"That ain't my culture and heritage!"
- Homer Stokes in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"
Tasteless, sure, to start a review of a book subtitled "Beyond Race and Class Divisions in a Consumer Culture" with a quote delivered by a wizard at a Ku Klux Klan meeting. But just wait, it's perfect. The line comes in the midst of a series of fundamentalist epithets that the wizard (who we soon find out is actually Homer Stokes, the upstart challenger against Pappy O'Daniels for governor of Mississippi) levels against the so-called "progressive" developments sweeping across the depression-era south. Here's the line in full:
"And then there's some folks say we done descended from monkeys! That ain't my culture and heritage! Is that your culture and heritage?!"
The resounding "no!", then, with which the robed and hooded crowd responds is dripping in irony, for they're completely right - that's not their heritage. Their's is much more horrible, a regime of terroristic racism, whose symbolic apogee - the torch-bearing lynch mob - they are enacting at that very moment.
This silly side-track provides us with two poignant metaphors with which to frame Paul Metzger's new book, Consuming Jesus: Beyond Race and Class Divisions In a Consumer Church (Eerdamans: 2007).
The first metaphor comes at the end of the wizard's speech, at which point he removes his hood to more closely inspect the hideous sight of an approaching color guard, which is, in fact, colored (sort of). Upon this unmasking, the audience is informed that the grand wizard - American mythology's own grand wizard of evil incarnates - is actually the hereunto noble and progressive Homer Stokes, "candidate for the little man." So the unmasking of the villain means not that we find a good guy underneath, but rather that we find out that the good guy was a bad guy. The task of the first two chapters is a somewhat opposite one: to unmask the seemingly benign and often extolled forces of consumerism and racial prejudice at work in the church today for the heretical impostors they are.
Chapter One, "A Faulty Order: Retreating Battle Camps and Homogeneous Units", is perhaps poorly titled, since it doesn't say much at all about the homogeneous unit church growth principle here, but is a fantastic critique of the historical progression and carry-over of a "retreat till the rapture" attitude from fundamentalism into evangelicalism. (The history of evangelicalism that is being written by the heavy hitters in American church history - Marsden, Noll, and Hatch - is put to good use, beginning the book's pattern of referencing with sources that are accessible and useful for a lay audience that wants to pursue the issues introduced.) Here Metzger makes a simple and reasonable case that good pre-millenial theology should not lead us to withdraw from society, but rather just the opposite. It ought to be a source of hope that motivates us to engage society and work to change it in anticipation of the coming kingdom.
Chapter two is where the critical component hits full force. Metzger unleashes on "the consumer Balrog", taking to task the way that homogenous unit growth principles, infatuation with numerical, monetary, and political success, and so forth, are actually the worst betrayals of the gospel, turning it into a commodity to be marketed according the whims and fancies of individuals. It hardly needs to be mentioned that the very message being marketed tells us that those very desires and predilections are hopelessly twisted and turned in on ourselves in narcissistic, masturbatory, greedy (I could go on!) self centeredness.
We live in the age of consumer culture, the grand supermarket or shopping mall of desire, and many progressive, culture-engaging churches have unwittingly taken the bait - hook, line, and sinker.
The second aspect of the book isn't really a metaphor, it's just that line. Metzger's book is good, old-fashioned, fist-pounding, finger-pointing, fire and brimstone. Except here the prophetic condemnation is held out over the consumerist ethos that has invaded American Churches. To this ethos, then, Metzger informs us "that ain't my culture and heritage!", and challenges us "is that your culture and heritage?!" It remains, then, the task for the rest of the book to prove that the tradition within which we actually stand is one that stands for justice and equality. And thus it avoids the Coen brothers' ironic skewering of a fundamentalism that would criticize what it perceived as societal evil only in the name of a much more evil tradition. Through and through, Metzger hammers away at his message that the central evangelical event of a heart consumed by the love of Jesus cannot at the same time be consumed by consumerism. To the extent that modern evangelicals are, they have forsaken their roots.
This seems like a good place for the best quote of the book.
The way churches today cater to the market forces of homogeneity and upward mobility inevitably leads them to exclude from their fellowship the poor and those on the fringes of society, partly because they have made such outsiders feel uncomfortable with the insider crowd of "our kind of people." Dehumanizing freedom of infinite choice and personal preference inside and outside the church replaces the law of enforcement and impersonal rule, and that reinforces the race and class divide. Today's problems of race and class in America are not rooted in torture or oppression, but in liberated choice and pleasure: they are bound up with the subtle law of consumer preference. This law declares that one must choose in order to be real, to be righteous, to be justified, and to be enlightened.
The Bible does not address the problem of consumerism directly, at least not as an ideology; that would be an anachronism. Yet, to the extent that consumerism splits the church, it comes under the prophetic purview mapped out in Scripture's call to holy unity. Church-growth strategies that emphasize quantitative over qualitative enlargement and cater to consumer choice and personal preference whet the appetites of the demonic powers as malevolent consumers and breed disunity. In this light, they warrant Scripture's rebuke. (55-56)
So, as it turns out there was only one metaphor. Homer Stokes doesn't provide us with a metaphor to invert in explanation of the third aspect of this book. But that's ok, since its pretty straightforward. In addition to unmasking consumerism as an evil, and denying it's continuity with the evangelical tradition, Metzger also affirms that there are resources within the tradition itself with which to combat its modern perversions. This is, in the best sense of the phrase, "a critique from within. Now, is a problem that Metzger's central strategy for combating consumerism - a revamped celebration and centrality of the Lord's Supper - is probably too sacramental than most evangelicals are going to be comfortable with. But that can be dealt with, and the outstanding contributions to theological critical theory being made along sacramental lines by Cavanaugh, McCarraher, and Milbank should not be assumed averse to appropriation by those of us in the more Zwinglian tradition. Yet aside from this, most everything that is said against consumerism is backed up by a representative from within evangelicalism. For this, he draws chiefly on the work of Jonathan Edwards and John Perkins. This choice of sources was a great move. First, Jonathan Edwards without parallel in influence for the development of modern evangelicalism. His position on "religious affections", set forth during the Great Awakening, goes a long way in defining the movement. The rest of his theology aside, if you don't stand with him here, you probably aren't an evangelical. That said, his Calvinism would be utterly reprehensible to the Arminianism of the American church if they knew anything about it. But still, I think his status as an American church father makes it work rhetorically. As for Perkins, well, if you aren't in awe of him and what he stands for, well, you probably aren't a human being. His story is the perfect embodiment of what this book's message: a life that has been consumed by Jesus will inevitably stand in radical opposition to the surrounding evils in society.
It might be claimed that all of this talk of consumerism is really besides the point, that it is only the symptom of an irreparably faulty system, that, in the words of Eugene McCarraher, "talking about consumerism has become a way of not talking about capitalism." I suspect that critique has some truth in it, but I don't think it fits with this book. This book was written to a lay evangelical audience that would reject it out of hand if it were suspected that any sort of Marxist theory was behind it. Perhaps the day will come when there will be an American Evangelical Church capable of such a full-fledged attach on the dehumanizing forces of capitalism, but that day is not now. Metzger's book pushes us towards that day. It is a book that is good for the church, and I can only pray that the right people read it.
