Consumerism & Sexuality

By most people's reckoning, our culture is becoming more and more open and accepting of any and all sexual behavior, as long as it "doesn't hurt anyone." In many ways our current culture is beginning to reflect more and more the pagan culture within which Christianity was birthed. The early Christians ' insistence that sexual purity was extremely important looked as strange back then as it does today. Christians today have been wringing their hands, trying to figure out how to steer young people away from the desolate wasteland of sexual immorality, because the Scriptures make it fairly clear that sexual behavior outside the marriage of a man and a woman is destructive to our humanity. We've tried scaring young people into abstinence ("Do you know how many sexually transmitted diseases there are out there?"), to no avail. We've tried moralistic tirades and hellfire sermons against it, to no avail. We've tried to ban sex education in public schools, to no avail. Again and again, young people, for the most part, are rushing toward any and all kinds of sexual behavior. Perhaps the reason we've been so ineffective is because we aren't going deep enough into the ideology that creates the sexual climate we live in today.

Postmodernity and consumerism have cooperated to create a culture where preference, choice, orientation and lifestyle have become hugely important. It used to be "I think, therefore I am," but now it's "I choose, therefore I am" or "I shop, therefore I exist". Consumerism shrinks human nature down to individual acts of choice, and usually those choices involve purchasing something. "I should have what I want" is the mantra of the consumer culture. There was an article in our local paper a few days ago about how a new fiber-optic Internet service was going into a poor area of town before it went into a rich area of town. A person from the rich area was indignant: "It's like we're living in communist Cuba. We can't get services we're willing to pay for." Besides the fact that this person was severely out of touch with the realities of communist Cuba, it points to an ideology carried by most people in our culture: If I want it and I can pay for it, I should have it. If I perceive something would be good for me to have, I should take it. There should be no limits placed on me fulfilling my dreams and desires.

It's easy to see how this ideology is carried over into sexuality. Consumerism involves the commodification of all of life; everything, from toothbrushes to relationships to the environment, is something I obtain in order to use (for my own pleasure). So I think about socks the same way I think about relationships: I pick something I like and use it until I'm done with it, then I throw it away. So the ideology behind sexual immorality is the same ideology that lies behind consumerism. I desire fiber-optic Internet service, so I should have it. I desire sexual intimacy, I should have it. And when I go to the grocery store I don't just buy one brand of cereal for the rest of my life, so why should I limit myself to sexual intimacy with just one person for the rest of my life when I have a plethora of options? As Walsh and Keesmaat say in their book Colossians Remixed, "Multiple sex partners is just good capitalism."

A big part of the problem then, is that while the church fairly clearly says that sexual immorality is wrong, by and large, it buys into the same consumeristic mindset that lies behind sexual immorality. Thus our message has no power, because we have not yet learned to become the kind of community that rejects consumerism and materialism as the stories we live under. We have not yet embraced the story of the Scriptures as our story, and let that narrative unfold in our life together. For the most part, we behave as though we are quite at home in the world of consumerism. The sexual climate we see today is the practical outworking of this philosophy. Inside the story of consumerism, sexual immorality makes a lot of sense, and that's why it is practiced so much.

David Fitch posted these words in a February entry on his blog, saying that beyond just taking a moralistic stance on an issue, that the church needs to become a certain kind of community for any of this to make sense:

For surely [in order to address the issue of sexuality in our culture] we would have to be the kind of community that did not indulge hyper romanticist notions of sexuality that objectifies sexual attraction as the basis of heterosexual marriage. Surely we would have to quit disembodying sexuality in the way we do whenever we make the Bible into moral propositions that should be enforced instead of a narrative world to be shaped and directed towards so as to live into. And we would need worship that would order desires towards God away from narcissism, for any other kind of worship cannot hope to train us out of our narcissistic obsessions with sex. We would need a way to love and nurture the hurting souls and the bruised lost ones who seriously desire to be shown another way but are too consumed at this moment to see anything else.

