Scott Kline
University of Waterloo
Abstract
In
his book Consuming Religion (2003) Vincent J. Miller demonstrates how consumer capitalism has been able to
commodify religious rituals, symbols, and figures and market them to consumers
seeking self-improvement, individual enlightenment, and/or greater
spirituality. His thesis is that “consumer religion” is emblematic of a
radically transformed social relationship created by consumer capitalism. This
article focuses on an element of consumer religion missing in Miller’s
argument; that is, how commodified, consumer religion enables certain
conservative political leaders to claim a tradition as their inheritance and,
in turn, mobilize alienated consumers/voters in the US culture wars. In
practical-political terms, culture-war conservatives have found a way to
consolidate political power by embracing both a free market, which actually erodes local tradition, and traditional values, which
provides fuel for culture war battles over popular movies, television, music,
and public education.
[1] In the spring of 2005, the North American media were
headlining two stories on the impending death of two media fixtures: Pope John
Paul II and Terri Schiavo. Because I am an ethicist who works in a Catholic
university, located in one of Canada’s most highly populated regions, I was
approached by a Canadian television network affiliate to tape a three minute
segment on Terri Schivao and issues associated with end-of-life ethical
decisions. I accepted, and that afternoon we began the taping. After explaining
the traditional Catholic position on the moral responsibility to provide the
necessities (i.e., water and food) to all, including the sick, the interviewer
lunged at me and said, “You know, the pope is dying—and in the news this
morning, it appears that only a feeding tube is keeping him alive. Aren’t the
cases of Terri Schiavo and Pope John Paul II the same?”
[2]
Stunned, I said, “Yes, in a sense they are. The difference, though, is that the
pope’s wishes are well known, while Terri Schiavo’s are mediated through her
former husband and her family.” It then dawned on me: I should have said, “They
are the same in that both Terri Schiavo and Pope John Paul II are, at this
point, little more than media representations, whose real lives are known by a
very select few, but still demand the attention of the masses because they
embody—at least as far as abstract media images can—the moral and
political debates surrounding the right to die a dignified death, the nature of
marriage, and a whole host of other issues commonly associated with the
so-called “culture wars,” including embryonic stem cell research and abortion.
In other words, Terri Schiavo and John Paul II are media spectacle; and as
spectacle, their meaning and importance correspond to a worldview that
justifies a social and economic relationship.” Thankfully, for the reporter, I
did not make this case—I let the slippage between the media
representations go ahead, for I knew it was going to take far more than the
remaining 90 seconds of the interview to explain myself.[1]
[3] Herein lies the problem that
I want to address. The vast majority of the developed world, and North America
in particular, related to the death (and life) of Pope John Paul II (and Terri
Schiavo) through mass media representations that are circumscribed by (a) the
overarching objective of the mass media—namely, audience ratings leading
to advertising dollars; by (b) an ever-growing audience of consumers who think
that news ought to be entertaining and, above all, important to their
individual lives; and by (c) a consumer mentality that religion is essentially
personal and valuable primarily as a general guide to private morality. This
phenomenon, I contend, is not morally or politically neutral. To the contrary,
consumer culture operates with a certain logic that not only redefines
traditional moral and political values, but also exposes them to new forms of
political manipulation by apparently conservative leaders seeking to mobilize
an alienated voter base. To make this argument, I begin by engaging Vincent J.
Miller’s work Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer
Culture (2003).[2] One
point of emphasis in this section is how religious rituals and leaders have
been integrated into consumer culture and how this integration has radically
altered previous hermeneutical strategies and, at the same time, created new
frameworks for interpreting religious authority. In the second section, I will
build on Miller’s argument to highlight ways in which (neo-)conservative
political leaders in the United States have been able to appropriate
commodified-consumer religion to mobilize their voter base, which, ironically,
is unwittingly alienated by the moral relativism associated with free-market,
consumer capitalism.[3]
The Morality of Consumer Religion
[4] In his
timely book Consuming Religion, Vincent
Miller begins with the assertion that consumer culture not only challenges the
integrity of religious traditions and communities by promoting a parallel and
often conflicting set of values, but it also redefines how people relate to
values, beliefs, culture, and, ultimately, to religion. Miller writes,
“consumerism is primarily a way of relating to beliefs—a set of habits
of interpretation and use—that
renders the content of beliefs and values less important.”[4] Drawing
on the work of Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre, Frederic Jameson, and Jean
Baudrillard, Miller shows how the rise of capitalism is connected to the
development of consumer religion. As capitalism became the dominant logic
system for social relations, religious beliefs, practices, and symbols first
became commodities, and then later signs and abstract signifiers that modern
consumers use to signal to others seemingly vital elements of their identity
and status, but which have no actual ties to the religion’s practices,
community, and its demands for social justice. In effect, the hegemony of
commodification trains people to relate to all culture as cultural products;
that is, commodities, which may be bought and sold on the free market.
