Every so often I come across a quote or a concept which just sticks with me for a really long time. It will spin and bounce around inside me, trying to attach to any and everything it comes across until something finally sticks.

This article entitled “Luring teenagers to religion” contains just such a quote. The article talks about how modern churches are flexing their creative muscles to come up with new and vital ways to get young people interested in timeless wisdom. A lot of people are fearful that changing with the times though - when it comes to spirituality - is a dangerous path, because it dilutes the efficacy of the teachings. The quote I liked so much is referring to groups who are changing with the times, and it reads:

“They mostly redefine religion in consumerist terms. ‘We want to sell you our product.’ It signals a shift from the authority of the religious tradition to the individual consumer as the authority. If you have to make the Bible look like Cosmopolitan magazine, it seems you’ve already lost.”

I personally don’t agree with the notion that updating imagery necessarily dilutes underlying content. I mean, it can, but it can also reveal all kinds of new information and insights into the material. Really, the problem lies in the person who is doing the translating or updating. Do they have a solid understanding of how symbolism worked back in the old days, and what new forms it has taken today?

Anyway, the part I really like the most about that quote though is what I put in bold above: “It signals a shift from the authority of the religious tradition to the individual consumer as the authority.” I guess if you run a religious institution, this shift in authority becomes a really threatening thing. Suddenly, your spiritual monopoly becomes threatened by all kinds of competitors in the marketplace of ideas. Before you didn’t have to worry about staying “vital” or “vibrant” to reach people; they had no choice but to listen to your sermons. There was no other game in town. And when there was you could just burn them at the stake, and the problem was solved.

Nowadays though, we’re seeing the “danger” of giving ultimate authority to the individual. People call this by many names, but I’d like to call it what it is: consumerism. Consumerism is the glorification of individual choice. In a consumerist culture, you define your identity according to which choices you make, and what you ally yourself with in the culture. For most people this takes literal form through the ritual of purchasing. By buying things, you ritually surround yourself with tangible fetish objects which symbolize the cultural-corporate ideology that you adhere to.

An article on MacWorld talks about this in relation to what is called “cult-branding”:

“Everything that is crucial to religion - shared values and beliefs, community interactions, storytelling, and an acceptance of the supernatural - can also be found in the worship by consumers of brands.

[…] All of these brand communities have been demonstrated to be capable of producing transformative experiences in their consumers and all have traces of magic, religion or the supernatural.”

[…] They add that as part of this idol worship, they, “engage in consumer-to-consumer narrative interactions that bind the community together and reify its values and beliefs”, they observe.

“Supernatural, religious, and magical motifs are common in these stories, including the miraculous performance and survival of the brand, as well as the return of the brand creator. We see traditional religious stories, players, and parts played out in the marketplace.”

As much as counter-culturalists like to use consumerism as a punching bag, I think in it lies the key to undoing the whole mess. Maybe we could call it radical consumerism, or something along those lines. Basically, what I see is that consumerism represents this shift away from institutional authority onto individual authority. The way most people express this though is not at this point very complex: Coke or Pepsi? Acura or Lexus? What most people do is not cling to their individual authority at all costs, but surrender it at any chance they get. What I mean by that is that if nobody bought products from a particular corporation, that corporation would vanish. They are fueled by people surrendering authority BACK into the institution.

Does this mean you should boycott or not buy anything? I don’t know. It’s your choice as the individual authority how you want to express it. I think one of the other keys to this situation is that ordinarily the vessels with which we are allowed to express our authority are extremely limited. Again, Coke or Pepsi? When a new soft drink comes along, suddenly everybody goes crazy (at least for a while), because they have a new a new way to assert their independence from existing corporate/religious institutions.

Pastor Ted, head of the wildly successful Evangelical megachurch “New Life” in Colorado Springs understands very well this “secret thrill” that people get from buying new products.

They like the stimulation of a new brand. “Have you ever switched your toothpaste brand, just for the fun of it?” Pastor Ted asks. Admit it, he insists. All the way home, you felt a “secret little thrill,” as excited questions ran through your mind: “Will it make my teeth whiter? My breath fresher?”

This is why big companies are always coming out with new subsidiary brands and imprints. They realize that people are tired of them, but don’t want to lose them to true competitors. So they set up many false competitors to keep their consumers enthralled.

The problem, as I see it, is that our consumerist culture sets us up as individual authorities, but only provides us one socially acceptable avenue with which to express it: surrendering that authority. It’s the same thing with voting. Bush/Kerry, Coke/Pepsi: The Choice of a New Generation. It’s not a choice at all really. It’s virtually the same thing. This is the great secret of consumerism: you must promote people’s sense of individual authority and expertise without promoting it so much that they learn to wean themselves off of your nourishing teat.

People in charge of the consumerist system are terrified of you figuring this out though. If you even look up the definition of consumerism nowadays, you’re struck with a strange bit of Orwellian linguistic trickery as the first definition (ie, the only one most people read). They define consumerism as:

The movement seeking to protect and inform consumers by requiring such practices as honest packaging and advertising, product guarantees, and improved safety standards.

When the hell did the definition of that word change into complete bullshit? You have to go down to the third definition in the list to get anywhere near what the REAL non-corporate-speak definition is. Fortunately, Wikipedia is still keeping the faith. Their definition is much more honest:

Consumerism is a term used to describe the effects of equating personal happiness with purchasing material possessions and consumption.

All that shit about protecting consumers has NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING! It’s called a smokescreen, and to see that it has penetrated all the way down to dictionary definitions is to me rather frightening.

However, things are changing in a positive direction too, but it’s only gradual. Wired had a fascinating article last year about how the internet has changed consumerist behavior. It’s called The Long Tail and is a worthwhile read. A sample:

Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what’s available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

What we’re witnessing today is a “Long Tail” effect trickling all the way up to perceptions of reality. Just like everything else, perceptions of reality is something carefully controlled and sold by media institutions. Many people today are “waking up” and realizing: “Hey! I don’t like the reality I’m being sold! I want to choose something different.” I wrote a little about this a while back in relation to conspiracy theory:

And this is exactly what I think conspiracy theory is such an excellent example of. Conspiracists have an almost Protestant refusal to engage in the official systems of worship and theology promulgated by the Church of the Media (Hollywood as the New Rome). They are asserting their “individual consumer as the authority” system of ethics which they learned from intense consumerist indoctrination. And they are realizing that worldviews, reality tunnels, media channels are all just products being sold. And as a consumer, you’re supposed to pick and choose what you like, what appeals to your instincts and fits your identity as an individual.

And for their exemplary performance as the ultimate information consumers, they are rewarded with nothing but scorn by the media, because their Protestant “priesthood of all believers”, their reality-tunnel Liberation Theology, threatens the very structure of the Media-Church institutions themselves. As the strength of choice of the individual consumer ascends, the strength of the religious tradition declines.

Consumerism glorifies the individual as the final authority. Extrapolated to its ultimate conclusion though, this opens up the possibility that the individual will choose to step entirely outside the institutionalized control systems. So a delicate game of cat and mouse is played to keep people from realizing this is one of their multitude of options available to them as an authority. We’re given a multiple choice quiz where only 5 out of five trillion possible answers are allowed. People who’ve been trained to not have an imagination, and not to dream bigger don’t care though. They are just happy to be able to help a celebrity avatar, Paris Hilton, decide whether she ought to buy a Coach or a Burberry bag. What if at the last minute though she chose something else though: freedom from the corporate bullshit excuse for having a real life and real choices?