exploitation needs to be controlled by law and
enforcement, but I would like to focus on what an outsourced industry does
in an impoverished land. Factories I have visited give opportunities that
would otherwise be unthinkable to thousands and thousands of families who
would have to wait several generations in subservient, subsistent economies
with shorter life-span, sometimes contemplating selling their daughters or
pre-selling their bones (to make skeletons for medical students in the
West?have you ever wondered why they are so short?) for opportunities
to become a part of modern production processes. Pastors and seminarians
with whom I worked in these places are essentially eager to get more of
these job opportunities in their host countries as fast as possible, although
resentment also remains that help has to come from the West, interfering
with national sovereignty and pride, and bringing forms of commercialism
that they view with suspicion.
However, when a new factory opens, it is not only the workers who
earn more than otherwise possible (still very low), but also rickshaw drivers,
lunch vendors, cigarette sellers (one at a time), road builders, truck drivers,
gas station attendants. Families who get these jobs outside the factory, not
only those within it, can pay the fee or buy the required uniform to get their
kids into school for the first time. And Evangelical churches appear, help
ing new members get jobs so they can buy a Bible and begin tithing.
Increasingly, the older myth of the "McDonaldization of the World"
or the "commodification of everything" is severely challenged by new
studies. I am thinking, especially, of the multinational set of studies
collected by Peter Berger and Samuel Huntington in Many Globalizations
(Oxford, 2002). In fact, people adapt new methods of production into exist
ing cultural matrices that in turn brings many different forms of mod
ernization into being. This entails not only new possibilities of education for
the kids (both boys and girls), but new ranges of medical care, and (most
importantly) shifting patterns of religious loyalty and practice. In more