Consumers choose their religion, enjoy it, and once it has served its
purpose—usually to achieve self-fulfillment—they discard it.
[5]
Among the many examples Miller uses to make his case, perhaps the clearest
illustration he presents involves the rise of Gregorian chant music, which in
the early 1990s gained global notoriety through the New Age sounds of the studio
group Enigma.[5] Despite topping music charts in France
and Germany, and becoming a worldwide hit on the pop and dance charts, the
popularity of Enigma’s album MCMXC a.D. did
not result in flocks of young people heading off to Roman Rite masses to understand
the Gregorian tradition or to be a part of a liturgical community that treated
Gregorian chant as a call to ritual. This, Miller seems to suggest, would have
been a political act of solidarity. However, consumer culture does not promote
such actions. In fact, because consumer culture treats religion as a commodity,
which can be fused with other commodities to create a new product, the meaning
of a religious tradition or ritual—in this case the Gregorian
chant—is likely to be completely lost. The popular song “Sadeness Part
1,” from the Enigma album, is representative of this new consumer relationship
with religion. In this song, the chant, the Procedamus in pace, which is the final sending off of the mass, is set
to a dance beat and airy synthesizer background tracks. Moreover, instead of
simply following the Gregorian-Latin chant, the dance beat leads into a
conversation in whispered French … a conversation with the Marquis de Sade, the
notorious sexual libertine of the early nineteenth century. Miller does
recognize that this juxtaposition of traditional Catholic ritual with the
sexually provocative Sade may be a politically and culturally subversive
act—a critique of Catholicism’s sexual hypocrisy, perhaps. Indeed, it
would seem that Miller wishes this were the case. However, the fusion of the
commodified Gregorian chant with the commodified Sade generates no political or
culturally subversive act. Following Miller’s thesis, the economic relationship
that promotes commodified religion actually deters consumers from acting in
solidarity. In this case, if consumers are aware of this fusion between a
Catholic ritual and the libertine Sade, and think it is particularly
insightful, daring, or even dangerous, then consumers will do what they are
expected to do: go out and purchase the CD or download it from a file-sharing
program or iTunes.[6] For Miller, Karl Marx was largely
right—human existence has fundamentally shifted from “being” to “having.”
The result, he concludes, is that a commodified consumer religion has actually
reduced morality to consumer choice and ethics to mere sentiment.[7]
[6]
The commodification of religion also plays an important role in turning
religious leaders into celebrities and their lives into spectacle. By the end
of the twentieth century, Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, and
a number of high-profile televangelists, such as Joel Osteen and Benny Hinn,
had joined a select group of popular religious figures who could pack stadiums,
sway audiences with the simplest of gestures, and sell millions of books, video
tapes, CDs, and magazines to boot! By the late twentieth century, Pope John
Paul, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama, to name a few, had long ceased being
just individual leaders of religious communities, they had become cultural
icons who could rally diverse populations to identify with their particular
“brand” of religion, or at least what is perceived to be associated with that
brand.[8]
[7]
Although Miller does not focus on the branding of religious celebrity and
promoting brand loyalty, he does treat one of branding’s necessary elements:
spectacle. To understand how spectacle functions in consumer societies, Miller
relies heavily Guy Debord. In our hyper-visual society, Debord argues, the
dominance of the visual creates a disconnection between what is represented and
what is going on in people’s lives. In Debord’s words, “everything that was
once directly lived has moved away into a representation.”[9] As
Miller rightly points out, the spectacle is a realm of virtual fulfillment
abstracted from the political forces that shape people’s lives. The result,
then, is that commodified consumer religion—whether an idealized version
of Tibetan Buddhism or an exoticized version of the Kama Sutra—often
misrepresents the religion in consumer culture.
