First, I think that Christians should stop yakking about ‘consumerism.’ ‘Consumerism’ is not the problem—capitalism is. Consumerism is the work ethic of consumption, the transformation of leisure and pleasure into duties. Talking about consumerism is a way of not talking about capitalism, and I’ve come to think that that’s the reason why so many people, including Christians, whine about it so much. It’s just too easy a target. There’s a long history behind this, but the creation of consumer culture is very much about compensating workers for loss of control and creativity at work, and those things were stolen because capital needed to subject workers to industrial discipline. (I don’t, by the way, believe that we inhabit a ‘post-industrial’ society. Our current regimes of work are, indeed, super-industrial.) Telling people that they’re materialistic is both tiresome and wrong-headed: tiresome, because it clearly doesn’t work, and wrong-headed, because it gives people the impression that matter and spirit are antithetical. As Christians, we should be reminding everyone that material reality is sacramental, and that therefore material production, exchange, and consumption can be ways of mediating the divine.

-Eugene McCarraher

Not only does capitalism deform the desire of those who prosper or at least survive under its tutelage, it also distorts human relations, even of those who are excluded from its fruits. This is to say, even if capitalism elevated the poor, it would still be wrong on account of the way it corrupts human relations, rendering them antagonistic, competitive. Capitalism has so construed the market that humans interact agonistically, competitively. All of us, winners and losers, consumers and excluded, compete for resources, for market share, for a living wage, for a job, for the time for friendship and family, for inclusion in the market, and so forth. Capitalism is wrong because even if it delivers the goods, it nevertheless works against the Good, corrupting (and perpetuating the corruption of) human sociality in competitive and conflictual modalities. Capitalism is wrong, not simply on the grounds of what it fails to do but because of what it succeeds in doing: distorting human desire and relations.

–Daniel M. Bell, Jr.

There is no point to making broad utilitarian claims about the benefits of ‘the free market’ as if we could identify a market as ‘free’ merely by the absence of restraint on naked power. Giving free rein to power without ends is more likely to produce unfreedom than to produce freedom. There is simply no way to talk about a really free economy without entering into particular judgments about what kinds of exchange are conducive to the flourishing of life on earth and what kinds are not. Though my purpose in this essay has not been to go into detail about the specific ends of human work and material possessions, the Christian tradition provides a wealth of reflection on these matters. I believe it would be counter-productive to expect the state to attempt to impose such a direction on economic activity. What is most important is the direct embodiment of free economic practices. From a Christian point of view, the churches should take an active role in fostering economic practices that are consonant with the true ends of creation. This requires promoting economic practices that maintain close connections among capital, labor, and communities, so that real communal discernment of the good can take place. Such are spaces in which true freedom can flourish.

–William T. Cavanaugh

“Once you concede the essential legitimacy of the ‘secular’ account of the person—or of economics, or politics, etc.—you end up relegating Christianity to the realm of ‘spirituality,’ or ‘values,’ or some other gaseous invertebrate that hovers around an ‘essentially’ secular self. Rather, Christians should contend that the ‘secular’ marks the repression, displacement, and renaming of our desire for a sacramental way of being in the world. Indeed, the history of the person is both the history of those perversions and of attempts to mitigate or undo the perversions. So I think that it’s better to say, not that the Christian account of personhood is ‘at odds’ with the ‘secular’ account, as the secular account is a disfigurement of personhood.

In this view, the self under late capitalism is a perversion of our desires for a beloved, sacramental community of labor. If you look closely, I think you’ll find that, for instance, a great deal of management theory—as dullard or cynical as it truly is—represents an effort on the part of corporate capital to simulate such a community. Advertising, to take another example, is the devotional iconography of late capitalism: it arouses, in the very act of disfiguring, our sacramental longing for a land of milk and honey, for a New Jerusalem.”
 
–Chris Keller, “Britney Spears and the Downward Arc of Empire: An Interview with Eugene McCarraher”, The Other Journal

“Paradise and beatitude are, in the end, the unacknowledged longings of economic life.  Our imperium of money has been an elaborate attempt to divert our attention from these desires.  For the last generation, we’ve been admonished to lock “utopia” in the attic of historical nightmares and dwell within the cheerfully commercial boundaries of the capitalist imagination.  It’s been busy and entertaining and, until recently, it’s been safe.  The poor were forgotten or chastised, the critics were stifled or bribed, and the billions in the slums of globalization’s wake were silenced with promises and missiles.  But as Mike Davis puts it in Planet of Slums with grim and austere elegance, ‘the gods of chaos are on their side.’  The wretched are increasingly unwilling to abide our imperial theodicy and our condescension. And as even McCloskey concedes, the imperium has gotten boring – a possible symptom of ontological dread, a dim recognition of some failure or lack in the fulfillment of our real desires.  Perhaps soon – sooner than we think, or has it already begun? – much of what passes for realism will appear as the romanticism of venality, the mythology of avarice and dominion.  ‘All is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil.’  Hopkins knew that avarice was a yearning for the dearest freshness deep down things.  Like him, I’ll wager that only theology can truly tell us the name of our desire; only theology can reveal love as the metaphysical foundation of the world.  It can unfasten the padlock on ‘utopia,’ soar over the walls of mercenary realism, commence a breakthrough to the other side.”

 –Eugene McCarraher, “Break on Through to the Other Side,” Books and Culture 13(6) (November/December, 2007): 41.

“…what we have called “disenchantment” or “secularization” is actually the repression or displacement of sacrament—and, to borrow from Freud, the repressed and displaced always returns in a different but malignant form. Miller says as much in terms of a critique of commodity culture when he writes that “the most pressing challenge of consumer desire . . . is not its difference from, but its profound similarity to, the form of the mystical ascent”—an ascent, he adds, frustrated by consumerism’s “derailing of eschatology”, its re-routing of our redemptive expectations toward the marketplace. A theological critique of “disenchantment” could then avoid the tiresome and flat-footed opposition of secular and sacred, and enable us to suggest that while moderns claim to disenchant and de-sacramentalize matter, they “fetishize” goods by shifting faith in divine power to the transformative properties of commodities. Likewise, the love of accumulation is a corrupted love of God, a private and spoiled Eucharistic banquet. And as the site of poesis deformed into productivity, the corporation is a grotesque of liturgical labor.”

–Eugene McCarraher, “The Enchantments of Mammon: Notes Toward a Theological History of Capitalism” Modern Theology 21:3 (July 2005), p. 450.