secular terms, these shifts and possibilities result in such things as trained
union organizers, new skills of management, the democratization of atti
tudes, and an expansion of human dignity. Everything is not perfect in these
situations, but the marginal improvement of life possibilities is dramatic.
Furthermore, here at home, Wal-Mart/Target/K-Mart, and the like,
employ people who often have their first steady job and are getting off
welfare or elders who need a part-time job to make ends meet. They also
provide pretty good clothes, tools, paint, furniture, foods, etc., at a price that
many more people can afford than those who shop at more traditional,
upscale stores.
Even if all the criticisms about "free market" systems are true, those
concerned about economic justice and human compassion surely have to
take these factors into account. They seldom do!
Protestant Mentality
But we must go deeper. Why are things going in these directions? There
are a number of aspects to consider. First, the capabilities of the world-wide
expansion of production that makes more products available at lower prices
to more people is due to the technological, organizational, and management
revolutions that have been developed in a long history. They have shaped
modernity and they are now shaping postmodernity. Marx was correct
when he said that the means of production are a decisive factor in economic
and social life?an idea, by the way, he stole from Adam Smith and his
parable of the pin-factory. But Smith and Marx were only partly right, for
they did not tell us about the formation of the institution called the corpo
ration, corporations which invested the money, hired the workers, and built
and ran the factories. Nor did they tell us about management. They were
wrong, I think, when they failed to recognize what I believe to be extensive
evidence that the development of these technological, organizational, and
managerial systems required a particular mind-set and a distinctive social
ethos that fosters and rewards those developments.
The decisive mind-set and social ethos developed historically out of
certain strands of Christian thought?specific kinds of "spiritual interests,"
they have been called?in close interaction with the material interests of
people, because of a preached and internalized understanding of the "priest
hood of all believers" that had become woven into people's practical sense
of vocation. The material interests of people, of course, were present in
people everywhere, not only among Christians. But only when those mate
rial interests were guided and legitimated by disciplines fostered by the
specific spiritual interests that we associate with the "Protestant work ethic"
did the human development of these technological, organizational, and
managerial patterns take place. Key technological developments brought
about the Industrial Revolution, followed by the cybernetic revolution. The
organizational revolution was the formation of the corporation, ironically by
the churches that had long formed organizations outside the direct control
of either the government or the extended family, as Harold Berman has
shown in his two volumes on Law and Revolution (Harvard, 1985; Belknap,
2004). And the management revolution came about with democracy in
politics and the trustee system in economics. These developments happened
primarily in Protestant countries, although they have spread and been
adopted in many other cultures and by non-Christian peoples.
I think a variation of the hypotheses developed by Max Weber a cen
tury ago and debated vigorously in scholarly literature for nearly a century
best explains our situation. In its wider implications, Weber's work accepts
selected insights from Smith and Marx, but incorporates the historical
influence of religion on several different cultures, with different religions
influencing each culture in a distinctive way. The mind-set, or what others
call the "mentality" or the "habits of mind" carried in and by the social ethos
as it was influenced by the Reformation?and especially the Puritan and
Pietist traditions?is still a powerful force. I say this even though this
inheritance has shaped aspects of American culture in ways that have been
denied by certain wings of scholarship, forgotten by the population and,
sadly, even repressed by much of public education, possibly due to a
lopsided reading of Weber on the one hand, and a fear of teaching religion
in the schools on the other. Yet these religiously-shaped mind-sets and
social ethos have enhanced the prospects for models of production that now
make available to the world what was once only for the elites.
Now, more and more of the world is learning the technology, organi
zation, and management skills that make high volume production, market
ing, and advertising (and consumerism) possible. These also bring changes
to the traditional value systems of those societies. Of course, some think
this is a great tragedy, as one can hear anti-American protests from many
parts of the world. Their critique is not only of growing polarization of the
classes and eventual class wars, nor even the more complex struggle
between ideal and material interests in shaping societal patterns, but of cul
ture wars now on a global scale. People think of their own culture as
sovereign, sanctified, and static; they do not want it altered. Anti-globalists
sound radical, but are in fact among the most reactionary voices in the
world.
Such is also the case with those who fear that economic growth will
shatter the world's ecology. Everyone should live more simply, so we are
told. Subsistence living is romanticized and made into a virtue in some
quarters of anti-globalism. But that does not slow things down much. In
fact, as I look around, the process of globalism is increasing in speed and
scope and is seldom replicating little Americas all over the world. Rather,
the eager adoption of the technological, organizational, and managerial
patterns of economic life are being selectively adapted and woven into the
ethos of the culture that is already there. This changes indigenous culture,
and it changes the uses and character of the technology. The choebal of the
Korean conglomerate is not like the Samurai feudal corporation of Japan,
or the caste-framed company in India, or the state-sponsored industries in
China. Thus, as Americas' life-style is a synthesis of religious influences
in a deep and complex interaction with secular forces and developments, so
new syntheses are being developed with distinct features in every region of
the globe.
Romanticism and Consumerism
But if we want to delve deeper still into these issues, we shall have to look
not only at the production side that has generated a rising tide of expec
tation; we have to look specifically at the precise character of contemporary
consumption. Is it also driven by the legacy of the Protestant, Puritan, and
Pietist background?
Only in part, I think. The sober, rational examination of all aspects of
daily life that became a part of the mind-set and social ethos of those
cultures shaped by Puritan and Pietist Christianity not only coincided with
but positively influenced major developments out of the Enlighten
ment?much less that part of the Enlightenment that pressed Western
history toward an anti-religious, systematic program of the secularization of
everything, but that part of the Enlightenment that promoted the freedom of
religion, the freedom of the economy, the freedom of democracy, and the
protection of human rights. After all, we have had two deep legacies in
modernity, one that issued in the Anglo-American tradition, heavily influ

