Emerge or Submerge
Media critic, Quentin Schultze (2004), contends that the Christian music industry has further perpetuated individualism and isolationism. Schultze believes Christian music tours have taken church pastoring away from the world of local, personal relationships, premised on trust and familiarity, and into the impersonal world of entertainment, characterized by the market-driven terms of production and consumer choice. These are just a few of the ways isolationism is embraced and expressed in most evangelical churches.
Consumerism
Individualism and isolationism are closely related to a third thread which is pervasive in both American culture and in the evangelical church—Consumerism. The driving premise of consumerism is “rights over responsibility.” Consumerism promotes the ills of individualism and isolationism because it leads us to a preoccupation of defending our property and rights with indifference to the poor and needy (Webber 2003).
Consumerism drives us to demand more, more, more. Few things demonstrate our obsession with “stuff” more than the self-storage industry. While the average American home has doubled in square footage over the past 25 years, a billion square feet of America has been committed to storing things that won’t fit in our homes. Self-storage is a 13 billion dollar industry in the United States; that’s more than the sum total of the music industry in the U.S. The owner of Epic Group, a self-storage business in Ventura County, California speaks from personal experience. He rented a unit to hold his daughter’s Barbie dolls and toy horses after she left home to attend Stanford University. “She wouldn’t take them. And they have sentimental value,” he said (Cason 2001).
Consumerism is alive and “well” in churches too. In fact, it’s been said that a thumbnail sketch of Church history can be synthesized as follows: The church began in Jerusalem as “Mission.” It moved to Rome and became “Institution.” From there it found it’s home in Europe as “Culture;” and it crossed the Atlantic and became “Big Business” (Webber, R., personal conversation, 03 October 2003). Do a little ethnography of your own in this area by wandering through the exhibit hall at the next Youth Specialties convention or by loitering in a Christian bookstore. Consumerism doesn’t show any signs of waning influence.
Of course Christian t-shirts and mints are the least of how consumerism has shaped American evangelicalism. Economically, evangelicals consume along with the rest of their fellow citizens. In fact, evangelicals have the highest rates of upward mobility of all religious believers in the United States (Wolf 2003). In addition, most evangelical churches are building “bigger and better” buildings and offering more and more programs and options to meet the demands of the isolated individuals in their midst. Options rule! The church with the most customized offerings “grows” the fastest. And when it fails to give its consumers what they want, they think nothing of leaving and consuming at the local church around the corner.
Secular sociologist, Alan Wolf of Boston University, believes the infusion of consumerism in the American evangelical movement helps to explain the unprecedented success of simplistic books like The Prayer of Jabez. Wolf writes, “What is offered in Wilkinson’s book is a conception of religion so narcissist that it makes prosperity theology look demanding by contrast… One searches this exceptionally thin book in vain for any statement indicating that Christian prayer is an act of sacrifice. In Wilkinson’s form of Christianity, you get far more than you give” (p. 33).
Consumerism has also shaped evangelical churches in more subtle ways. Consumerism seems to be a major predictor in causing American evangelical churches to lower the bar for how they call people to follow Jesus. The church has toned down its hellfire preaching in favor of more culturally relevant messages that tap into the consumerist ideals of its members. This is done in an attempt to meet people where they are; but are we taking them anywhere once we “meet” them there?
More Americans than ever before call themselves born-again Christians, but the lord to whom they turn rarely gets angry and frequently strengthens their self-esteem. Wolf (2003) writes,
Traditional forms of worship, from reliance on organ music to the mysteries of liturgy, have given way to audience participation and contemporary tastes. Some believers are anxious to witness their faith to others, but they tend to avoid methods that would make them seem unfriendly or invasive. If Jonathan Edwards were alive and well, he would likely be appalled; far from living in a world elsewhere, the faithful in the United States are remarkably like everyone else” (p. 3).
Consumerism, like Individualism and Isolationism, reigns in the American Evangelical Church. As a whole, American evangelicals mirror their neighbors in their spending habits, their recreational choices, their dreams about retirement, and their demands to have their needs met.
Summing up The Evangelical Church in the United States
The predominance of individualism, isolationism, and consumerism in American evangelicalism demonstrates our relative “success” with having achieved cultural relevance in the church. Mittelburg (2000) lauds the value of the culturally-relevant, dark, noisy, energetic fast-paced service he experienced, In contrast, Wolf (2003), who acknowledges he’s not a professing Christian writes, “Watching sermons reduced to PowerPoint presentations or listening to one easily forgettable praise song after another makes one long for an evangelical willing to stand up, Luther-like, and proclaim his opposition to the latest survey of evangelical taste” (p. 257). Evangelicalism’s problem is its strong “desire to copy the culture of hotel chains and popular music that it loses what religious distinctiveness it once had” (Wolf 2003, p. 257).
Notice how Wolf describes his experiences at Willow Creek and Saddleback while he was conducting his research on American evangelicalism. He writes,
Willow Creek…displays no cross on it’s building, but that does not mean it lacks one. “We do have a cross,” as a tour guide explained. “We bring it out for special occasions, like baptism.” This openly strategic way of thinking about religious identity is common in evangelical circles; one survey of mega-churches found that more than half of them refrain from placing religious symbols in prominent places (pp. 114-15).
Rick Warren…does not come close to even mentioning hell. On the day I heard him in the summer of 2002, Warren was in top form; he is without doubt one of the most captivating public speakers to whom I have ever listened. Addressing himself directly to the question of sin, which he prefers to call temptation, Pastor Rick begins by pointing out that… “Too much self-discipline can be a bad thing” (166).
Wolf’s (2003) concluding assessment of the evangelical landscape in the U.S. is that while we are a movement of people who believe in a supernatural creator, there is little we do that appears very supernatural. We blend into the modern American landscape. We live in the suburbs, send our children to four-year liberal arts colleges, work in professional capacities, enjoy contemporary music, shop in malls, raise confused and uncertain children, and we relate primarily to people with whom we share common interests.” Churches end up competing to be relevant rather than striving to be missional.
Category: Ministry, Winter 2007
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