[8]
To be sure, Miller recognizes that religions are never static social forms, but
instead complex institutions that have both influenced and been influenced by
larger socio-cultural phenomena. Moreover, he is not suggesting that straying
from orthodoxy is novel to modernity or consumer culture. Indeed, challenging
formal religious practices or teachings has been one of the driving forces in
religious renewal movements. What has changed, however, is how these challenges
are handled in these times of “liquid modernity.”[10] In
many pre-modern societies, there were social, political and even corporal penalties for misrepresenting a
tradition. As a general rule, popular religious reformers and radicals, such as
Martin Luther, Thomas Müntzer, Hasan al-Basri, Honen Shonin, and Maimonides,
challenged orthodoxy and existing power structures to revitalize their
traditions, whether Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or Judaism. Others,
including popular figures like Jesus, Joan of Arc, and Gandhi, were famously
murdered for misrepresenting their traditions and challenging existing power
structures. In consumer culture, though, misrepresentations actually add to the
marketability of religion. In fact, dominant institutions in consumer
society, specifically the commodity producers, actively encourage the
misrepresentation. For instance, the yoga mats and active wear sold by trendy
fashion stores such as Lululemon are much more consistent with Western
middle-class sensibilities than the monastic life of Buddhist monks sworn to
poverty and begging.[11] Because misrepresentation carries no
social, cultural, or political penalty, consumers are now free to shop around
and to mix-and-match religions. In effect, then, what consumer religion does is
cultivate a kind of “free trial,” “no-strings attached,” “do-it-yourself”
approach to religion and religious moralities, especially notions of social
solidarity and the common good.
The Politics of Consumer
Religion: The Production and Consumption of Cultural Politics
[9] So far, I
have agreed with Vincent Miller’s general assessment of consumer culture, the
commodification of religion, and their effects on moral, ethical, and religious
practices. One area, though, where Miller’s argument fails to persuade is his
discussion of politics. Simply put, he does not adequately address the overtly
political uses of consumer religion. To be fair, his book does contain a
sophisticated chapter entitled “The Politics of Consumption,” in which he
engages the work of Michel de Certeau and Pierre Bordieu to understand some of
the creative ways in which consumers reject inferior cultural products and
resist the tremendous power of the culture industry. However, this discussion
remains focused on the market and the market’s ability to redefine social
relationships. My question is what happens when political leaders invoke
commodified religious rituals and leaders to advance a particular agenda?
Specifically, what happens when conservative political leaders and those
associated with the religious right in the United States appeal to commodified
religious beliefs, rituals, and figures—all in the name of upholding
tradition—in an attempt make their policies palatable to American voters?[12] Although I acknowledge and appreciate Miller’s reason for discussing the “Politics of Consumption,” I maintain
that, in a society where voting and citizen participation has been reduced to a
consumer choice between the liberal and conservative brands,[13] we
should also focus on the “production and consumption of cultural politics.”[14] Moreover, this focus on cultural
politics is crucial in helping us understand a paradox that underlies the
conservative appeal to culture war issues.
[10] For many social and religious
conservatives in the US, culture has become the defining issue in politics. Starting in the late 1960s, there has been a growing
division between social conservatives and liberals on issues such as
homosexuality, abortion, marriage, affirmative action, the morality of popular
culture, and the nature of public education.[15] Prior to 9/11,
religious conservatives, such as Dr. James Dobson (founder of Focus on the
Family) and Pat Robertson (founder of The 700 Club and a Republican presidential
candidate in 1988), thought that the greatest threat to America’s identity and
place in the world was a liberal-secular elite who were writing the majority of
the country’s textbooks, running Hollywood, and dictating domestic policy from
federal courtroom benches. As the former Nixon speechwriter and three-time presidential
candidate Patrick Buchanan famously articulated in his 1992 Republican
convention speech, conservatives believed that the threat to America’s
traditional values constituted a “culture war.”[16] To be
sure, this conservative declaration of “culture war” was not an attempt to substitute a “high culture” for philistine
politics. It was not, in other words,
an attempt to protect a noble or sacred culture from the sullying effects of Realpolitk or mundane political discourse. Rather, it was an attempt
to politicize culture and, in the process, instill a particular brand of
morality-based cultural politics[17] into American political debate.
[11] In many respects, this
declaration of culture war in 1992 by Buchanan was in response to growing
anxieties among many conservatives that George H.W. Bush had failed to lead the
country toward Ronald Reagan’s messianic “city on the hill,” a vision that the
“Gipper” outlined in his farewell speech in January 1989. Although there were
those who criticized the Bush administration for its inability to influence
producers of violent and immoral forms of culture, such as gansta rap,[18] Bush had largely passed the moral challenge of Reagan’s vision based on his
leadership at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the invasion of Iraq.