enced by the Scottish heritage, and the other that issued in the French and
eventually the Russian tradition, much shaped by the French Revolution and
some aspects of Germanic philosophy. These were alike in that they
challenged older forms of Roman Catholicism and sometimes fomented
colonialism; but they were fundamentally different in the kinds of mentality
and ethos they fostered, and the kinds of polity they spawned: the one open
and decentralized, the other closed and centralized. Both brought, however,
disruptions of older cultural and religious belief, and, in various degrees,
new rational forms of science, government, economy, and, for that matter,
of medicine, education, and law.
It was against such developments that we find the rise of Romanticism:
a reaction against rationalistic "modernization" that continues today in the
widespread hostility to globalization and in some forms of theological
conservatism. In this connection, I want to call your attention to the volume
written by Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern
Consumerism (Blackwell, 1987), obviously an echo of Weber's famous The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Peter Smith, 1984). Campbell
does not have the range and depth of thought that Smith, Marx, and Weber
did, but he does draw our attention to one set of intriguing factors. He
argues that while Smith and Marx exposed some of the mechanics and
effects of modernization, and Weber had the socio-economic effects of the
Protestant movements on it basically right, none of them deals adequately
with modern forms of consumerism.
I would like to elaborate on one point of Campbell's' work, namely
that while certain strands of Protestantism's ascetic restraint and reliance on
new rational methods put the West on an early track toward a corporate
managed, high-tech economy that was enormously productive, it was
another stream of thought that made people want these goods. The Roman
tic movement not only loved to look back to the simpler days before mod
ernity, when men were knights in shining armor and women were all
sequestered beauties waiting to be rescued, and when the ordinary peasants
were less driven by asceticism and reason than by authentically raw passion
and will. The heroic figures of yesteryear were treated in ways that we
recognize today as early versions of Tolkien. At the same time, the in
domitable forces of nature were celebrated; the outer storms and earth
quakes of the material world and the inner drives and felt needs of the
emotional world were celebrated in ballad, novel, painting, and poetry. This
took a popular form in figures such as Lord Byron, who loved strutting his
handsome profile in sometimes-foppish garb. So also Emerson in this
country, plus dozens if not hundreds of painters, composers, and poets.
This cultural-artistic, passionate protest against the mechanization and
rationalization and corporatization and management of the modern world
was infectious, partly because the early effects of the industrial revolution
were deeply disturbing to older, more settled traditions. It created slums and
made earlier skills obsolete. It put growing wealth in the hands of the
uppity new owners of the corporations rather than in the hands of landed
aristocrats where it had always been, and seemed, as does the globalization
movement of today, to polarize the classes. But while many of the displaced
working class were attracted to the Puritan and Pietist movements, they had
reason for resentment against the disruptions of their lives and the difficul
ties of adjusting to new conditions (as do some of the Evangelical and
Pentecostal movements in developing countries today and some dis
privileged parts of the population at home). Also, the Romantic, the Puritan,
and Pietist wings of Protestantism had certain value affinities between them.
Ordinary people began to focus less on systematic theology, rational defi
nitions of doctrine, or careful exegesis of the Biblical text, and more on the
direct personal experience of an inspiring presence of the Spirit of Christ in
the heart, and of love for the brothers and sisters in the populist, revival
movements that anticipated contemporary developments.
The key point that brought about the convergence of the Romantic and
the Revival movements is this: One had to consult one's inner dispositions,
the truth in the turmoil of one's own heart to know what one was to think,
do, and be. This impulse can take several directions. It can mean the eleva
tion of love over faith, or, more likely, the experienced confirmation that
love and hope are the concrete manifestations of a valid faith. Faith is less
the reasonable clarification of right belief than a personal trust in the dispo
sitions of the heart. In any case, one consults one's inner felt needs and
wants to know what one should think and do, and the stimulant that most
elevates the stirred feelings determines the shape of those wants and needs.
When this understanding of the right and good dominate the ethos, the stage
is set for the use of emotive symbols to manipulate and intensify perceived
wants and needs.
Neither Campbell nor I hold that the Puritan and Pietist movements of
modern Christianity have caused consumerism, but they quite possibly
fostered modernity with their rational focus on discipline, and asceticism
had another side that coincided with the impulses of Romanticism. In both,
the worst thing that one could do would be to ignore the deeper longings of
the heart that induce a profound dissatisfaction that could only be met by a
new experience. To fail to meet those felt needs would be to betray intu
itions of the divine, for they represented what M. H. Abrams called, in his
masterful study of Romanticism, Natural Sup er naturalism (W. W. Norton,
1973).
In my view, two things happened as a consequence of these devel
opments. One is that a large portion of the social ethos became enamored
with this more Romantic view of life. Second, if people began to lose faith,
they became in fact Romantics, following the desires of their own hearts not
back to a Revival, nor to a church at all, but to other areas of society, such
as the arts. Other Romantics turned to political movements that represented
a passionate solidarity with "the people" (defined as the wants or needs of
a class, race, or gender minority), or to a love for nature and its primal
ecological vitalities. But many turned to the mall, to impulse buying, and
the accumulation of things. The route to many creative works of art was
charted by the Romantic path, as were several movements for social justice
and some vital defenses of the environment. But some people got lost in
these movements also, in the worlds of the flower children and hippies, or
in a succession of populist liberation movements that always seem to fail,
and still others in those "deep green" militants who want to save the world
by dismantling modern civilization and reinstalling Eden. The generation
most inclined in these directions is now middle-aged. In David Brooks'
hilarious book, Bobos in Paradise (Simon and Schuster, 2001 ), you can read
what happened to them when they realized that they had to earn a living to
carry out these revolutions. So they went into academia, management
consulting, and financial investment in ethically guided funds, and, scandal
ously enough, became successful. Now these "bourgeois bohemians," the
Bobos, drive their Volvos from their half-million dollar homes with
manicured lawns to meet their friends over a latt? at Starbucks before they
pick up their designer kids from soccer practice, to discuss how terribly
regimented they all are by the economic colonization of their life-worlds,
mourn the loss of radicality in today's youth, and consider the best ways to
do compost so as to not further endanger the earth.
But they are, I think, an exceptional sub-culture. Most of us have
internalized a double ethic; one is the modern version of the Protestant
Work Ethic. Many have at least a vague sense of our own vocation or are
seeking to refine it, and do so with a profound sense of commitment and

