So I watched Sandra Unger online a couple of days ago.  She spoke about consumption.  The title of the sermon was "Stuffocation." 

Generally, I was in agreement with the direction she was going in.  Most North American Christians seem to be driven by capitalistic ways of doing things and they bring those to bear on their relationships.  Certainly this is a sermon that we Western Christians are in need of heeding.  However, I had some reservations.  Here are a few.

1.  Sandra used a video clip from the site www.storyofstuff.com   In that video, Annie Leonard basically says that after WWII the government sought to reinvigorate the economy by "design" and that was by making more consumer goods and getting people to buy, buy, buy--to "jump on board of this program."  However, I think this is a SLIGHTLY OVERLY simplistic way of understanding the nature of capitalism.  There are many more forces at work than simply some sort of conspiracy going on.  I mean, how do you get democracies to "jump on board" to buy and sell freely?  It seems that the spirit of capitalism not only needed but still needs to be empowered by institutional arrangements that bring buyers and sellers together, facilitate orderly and non-coercive exhanges between them and enable buyers and sellers to learn economically relevant lessons from their exchanges.  This means that there are a plurality and flexibility of a number of western institutions--law, bills of exchange, insurance, taxation policies, etc.  These have been very important to economic development.

2.  It seemed to me that there was no real solution.  OK.  I understand living counter-cultural as Christians, but what does one hope to accomplish by this?  To make better Christians?  Or is it to effect society positively?  And then what would that look like?  Would it mean we don't get our identities from this meta-narrative?  We don't get our relationships with others from this meta-narrrative?  What about laws themselves?  If say, something like what I described above is instrumental to the capitalist spirit of the times, would those not be worth considering?   Let's live counter cultural.  Fine.  But we have to look at this thing wholely and not piecemeal or else I'm afraid we're not going to effect the structures that are in place which will keep us on this merry-go-round. 

Post Edited (BBBCanada) : 5/30/2008 11:31:50 PM (GMT-5)