However, the economic challenge of a “city on a hill” that “hummed with
commerce” was a major stumbling block for the Bush campaign heading into the
1992 presidential election. On the heels of a 1990 recession and a broken 1988
campaign pledge, “Read my lips … No new taxes,” Bush’s popularity, which was in
the 80% range in late 1991, began to plummet toward 30% by the Republican
convention in August of 1992. Already in early 1992, Reagan’s vision had
actually become a liability for the Bush re-election team, even to the point
where Bush’s critics were using Reagan’s vision as way to highlight his
deficiencies as president. With Bush vulnerable on the economy, both Bill
Clinton and Ross Perot, a populist third party candidate, ran on alternative
economic platforms. Clinton’s slogan “It’s the economy stupid” became a kind of
political mantra on the campaign trail. Having lost the economy as a campaign
issue, social conservatives began focusing on culture and traditional values as
wedge issues in the campaign. Despite a number of highly publicized missteps,
such as Dan Quayle’s decision to take on Murphy Brown and single-parent adoption,
the culture-war strategy did strike a chord with a number of voters, especially
as stories of Clinton political scandals and sexual escapades began appearing
regularly in the national media. Although the culture-war strategy ultimately
failed to elect Bush in 1992, and was virtually absent in Bob Dole’s bid to
unseat Clinton in 1996, there were Republican strategists, including Gary
Bauer, Ralph Reed, and Karl Rove, who thought the strategy could be part of a
larger plan for long-term Republican dominance in Washington.[19]
[12] As many commentators
noted after the 2000 US election, President George W. Bush’s embrace of the culture
war rhetoric was part of a concerted strategy drafted by Karl Rove, the Bush
campaign director, to galvanize the religious right, which actually failed to
turn out four million of its voters in 2000.[20] Within the first 100
days in office, President Bush introduced faith-based social welfare
initiatives, supported school prayer policies and advanced an education voucher
system, which diverted federal funds to private, religious schools, while
protecting the right of families to home-school their children. To many in the
religious right, including Dobson, Robertson, and the now-disgraced Ted
Haggard, President of the National Association of Evangelicals, these actions
demonstrated that Bush was a true religious conservative and could therefore be
trusted as the nation’s leader.
[13] In the run-up to the
2004 election, Bush pursued culture war issues even more vigorously. In
November 2003, he signed a bill banning partial birth abortions. With obvious
symbolic meaning, the signing took place in the Ronald Reagan federal building
and in the presence of noted religious conservatives such as Cardinal Egan of
New York and Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority Coalition.[21] Moreover, with his campaign kick-off just around the corner in early 2004, Bush
went against Republican conventional wisdom and proposed a constitutional
amendment to define marriage exclusively as a heterosexual union, a proposal
that had no chance of winning senate approval.[22] Yet, the message was
clear: Bush would continue to wage a domestic culture war against liberal
judges, politicians and popular personalities who promote vulgar forms of
culture, suppress religious freedom and destroy traditional institutions, such
as the family.[23]
[14]
A reliable ally in this pre-election posturing was the spectacle of Pope John
Paul II (who died in April 2005) and the Roman Catholic Church. Under Rove’s
directions, the Republican Party mounted the Catholic
Outreach Tour in the summer of 2004 to
“highlight how the Republican Party is most in line with Catholic values, and how
Catholics can get involved.” According to Tara Wall,
an Outreach spokesperson during the campaign, “We believe Catholic voters will
support Bush’s message of faith-based initiatives, family values (and) the
sanctity of human life.”[24] In retrospect, the strategy worked.
Bush increased his overall Catholic vote from 46% in 2000 to 52% in 2004. In
key states, such as Ohio and Florida, Bush gained 5% and 3%
respectively—in the case of Ohio, where he won 55% of the Catholic vote,
the increase over 2000 was large enough to give Bush the state over Kerry,
which ended up being the key state in the Bush victory.[25]
[15] Since the 2004 election,
a number of leading Democrats—including Hilary Clinton and Rahm
Emanuel—have encouraged the party to “get values.” One of the
intellectual forces behind this values push is George Lakoff, a cognitive
scientist and linguist at UC-Berkeley and the current director of the
progressive thinking tank, the Rockridge Institute. Lakoff’s basic thesis is
that progressives have, since at least the 1970s, generally failed to
understand contemporary politics as a struggle between competing worldviews. To
mobilize the electorate, Lakoff argues, progressives should frame political
issues more in terms of morality and values, as conservatives have for some
thirty years, instead of the detailed policy prescriptions that often
characterize Democratic political discourse.[26] Inspired by Lakoff’s
work, Democratic strategists have begun to encourage their candidates to speak
to the values of NASCAR dads, exurban families, and even religious
conservatives. Historically, though, the problem with such a strategy has been
that when Democrats started to use the language of “values,” the right used its
“backlash insurance”[27] and dismissed it as either vacuous
political rhetoric or veiled state-run socialism. Based on the recent book by
the Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly entitled Culture Warrior (2006), Lakoff’s proposals
will be met with similar dismissals from the political right.[28]
[16] To counter, Democrats
appear to have two primary options: The first is to mount a sustained argument
that the basic ideology behind the free market and consumer culture is
inherently biased against moral and religious values, such as solidarity, the dignity
of the human person, the common good, and economic justice. Yet, no serious
Democratic leader can do this—America’s place is the world requires an
integrated market system based on a free market mentality. The second option,
which proved fairly successful in the 2006 midterm elections, is to develop an
election strategy that forces moderate RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) and
neoconservative candidates to abandon “values voters.” The theory behind
this strategy is that centrist Democrats, with a track record of being
“pro-life” and “pro-family,” will ultimately force RINOs and neocons to break
with “values politics” in favour of “real” Republican issues, namely, tax cuts,
social security reform and trickle down economics. If the strategy works, the culture-war
wedge issues will be neutralized, thereby opening up a discussion of economic
justice, social welfare, and other issues where Democrats tend to do better
politically.[29] Of course, the danger in courting
religious conservatives, especially in key states like Ohio, Florida, Missouri,
and Pennsylvania, is that, much like Rove Republicans, moderate Democrats run
the risk of merely manipulating conservative “values voters.”