dedication. We work hard, we study hard, and we do our sports or other
extra-curricular and voluntary activities with intensity and with careful
attention to being as efficient and productive as possible. When we do not
follow these standards, or do not use the gifts we have been given to accom
plish at the levels at which we think we are capable, we feel guilty and
unworthy of the many blessings in our lives.
At the same time, we often have a second ethic that is basically Ro
mantic, especially when we are off-duty. On weekends or holidays, or in
the evening when the workday is done, we feast and we indulge, we feel the
various inner urges to splurge, and think we cannot be true to our own needs
if we do not. We watch the fantasies on TV and turn our passions loose in
any number of a dozen ways, letting them guide us where they will, seldom
with much thought or rationalization. Yet, the next morning, we are ready
for school, or work, or church as we morph into the other, more Puritan, half
of our ethic of life.
Whether we are among those who are spiritual post-believers with a
Romantic conscience or whether we are essentially convicted believers with
a secondary Romantic ethic for off-duty times and seasons, we are in fact
deeply involved in a world of massive productivity and massive consump
tion. Our social ethos is divided and we, too, are personally divided?if not
all of the time, some of the time. And all of this involves living in and
sustaining a corporate, high technological, managed, ever expanding, high
consumption society.
Christians and Mammon

What should Christians think about this divided world of our social ethos
and of our own hearts? Are we directly violating the command that we
cannot love God and Mammon? The answer is: some are, and perhaps we
all are at some points. It depends on the dominant attitudes of our hearts.
It can become a serious threat to our souls and it can further bend the social
ethos in a corrupting direction, for we are told that the love of Mammon is
the root of many evils. When we speak of Mammon, we are not referring
to money in the ordinary sense of a means of exchange, but as one of the
powers of life that we can, and some do, take to be an object of love,
something that we desire and put our hopes in, as if it could save us. In fact,
money can save, in the temporal sense, those who are starving or homeless
or sick. And it is better to have sufficient resources than to have too few.
But if we put our spiritual confidence in money, it turns on us and we be

come obsessed with it: greedy, possessive, miserly, without liberality and
generosity or a sense of stewardship and gift giving.
If we tolerate this guilty cycle, are we guilty of selling out our faith to
the culture? It is probably impossible to root out the spirit of consumerism
entirely in human cultures, and it may not be wise to try. For one thing,
efforts to do so in the name of Christ would generate a new monastic-like
renunciation of the world and a detachment from the material fabric of life.
We could become like the desert monks of old or like the forest monks of
Buddhism, or like the Luddites of the Industrial Revolution period, or, more
ominously, the Taliban of recent Afghan memory: one side of which with
drew from material culture and presumed that the less materialistic they
became the more spiritual they could become; and the other side of which
attempted to destroy a modernizing, mechanizing, and commerce-driven
world by either smashing the instruments of production or trashing the sym
bols of consumption. Both views ultimately deny the reality of the Incarna
tion and the promise that we shall have life, and have it more abundantly,
now and in the life to come.
No, it is not a sell-out to the culture to recognize that production and
consumption are a necessary part of life. It is precisely the opposite; it is
taking responsibility for the general shape of the culture. It is the contin
uation of the tradition of the Reformation that opposed both the monastic
withdrawal from the world and the idealization of poverty, as well as the
militant iconoclasm and zealotry of the occasional peasant revolts against
the increased wealth of expanding city commercial classes and their political
defenders. Yes, a certain modesty of wants and a serious constraint of greed
and lust are both marks of virtue. But a society that does not increase the
material well-being of its citizens is one that will quickly decay or collapse.
The question is how to do this morally, responsibly, and with spiritual
discernment.
Some closely related questions are handled in competing ways by my
friends Ron Sider of Eastern Seminary, author of Rich Christians in an Age
of Hunger (Word, 1997), and John Schneider of Calvin College, author of
The Good of Affluence (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002). Sider seems to think that
Christians are wealthy because we have gained at the expense of others and
luxuriate while others suffer, and both the example of Christ and the main
message of the Bible on economic matters is that we should share our
wealth by sacrificial giving and simple living. Schneider seems to think that
those who have developed productive and flourishing systems should

