Religion is alive and well, and killing itself.

There is an extremely unsettling commercial that I see on television every now and then. It is a car commercial in which there is a very disjointed family: a teenage girl talking on her cell phone, one boy playing some kind of handheld video game, paying no attention his younger brother, who wants to throw the football around. Their mother pulls up in the advertised car and invites the entire family to go for a ride. The children apparently relent, followed by their begrudging father, who was looking at an ESPN-esque website.

Cue the music and voiceover explaining the features of the car, which apparently brings the entire family together. At the end of the commercial, the teenage sister says to her younger brother, “you know, you’re not so bad Bobby”, at which point the boy replies, “It’s Billy” (or vice versa – I can’t really remember which was the boy’s real name).

The commercial got a knee jerk reaction from me the first time that I saw it: I chuckled because it’s an outlandish dialogue that is supposed to make us laugh. Yet the reason why it makes us laugh is because the heart of the dialogue points to something less exaggerated (as humor usually does) but we are all semi-aware of and concede as being at the least a minor dilemma in America.

Neil Postman, the late cultural critic, cites the importance of the American culture to have some type of grand narrative that drives its people. In his book, The End of Education, he lists these grand narratives as gods that serve people; gods that give their people a meaning and a purpose or end to which to strive. Postman lists one particular god that does have not the adequate ability to serve. A false god, if you will. That god’s name is the god of consumerism.

Ah, yes. We’ve heard this sermon before. The indictment of consumerism, and how it ultimately never follows through on its promise, and leaves us discontent, a little unhappy and perhaps, even dissatisfied. But the preachers who preach that we must be in and not of the world have very few places to direct their listeners besides the havens we call church and retreat centers, and in many of them we end up huddling around the gospel hoping that it keeps us warm in the middle of the night.

It is strange for the proponents of the light of the world to find an ally in a so called secular, cultural critic. Yet Postman offers a shrewd observation that helps us in discovering why consumerism’s masquerade as a false god should be so unsettling.

For Postman, religion is alive and well, even outside of the religious communities. Perhaps this is the first thing that we need to realize: Religious people do not have a monopoly on religion. After all, what is consumerism if not the promise to deliver something that improves your life? And how does it convince us that we need, except to first point out that we are lacking? It is here that consumerism uses its cousin, advertising, to accomplish this. Advertising tries to scare us. It addresses a problem in our lives, perhaps something that we’ve never thought of before. Or, maybe it is something that has always been in the corner of our minds that we hardly thought was a problem at all. But the problem is drawn to the forefront of our minds, and the goal is to convince us that we are living in a state of fallenness. Yes, there is an almost divine problem that cannot be solved, whether it has to do with transportation, information, an empty stomach or a dirty kitchen. The problem begins to loom at large. It has never been this big before. Our minds are then zeroed in on the problem, and we cannot ignore it. Sure, we can take a risk and try, but what if those millions of tiny bacteria end up harming my child, or my failure to upgrade to a better insurance provider leaves me with the regret at missing out on saving money?

Enter the hero. The almost divine savior, to tackle the almost divine problem. Interesting, the savior introduced happens to be able to save us from all of the problems that were drawn to our attention. But of course, we can’t forget the aftermath. The happy healthy baby, the shrewd customer who ends up saving hundreds, and the reunited family.

Admittedly, it sounds a bit over the top when it’s said like that. And of course, I’m fooling no one with that embellished version of the consumerism story. At some point in that train of thought I began to think to myself, “wow, this actually sounds pretty bogus. I’ve heightened commercial advertising to gospel status. Even if it really is like that, people have got to be smart enough not to be duped so easily.” And I hope that I am right. Of course we all know the naysayers will blow the problem up to cosmic proportions. It’s just always been that way.

However, I still believe that the correlary addressed by Postman serves as a useful insight, and I would be remiss if I didn’t say that there was truth to that depiction of consumerism, just as the car commercial had depicted the problem of the estranged family in exaggerated and comedic fashion. But therein lies a nuance that we don’t see, and it is not necessarily the problem that promises ultimate satisfaction. Postman addressed the fact that consumerism mirrors the religious story, but it has evolved beyond a mere duplication. We all know that the god of consumerism has an agenda that is unashamedly intentional and biased towards itself. But what we may not know is the fact that consumerism is now making fun of itself, and getting away with it.

The great irony in the car commercial is that it knows full well why the family is estranged in the first place: their collective attention is drawn to cellphones, hand held video game consoles, and the internet. Yet, lo and behold, there is another attention getter: the car that supposedly is the fix to all the problems of the family. But shouldn’t it be strange that while the car promises to be the savior that these other products are not, it too is using the same medium through which to proclaim its divinity? The sad answer is apparently not. Truth is, commercials like this can be run, and we chuckle and move on. There is no shrewd observation that there is some sort of problem here when we collectively admit that there’s a problem, but simply shrug our shoulders and move on with our lives, all the while being bombarded by false saviors sent by the god of consumerism.

And it is at this point that perhaps religious communities should condemn the trivialization of our bread and butter, our old story. Sure, we kind of need a new vacuum or car, but it can wait. And of course, we kind of need solutions to our problems of injustice, of greed, of family breakdowns, of addictions, of helplessness, of utter sin. The bastardizing of the gospel story for the purposes of that false god make our religious story as tame as the suggestion that we get fries and a coke with that burger. Religion is alive and well, and is killing itself. And it turns out that those preachers are right. Consumerism does not satisfy, but leave us in sort of a strange limbo stage in which we are accustomed to being drawn to temporary solutions for temporary problems. Yet, what does it mean to be in and not of the world, and does the gospel have implications for the here and now only? Or does it have implications for only those huddled around the fire? What can a religious community do to make sure our story is not hijacked and decontextualized, duplicated and trivialized? We do well to point out that consumerism cannot serve well as a god. Yet perhaps we would do well to put our energies to what would serve well as a god, and not only for the benefit of those who are in and not of the world, but the world at large, and do it in an unapologetic manner. And let us hope that we perhaps have an answer for those who are shortchanged by the god of consumerism, and our huddled masses do not block the light of the gospel.