[17] Regardless of political
strategy, there remains in American consumer society an unresolved paradox
between traditional moral values and the free market.[30] Despite the claims of neoliberal economists such as Milton Friedman, who argue
the free market is simply a value-free instrument that reflects the collective
choices of consumers, the introduction of consumer-global capitalism into
developing countries has repeatedly fostered socio-political destabilization.
As Amy Chua suggests in her book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market
Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), the greatest threats
to national and social identity in the modern world have not been military
invasions, but the implementation of a free-market economy—an economy
free from local regulations, moralities, and standards.[31] This
analysis parallels that of scholars such as Karl Polanyi, the Hungarian-born
economic anthropologist and author of The Great Transformation (1944), and others who have
long noted that when a community’s identity is under threat, whether by foreign
armies or by foreign cultures, that community will likely turn to religion and
traditional values as a means of resistance.[32]
[18] So where does this leave
American voters/consumers, and especially voters/consumers who feel threatened
by terrorism and value-less liberal elites? Are they not also affected by the
market and the ideology of consumption? In a word, “yes.” To risk
oversimplification, I maintain that the “de-centering”[33] of
American society since the 1980s, which in some respects spawned the culture
wars, stems from the fact that many Americans are currently trying to resolve a
modern tension that has plagued modern societies from their inception in the
19th century. That is, how do nations that adopt the free market deal with
attempts by their religious communities, unions, and political parties to
protect their environments, working conditions and cultural identities?
[19] In the 19th and 20th
centuries, social and political theorists assumed that either a government
would promote deregulated market expansion or it would adopt protectionist
foreign and domestic policies. In all cases, it was the job of civil society
and opposition parties to counter the government in power. In practice, this
relationship among parties, civil society, and voters all but guaranteed centrist
economic, social, and political policies. Moreover, because these approaches
were viewed as polar opposites, it was virtually inconceivable that a
government could take both extreme positions at the same time.
[20]
However, these theorists were wrong.[34] Having learned from the Thatcher government
and from the Reagan administration, the George W. Bush administration
discovered a way to govern by taking both extreme positions at the same time.
That is, as a matter of political representation, the Bush administration
embodies the modern tension between the free-market mentality and
nationalistic-conservative resistance. Because it embodies both modern
movements, and because critics from left to right have largely failed to point
out the seeming contradiction of this position, the Bush administration has
found a way to consolidate political power.
[21]
On the one hand, the Bush administration has pursued an aggressive
foreign-policy agenda that seeks to open up countries such as Mexico,
Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, and even Iraq and Afghanistan to free market
democracy. This policy of free-market democracy has led to persistent
resistance in these countries as the destabilizing forces of the market have
taken hold. This resistance will mean ongoing security concerns for the US
government. On the other hand, the conservative backlash to market forces will
remain a key part of domestic politics as Americans continue to experience the
breakdown of their local communities and the unraveling of traditional values, which
are due in part to the culture-eroding forces of a globalized market economy.[35] Consequently, culture war issues are poised to become even more prominent in US
politics. In many respects, abortion, same-sex marriage, physician-assisted
suicide, and embryonic stem cell research are set to become the final battle
grounds in the war against the relativizing forces in society, usually those
labeled as “liberal.” What is lost, of course, is a clear evaluation of the
real sources of the malaise for many Americans, economic insecurity, social
dissolution, and political strife.[36]
[22]
To mobilize support, the religious right has often appealed to John Paul II, or
rather the spectacle of John Paul II, because he represented (and still
represents) “traditional values,” which is code for one side of the culture
war. What many culture-war conservatives fail to recognize, however, is that
John Paul II was an avid critic of the free market and democratic
imperialism—in other words, the Bush administration’s foreign policy. In
addition, culture-war conservatives fail to mention that, to make his case
against unbridled capitalism, John Paul often alluded to Karl Marx’s and Guy
Debord’s argument that, in modern-capitalist societies, one’s identity has
become dependent on “having” and “seeing,” and not on “being.”[37] This
representation of John Paul II, or rather this misrepresentation, sells to
voters/consumers who encounter spectacle as a fluid phenomenon, a phenomenon
whose value and truth depend on the consumer’s capacity to ascribe meaning to
it.[38] In this case, the religious right and culture-war conservatives have been able
to appropriate the commodified spectacle and brand of Pope John Paul II to
advance a political agenda with impunity because, in large part, consumers have
simply not been trained to question their/our relationship to the spectacle and
the values—or sentiments—attached to it.[39] In
this respect, conservative political leaders are protected by a collective
blindness on the part of consumers, which enables these leaders to control a
message.
