Sacrifestivals: On Christianity and Mass Consumption in America

Thank the Lord, the sun is finally setting on the academic jeremiad against mass consumption. And thank scholars like Leigh Eric Schmidt, whose book on American holidays helps swell the chorus of more sophisticated interpretations of popular rites of consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Daniel Boorstin and Herbert Gans gave us the tools a generation ago, but it has only been in the 1980s and 1990s, and primarily in the last few years, that a definite maturity has emerged in the historical study of mass consumption. In The Image (1962) and The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973), Boorstin outlined a unique American dialectic between the culturally bred expectations of consumers and the enterprises of consumer-oriented entrepreneurs. The result of the dynamic interaction between buyer and seller was a whole new consumption-oriented world of concepts, meanings, hopes, and beliefs about the material and sensory world. This new world was good and bad—good because of its dynamic creativity in meeting the eternal human desire for comfort, and bad because of its peculiar capacity to dilute values and confuse meanings. Gans, in The Levittowners (1967) and Popular Culture and High Culture (1974), harpooned those elitist critics of “mass culture” who were too lacking in compassion and imagination to understand that “average people” like the Levittowners were not prototypes of Homer Simpson, the famously insipid suburban father of The Simpsons. The pursuit of mass-produced creature comforts like Levitt homes, Gans argued, reflected the legitimate tastes of the majority of people, many of whom were deliberately fleeing the more “communal” lives of urban ethnic neighborhoods for greater privacy and quiet and for a new blend of city and country on the suburban frontier.

To complete the interpretive framework, all that was needed was a strong level of anthropology, which Mary Douglas provided in The World of Goods (1979). Douglas, and anthropology, showed us that even in the most materially sophisticated societies people seek to meet certain basic needs through their consumption habits, not unlike people in simpler tribal cultures. The anthropological transformation of our view of modern society inspired cultural historians to take a much less moralistic and much more functional approach to their subjects. ¹

Consumer Rites builds on these foundations, as well as on recent work emphasizing the carnivalesque and whimsical elements of American consumer rituals.

In the introduction, Schmidt gives four reasons why he deliberately avoids conflating history and social criticism, as has so often been done in the study of mass consumption: (1) the necessity of taking an anthropological view of “the kind of festal excess that is often fundamental to celebrations,” rather than condemning it as mere wastefulness; (2) the necessity of taking an anthropological and sociological view of consumption and gift exchange because “social critics have all too often succumbed to the temptation of seeing gifts and goods in terms of simplicities: hierarchic display, status competition, consumer manipulation, capitalist hegemony, mass cultural banality, and the like”; (3) the recognition that popular culture is not a simple manipulation of the dull masses who would be better off with more sophisticated cultural interests; (4) the desire to take seriously the feminization of holidays into “home-festivals” rather than dismiss them as unimportant because of their association with women, as critics have often done (pp. 8–10).

Rejecting the “elite aestheticism that runs through so much cultural criticism from Thorstein Veblen to the Frankfurt School to Ann Douglas,” Schmidt favors a more down-to-earth approach, recognizing that “modern holidays, in their very commodification, remain Jello-thick with meaning” (p. 308). In analyzing the development of four signal occasions—Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Easter, and Mother’s Day—and all the merchandise that paraded along with them, Schmidt maintains the common sense approach to products that Susan Strasser presented in her history of American marketing: “Manufacturers have for a century worked to produce merchandise that guarantees satisfaction; people who like products will buy...