what have we become?

My favorite class this semester is Religion and the Environment. This past Tuesday we discussed a paper by David Loy titled Religion and the Market. In this paper, Loy contends that the Market has become “our god”, consumerism “our religion”, and shopping “our national past-time”. He shares one statistic that didn’t seem to shock many of us (though it should): the average CEO in the US receives a compensation package of 3.7 million dollars a year (1997). As we began to dive into discussion on this very statistic, our token business major spoke up (and God bless him). He asked us to understand that if a large company tanks, the CEO of that company would never receive another job. Therefore, he or she would desperately need such a “reasonable” compensation package. To say I disagree is an understatement.

As we continued the conversation, the theme of the paper is reduced to whether or not we agree with Loy’s accusation of the Market actually being some sort of religion. As usual, we have missed the point of what Loy is trying to say. My classmates are acknowledging that no one needs a ton of money, multiple cars, or any other excessive amount of material items (duh). They make this observation relevant to religion by stating that, as people of faith, material goods become idols, and that materialism “kills our internal spirit” or something along those lines. I believe that these claims are true, but I contend that we take this to the next step. The classroom was filled with many ”devoted” (yet, domesticated) Christians and I wanted us to reach a point in the discussion where we would actually move our thinking toward the larger implications of our own greed, consumption, and lifestyle. In other words, for Christians, excessive materialism isn’t just dangerous to us as individuals, but also to those that we are taking advantage of to acquire such luxuries. We must begin to transform from an exclusive, egocentric, internal faith to an inclusive, communal, external faith. 

My heart breaks when our line of vision is so obscured by our own little world that we forget to look at the larger picture. The fact of the matter is that our consumption is leaving the developing world at our mercy. If every country consumed what the US consumes, the planet would be long gone. The US is 4% of the world population and consumes over 40% of her resources. Our brothers and sisters outside of our borders cannot get ahead because our greed won’t allow it. And the saddest idea underlying this fact is that many compassionate, caring, faithful Americans don’t realize what we are doing.

And what about those within our congregations that are aware of this? Why haven’t our churches addressed our environmental stewardship, resource consumption, or gluttony? Because many in our pews on Sunday mornings don’t only want to be faithful followers, but passionate patriots that uphold the “American Dream” (whatever that has become). My generation is starting to distant itself from the Church because we are beginning to realize that traditional faith is still occupied with traditional issues and refuses to address our responsibility to the planet, poor, and the oppressed. Programs such as Invisible Children, Toms Shoes, and many other non-profits are seen by young people as doing more to establish a world community and God’s Kingdom than our churches that only seem occupied in their own, internal, petty squabbles. In Rob Bell’s book Jesus Wants to Save Christians, he states that “you forget God when you forget the people God cares about. Over and over God speaks of the widow, the orphan, and the refugee. This is how you remember God: you bless those who need it the most in the same way that God blessed you when you needed it the most.” What have we, as Westernized Christians, become? While remaining ultra-comfortable in our own consumptions and luxuries, have we forgotten where God likes to hang out?

We must realize that money does not buy happiness. We must stop worshipping gods that do not satisfy and fail to liberate the oppressed. We, as Christians, are called to champion the poor, even if that means living with less to aid the poor outside our own borders. After all, God’s love doesn’t just come in red, white, and blue.