Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (review)

Vincent Miller, who teaches theology at Georgetown University, presents a challenging thesis in Consuming Religion: consumerism has so conditioned individuals in contemporary Western culture that they approach religion as just one more consumer product. As a result, tradition becomes out-of-date, a formless and meaningless reminder of last year's fad; and religion becomes something that must be personalized to suit the individual consumer.

Miller has constructed a difficult argument. The first six chapters, which comprise the bulk of the book, explore the cultural and economic problem of consumerism. Finding support in French social critics better known to specialists and students of post-structuralism, including Guy Dubord (1932-1994) and Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), Miller details the consequences of the Western commodification of culture. Along the way, religion appears as one more box on the shelf.

Miller carefully details his points, from "How to Think about Consumer Culture," and "The Commodification of Culture," each heavily laced with cultural and economic theory, to "Consumer Religion," a chapter that speaks to the personalization of religious belief and commitment along consumerist lines. In this third chapter, Miller traces the development of advertising at the close of the 19^th century as one harbinger of the current "consumer religion." As the twentieth century opened, he writes, print advertisements shifted from being primarily textual to include more illustrations. This shift served to support sometimes outlandish promises that often played more to the emotions than to common sense. Miller argues that this "shift in marketing fundamentally changed consumption by transforming commodities into symbolic markers for deeper fulfillment" (87). Hence advertising increased personal and social insecurities, eroded the meaning and power of cultural symbols, and promoted a relationship between consumption and fulfillment. Obtaining the advertised commodity was to lead to happiness. In the process traditional cultural referents began to be either obscured or co-opted.

Concurrently, spirituality in large part became marked by an individualism that overtook the normal and natural process of individuation. Alluding to "Sheilaism," the private spirituality delineated in Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart, Miller reminds the reader of the then relatively new (or at least little heard-of) phenomenon of personal non-denominational "spirituality," which resulted from the combination of psychotherapy and consumer ideals evidenced by Sheila Larson, the subject of Bellah's interviews. Miller also cites Wayne Clark Roof, who described the personal religious style of the American baby boomer as that of a "seeker." This personal and personalized search for fulfillment of the boomer generation is characterized by allegiance to personal experience, but not to institutions or leaders. As a consequence, Roof, Catherine Albanese, and others, conclude that boomers are capable of serial commitment to religion, despite differing styles of commitment to different sorts of belief systems. Hence Henri Nowen's personal journey, reflected in his wide range of topics, bespeaks a spirituality of his era. Miller underscores his point by calling on Robert Wurthnow, who describes the general shift from allegiance to a stable congregation, to allegiance to personal individualized "seeking."

While fides quarens intellectum is a good thing, what Miller describes is neither fides nor, in the end, intellectum. For according to Miller "spirituality" has come to mean "the personal experiential dimensions of religion in opposition to institutional forms" (90). Hence to "seekers" religions are merely "repositories of insights and practices that they appropriate for their own personal synthesis" (90). Miller's argument finds support in the work of scholars like Roof, because of their ready conversion to economic terms. He writes, "Roof's description of spirituality very closely resembles commodified habits of cultural consumption" (91). As spirituality becomes detached from creeds, ritual, and community, the religious traditions from which it ostensibly grew become more able to "conform to the default assumptions and practices of the dominant culture" (91). The increasing decline of "religious monopolies" in the face of the rise of a pluralistic culture conjoin with secularism to account for the progressive decline of...