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Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture. By Vincent J. Miller. New York: Continuum, 2004. vii + 228 pp. $24.95.
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 As a result, tradition becomes out-of-date, a formless and meaningless reminder of last year's fad; and religion becomes something that must be personalized to suit the individual consumer.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 19th 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 heardof) phenomenon of personal...