As I've posted before, embodied witness is much more important than esoteric facts. Truth can only be fully known if it is incarnated in a community. Moralistic tirades against sexual immorality look like irrelvant temper tantrums, because we embrace the same consumerist ideology that empowers sexual immorality. For Christians to really address the problem of sexual immorality in our culture, we will have to start by rooting out the idolatries of consumerism and materialism in the church. Only then will we have the kind of embodied witness that will lend power to a message that sounds so completely odd and naive to our culture.

Comments

[cindyH]

Couple things...while I think certainly that consumerism plays a HUGE role in the sexual climate we live in, I'm not sure it's THE biggest reason, nor is the fix only teaching the church not to be materialistic consumers. Are you implying that? Wasn't sure. It seems rather too simple a conclusion....or at least a nice shiny box to look at and say we now 'get it'. I've (been forced to) spent lots of time (as a parent of teens) thinking about this subject, and I can think of at least two other reasons sex is so pervasive in our culture. Detached parenting of the current generation would be a biggie. Not respecting the way we're wired would be another (but connected to the previous idea).

I do agree, nevertheless, that the church needs to take an honest look at how she partakes in the consumerism of our generation...but how do we do that? What would disentangling look like? I heard Jim Wallis say that Bono has never had the success of mobilizing his fans for the poor because he's talking to a crowd of consumers. They consume his message at the concert, then go on their merry way. Not his fault, but it's a frustrating reality of our culture (as I'm sure pastors everywhere know). But I wonder how much the church has played into that with the focus so centered on Sunday Morning? Why is it so many (the elusive 80%)would rather sit and be entertained than work in children's ministry? (or food pantries or tutoring agencies, or what-have-you) Do we make it easy for people to consume church? Is that all bad? Methinks giving lots of sermons on avoiding materialism will result in the same reaction we see in the culture when we preach sexual purity. It's a foreign concept. What does a non-consumerist person look like? How does their life look different? I have some ideas, and have a friend or two who I'd consider in this category, but what will it take to convince an entire subculture that they are guilty of perpetrating ideology that leads to the very thing they say is destructive (sexual immorality)?

Anyway, good post. Just wanting to dig a bit deeper, as you said.

[Benjamin Sternke]

Cindy,

I wasn't implying that consumerism is THE only reason for sexual immorality, or that solving the consumerism problem would automatically solve the sexual problem. I'm with you on the other causes you mentioned. Detached parenting (or rebellion on the part of a young person, or both) can lead to a "love vacuum" that causes many to push the sex button to see if any real love will come out. I also agree that we often teach on this subject as though having a desire is the same thing as sinning.

Your questions on actually implementing it are also perceptive. It's easy to see the problem, but harder to find solutions. Elton Trueblood actually wrote about the "Building Up To Sunday Morning" phenomenon back in the 1950s. I quoted him in an earlier post. This kind of thing does need to be embodied in a community, and that will certainly take more than a sermon series to make that happen.

I've often wondered how the church can face the challenge of consumerism. In one sense, we need to meet people where they are at, and so we face consumerism as a simple fact of life that needs to be dealt with (so, for example, churches need to engage in certain kinds of marketing in order to reach people). Or does using consumerism as an "entry point" always backfire later? Like Jim Wallis said, people come to U2 shows to consume, so Bono's call to fight poverty falls on deaf ears. Perhaps pastors are dealing with the same phenomenon? There is a culture of consumption that draws people to come to church to consume, so a call to live a sacrificial life of love often falls on deaf ears. Sp perhaps we need to avoid consumerism altogether and create some kind of new version of the Bruderhof Communities. But of course even they have a website (some minimal marketing). It's finding a way to navigate the cultural context in a redemptive way, without prostituting ourselves (pardon the strong term). We're still working that one out in practice, but I imagine that it involves some kind of core community that lives under a different story. An embodied witness to the truth. But we do need to continue to dig deeper, working out how to live authentically in the context of consumerism.