Conclusion
[23] In his
review of Consuming Religion, David
Seljak, a sociologist specializing in religion in Canada, notes that the
commodification of religion has significantly contributed to social alienation,
even as consumers feel that they are part of a movement larger than themselves.
He cites three areas where this is most apparent: First, commodified consumer
religion discourages democratic participation by loosening people’s attachment
to community and by encouraging passivity. This movement tends to legitimate
centralized authority in both religious life and in politics. Second, consumer
religion restricts cultural recognition by encouraging the appropriation of
elements of other peoples’ cultures while refusing to engage them in the real
world and by adopting shallow appreciation of all culture. And third, Seljak
maintains that consumer religion deters social justice by hiding the origins of
our products, including environmental and social injustices, and by distancing
actors’ beliefs and values from their life practices.[40] Based
on what I have outlined in this article, I would add a fourth level of
alienation to Seljak’s list; namely, the commodification of religion in a
consumer society provides easily manipulated images, which can be used by
political leaders to mobilize “unsettled” and “alienated” people to vote for
what is perceived to be traditional values.[41]
[24]
Hannah Arendt, in the introduction to her book Men in Dark Times (1970), identifies a fundamental danger associated
with political leaders appealing to tradition to rally citizens behind a
political agenda. She writes,
If
it is the function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by
providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and word, for
better and worse, who they are and what they can do, then darkness has come
when this light is extinguished by a “credibility gap” and “invisible
government,” by speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the
carpet, by exhortations, moral or otherwise, that, under the pretext of
upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality.[42]
For Arendt, as
tradition begins to lose its integrated, everyday character in the lives of
people, old symbols and categories all too often become catalysts for modern
political violence and social unrest.
[25]
In this article, I have drawn a conclusion that is quite similar to Arendt’s.
That is, we live in a world of commodities, where religious symbols and
practices have been detached from their historical and cultural foundations,
and where consumers tend to value “tradition” only inasmuch as it fulfills
specific immediate desires. The fragmentation between historical-cultural
foundations and the lives of modern consumers has enabled the commodity
producers to promote religious products to consumers hungry for
self-enhancement and universal, transcendent truth. At the same time, this
process has also enabled culture-war political leaders and media personalities
to claim, without justification, traditional religious symbols as their thread
to the past and their path to the future. Since the 1990s, these culture-war
conservatives have been able to harness consumer religion in debates relating
to education, the definition of the modern family, the music and film industry,
as well as America’s “Christian” heritage. Yet, “under the pretext of
upholding old truths,” to use Arendt’s language, many of these same
conservatives advocate for an economic system that has been historically
dismissive of traditional values, except when they can be commodified and
repackaged for general consumption. Thus, instead of denouncing the
commodification of religion, culture-war conservatives actually need
commodified-consumer religion as a precondition for the political usage of
religion and traditional values in capitalist society. With the moral habits of
modern consumer religion in place, culture-war conservatives can effectively
use consumer religion as a means to consolidate political power by portraying
themselves as both guardians of traditional values and, paradoxically,
proponents of the free market.
Notes
[1] I should note that my experience with local television was not an isolated case
of a reporter eagerly segueing to the next story. On the contrary, these
stories of looming death, it would seem, were following the same unwritten
script. As Howard Kurtz, senior columnist writing on media issues for The
Washington Post, has
rightly observed, “Schiavo’s passing merged
seamlessly into the next death watch as Pope John Paul II entered the hospital,
triggering coverage so intense that a Fox News anchor, reacting to a producer’s
error, pronounced the pontiff dead more than 24 hours early.” Howard
Kurtz, “Is It to Laugh (or Cry) About? Tragedy or Farce, Either Works for TV,” The
Washington Post (5 May 2005): B2.