develop an ethic that allows responsible enjoyment and delight in the
benefits with thankfulness to God. Jesus himself was criticized for not
fasting, as did the Pharisees, for eating and drinking with wealthy sinners
and tax collectors, and for enjoying the feasting of weddings and promising
an eschatological banquet; all of these surely are marks of having plenty for
consumption as a kind of blessing, as the patriarchs, kings, and sages of the
wisdom literature of the Old Testament also enjoyed.
I think they are both right at points and both wrong at points. Sider is
surely right that the logic of the faith is more giving than gaining, and that
sharing of our plenty is a duty of the faithful person. He is wrong, however,
to the extent that he suggests rich countries have more because the poor
countries have less. The older zero-sum concept that all wealth is theft, and
thus that any unnecessary consumption deprives the needy from having
enough because there is only a fixed quantity of available resources, is now
replaced by a recognition that it is possible to create new quantities of goods
and services, to bake, as it were, a bigger pie with more for everyone.
Furthermore, to have some parts of the population forever dependent on the
charity of other parts turns out to be dehumanizing. The newer problem
thus is how to draw more and more people into the productive processes and
toward responsible consumption, and to do so with the relative justice
possible in this life. Sider is not overtly opposed to this strategy, but it is not
central to his view of the Christian message.
Schneider is correct in suggesting that Christians have no Biblical
warrant for living in a constant state of guilt about having plenty and
enjoying the fruits of affluence. There is a joy in the faith that allows for the
celebration of the good things of life, especially since the evidence is quite
convincing that conversion to Evangelical Christianity often brings with it,
as an unintended by-product, a greater prospect for economic well-being.
Unfaithful prodigal sons and daughters waste their fortunes, but can we not
joyfully kill the fatted calf when one returns?
Schneider is surely correct in resisting the plagued conscience of the
overly scrupulous. But he is probably wrong in that he does not accent the
missiological drive to bring spiritual and material transformation to those
parts of the world at home and abroad where the connections between a
sound faith, a disciplined ethic, a productive participation in the creation of
wealth, and the delight in the providential gifts that flow from these are not
known or realized.
Business and Ministry

I must say that neither Sider nor Schneider accents the moral and spiritual
values that partly are, and could be more fully, built into the fabric of
contemporary technological and corporate life. And this is my final
message for you today. So far as I can see, we are going to live with some
form of corporate-managed, technologically-driven capitalism for as long
as we can imagine the future. This is not the Kingdom of God, and it is not
altogether wonderful or beautiful or just. But it is possible that the Kingdom
can work within us as we live in this environment and among us as we
participate with others to reform, improve, and in some respects transform
these features of the contemporary common life. For those of you who will
be going into business, I exhort you to stay true to the moral and spiritual
bases of your vocation. Understand that you will have the opportunity and
the responsibility to do a ministry in and for the material well-being of the
peoples of the world. Build trust, and be trustworthy, as some are not; share
and care, as some do not; construct viable, profitable, and responsible
corporations that will serve God's purposes and humankind, as some have
not done. And exemplify in all you do a joy and delight in the life God has
given you; it commends the disciplined life to others and finally also before
the Lord.

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Reflections on Consumerism in a Global Era

Author(s): Max L. Stackhouse

Philosophy Documentation Center is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and

? Business & Professional Ethics Journal 2004. Correspondence may be

importantly) shifting patterns of religious loyalty and practice. In more

Romanticism and Consumerism

modernity, one that issued in the Anglo-American tradition, heavily influ

seeking to refine it, and do so with a profound sense of commitment and

Christians and Mammon

But if we put our spiritual confidence in money, it turns on us and we be

those who have developed productive and flourishing systems should

Business and Ministry

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