[2] Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a
Consumer Culture (New York: Continuum, 2003).
[3] Thanks to David Seljak,
Megan Shore, Margie Patrick, members of the North American Association for the
Study of Religion at their 2005 meeting in Philadelphia, and the anonymous
reviewers who, at various stages, offered valuable criticism of this article.
[4] Miller, Consuming Religion, 1.
[6] As an aside, Michael
Cretu, the man behind Enigma, marketed the group’s music as a New Age
alternative to institutional religion. In a press release published by Virgin
records, Cretu states, “Old rules and habits have to
be rejected and dismissed so that something new can be created.” He added,
“Contrary to the usual record company philosophy, people are open-minded and
starved for something unique. This is music that is different from any other
available at the moment. I think people have responded to that.” See the Enigma
entry in Contemporary Musicians: Profiles of the People in Music, Volume 14 (New York: Thomson Gale, 1995).
[7] For variations on this conclusion, see Miller, Consuming Religion, 81, 91, 105-106.
[8] On branding, see Naomi Klein, No Logo (Toronto: Viking Press, 2001). Citing
liner notes by Moby, who appealed to the Dalai Lama to make an argument for
veganism, Miller demonstrates that consumers of religion often project moral
actions on leaders and religious traditions that are wrong—in this case,
the error has Tibetan Buddhists being vegetarians. See Miller, Consuming
Religion,
4, 97-99. Although purely anecdotal, I should note that undergrads in my
religion and popular culture class typically respond with suspicion and contorted
facial features when I tell them Tibetan Buddhists are meat-eaters.
[9] Miller, Consuming Religion, 59; citing Guy Debord, The Society of the
Spectacle (1967; New York: Zone Books, 1994).
[10] See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2000). Among the
characteristics of what Bauman calls “liquid modernity” is the redistribution
and reallocation of modernity’s “melting powers” (6). The complexity of liquid
modernity, Bauman argues, means that individuals are now put in a position where
they must decide on their own how to make sense of the world around them, thus
profoundly changing the human condition.
[11] Lululemon has become
one of the premiere stores catering to an urban, upscale market that desires a
pure, natural, and healthy lifestyle, which Lululemon promotes primarily
through what the company calls “yoga.” Of particular interest here is
Lululemon’s “manifesto,” which is little more than a compilation of clichés
about healthy living, few of which are rooted in Buddhism. In fact, a number of
the clichés, such as the following one, are fundamentally at odds with
Buddhism’s teaching on non-attachment: “Write down
your short and long term GOALS four times a year. 2 personal, 2 business and
one health goal. A university found only 3 percent of the students had written
goals. 20 years later, the same 3 percent were wealthier than the other 97%
combined.” http://www.lululemon.com/culture/manifesto/text (accessed 3 June 2007).
[12] For an insightful
argument on the interconnection of the rhetorical usage of apocalyptic language
and the commodification of values, see Erin Runions, “Desiring
War: Apocalypse, Commodity Fetish, and the End of History,” The Bible and
Critical Theory 1 (2004) http://publications.epress.monash.edu/toc/bc/2004/1/1 (accessed 3 June 2007).
[13] By the 2004 election,
the branding of liberal and conservative had spilled over into the media as
well. The MSM (mainstream media), represented by the New York Times, came to
equate with “liberal,” while Fox and conservative-independent Internet sites,
including many conservative blogs, became code for “conservative.”
[14] For a discussion of
“cultural politics,” see Ian Angus and Sut Jhally, “Introduction,” in Sut
Jhally, ed., Cultural Politics in Contemporary America (New York: Routledge,
1989), 2.
[15] Following the work of
Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), social
conservatives tend to cite the late 1960s, and particularly 1968, as the
significant turning point in the redefining of America’s cultural values. Of
course, this conclusion is not unique to social conservatives, but generally
accepted by social historians and theorists. For example, see Todd Gitlin, The
Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993), esp. chs. 12-19.
[17] For further discussions
of what I understand as “cultural politics,” see Richard Maxell, “Why Culture
Works,” in idem, Culture Works: The Political Economy of Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 1-3. Also see David
C. Korten, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers and Bloomfield,
CT: Kumarian Press, 2006), 327-40.
[18] In the spring of 1992,
gansta rap became a political issue with the growing popularity of Ice-T’s song
“Cop Killer” and the Rodney King incidents in Los Angeles. The Bush campaign
effectively deflected criticism by blaming “liberals” for the “moral erosion”
of American values. The Clinton campaign attempted to neutralize the culture
issue by singling out Sister Souljah, a hip-hop MC, for racially provocative
statements regarding the Rodney King beating.
[19] For an extended
discussion, see Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, One Party Country: The
Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley,
2006).
[20] The issue of turnout
was a point of widespread discussion in the 2004 election. See, for example,
Dan Balz, “Electorate a Key Unknown,” Washington Post, 24 October 2004: A01.
In 2006, this story had less currency, with political debate having more to do
with the Bush administration’s Iraq policy and corruption than with values
voters.
[22] John Danforth, a
retired US senator and former US Ambassador to the UN in the George W. Bush
administration, has cited this event as one of the prime examples of
values-voter manipulation. See his book Faith and Politics: How the “Moral
Values” Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together (New York: Viking,
2006).
[23] Much of this message is
encoded in values-voter language such as “activist judges,” “cultural,
religious, and natural roots,” and “San Francisco.” See George W. Bush’s
“President Calls for Constitutional Amendment Protecting Marriage,” 24 February
2004, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/20040224-2.html (accessed 18 November 2006).
[24] Daniel Burke, “Republicans Plan Catholic Outreach Tour,” Religion New Service
(RNS), 1 July 2004.
[25] For a detailed
discussion of voter data, see the work of John C. Green, including his book The
Values Campaign: The Religious Right in American Politics (Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 2006). Green is a senior fellow in religion and US
politics with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. For Green’s early
discussion of Ohio and Catholic voters, see Steven Waldman and Green, “It
Wasn’t Just (or Even Mostly) the Religious Right,” Believe Net http://www.beliefnet.com/story/155/story_15598_1.html (accessed 18 November 2006).
[26] George Lakoff, Moral
Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 2nd ed.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Don't
Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values, Frame the Debate—The Essential
Guide for Progressives (White River
Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004); and Thinking Points: Communicating Our
American Values and Vision (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006).
[27] See Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution
and the Erosion of American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 12-13.
[28] Bill O’Reilly, Culture
Warrior (New York: Broadway Books, 2006). O’Reilly singles out Lakoff as one of the
leading “secular-progressive” (S-P) thinkers opposed to traditional moral
values.
[29] In the 2006 midterm
elections, the newly elected Democratic congressman Heath Shuler, from South
Carolina, typifies the new “values Democrat.” We should also note the role of
consumer-popular culture in Shuler’s election bid—Shuler was a
quarterback in the National Football League (NFL), playing for the Washington
Redskins.
[30] Scott Kline, “The
Culture War Gone Global: ‘Family Values’ and the Shape of US Foreign Policy,” International Relations 18 (2004): 453-66.
[31] Amy Chua, World on Fire: How: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds
Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2002).
[32] Karl Polanyi, The
Great Transformation (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1944; updated ed. 2001).
[33] See Hacker and Pierson, Off Center,
chap 1-3. Here
I am assuming that Hacker and Pierson’s thesis is correct—the US
electorate has shifted to the political right.
[34] During the late 19th century, there were governments that tried at times, with moderate success, to
embrace both liberal economics and conservative values; e.g., the William
Gladstone governments in the U.K. Thanks to Peter Erb for pointing this out to
me.
[35] Throughout the Bush
administration’s first term, Republicans remained consistently committed to
this scenario—free market expansion and maintaining traditional
values. A rift began to emerge early the in the second term as illegal
immigration from Mexico began to become a political issue. For many in the Bush
administration, an amnesty plan is a political winner because many immigrants
hold conservative social values. For other conservatives, though, the influence
of Spanish and Mexican identity threatens to erode “American” identity and
values.
[36] For an extended
discussion of polling data pm what issues concern Americans, see Stephen Hart, The
Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001).
[37] E.g., see Redemporis Hominis (1979), par. 16; Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), par. 28; and Centisimus
Annus (1991), par. 36. Miller also makes this point, Consuming Religion, 95-107.
[38] This calls to mind the now-famous essay by Harry Frankfurter, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005). As Frankfurter argues, both the liar and the
truth-teller acknowledge the truth, even if one chooses to lie. The
bullshitter, by contrast, holds no regard for the truth.
[39] Another excellent
example of consumer religion is the marketing of “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD)
paraphernalia during the late 1990s. This pop-religion trend spawned a number
of biting parodies, such as “Who Would Jesus Kill?” in response to the “war on
terror” and the US-led invasion of Iraq.
[40] David Seljak, “Religious Diversity and the Market,” The Ecumenist 42/3 (Summer 2005): 10.
[41] See Robert Nisbet, Conservatism:
Dream and Reality (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Also, see the conclusions drawn by David
Kuo, Tempting Faith: An Inside Perspective on Political Seduction (New York: Free Press,
2006).
[42] Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, 1970; 2001), preface
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