by John Ellis
Over the last two months I’ve been working on a larger project – a series of six articles – that delves into the question, “is white evangelicalism a false religion?”. I’m coming to the end of the research phase and have already done quite a bit of writing on the first three articles in the series (the first article is almost finished).[1] Four recent conversations, though, have prompted me to want to share some initial thoughts prior to publishing the series. I believe this topic/question is important and I’m eager to open the conversation wider as soon as possible. So, with this article for now, my goal is to interact briefly with how consumerism has enveloped all of us, white evangelical or otherwise, but specifically within faith communities that fall under the tag of white evangelicalism. In doing so, I think, I’m preparing the ground for some hard things I say in my upcoming series.
This morning, during one of the aforementioned conversations, a friend and I discussed the ramifications of the historical truth that during the first three decades of the 20th century, according to historian Wendy Wall, “The advent of mass production, consumer credit, and advertising produced in the U.S. the world’s first mass consumer economy.”[2] More importantly, we discussed that reality’s impact on faith in this country and white evangelicalism more specifically.
I don’t believe it’s controversial to assert that consumerism is a, if not even the, dominant ideology in American culture. What’s likely controversial, or more likely unsettling, is the claim that all of us, me included, are held in consumerism’s vise grip. If that’s true, and I believe it is, a follow up assertion becomes that consumerism has white evangelicalism in a vise grip, too. Without hard deconstructive – or deculturation – work, both our individual and collective expressions of faith, internal and external, will be filtered, to varying degrees, through the prism of consumerism. But that deconstructive work cannot even begin to happen until we recognize how axiomatic it should be to claim that I – you – am/are controlled by consumerism. To help unpack that, I turn to the three other conversations I mentioned.
The first one took place between me, my wife, and a good friend of ours. During our conversation I mentioned a prayer request that had been shared in a group setting a few weeks earlier. I want to be careful here, especially in case the person who shared the request reads this: I’m not necessarily criticizing the request nor the person who made the request. I understand why the request was made, both from a heart and praxis level, and I commend this person’s desire to share communally while seeking the Holy Spirit’s work via prayer. But I do believe that it illustrates what I’m charging all of us – me included – with.
This person mentioned a hard thing regarding one of their kids. The statement was then made, slightly edited by me to help keep this vague, “I told my child that our identity is not determined by our friends.” From my vantage point it appeared that most of the group agreed with that statement. For my part, I silently thought, “But that’s not true. Our identity is very much shaped by our friends.” And that, I believe, is a counter-intuitive thought for most Americans, including white evangelicals.
After relating that to my wife and our friend, I added that that belief is rooted in the Cartesian Cogito – the I of expressive individualism. It’s a form of soft solipsism; the belief that I am self-determining/defining.[3] But we’re not. We’re defined by our relationship with, and I believe in this order, God, others (and there’s a hierarchy here, of course – my relationship with my kids plays a greater determinative role in who I am than my relationship with my electrician, for example), and nature. I pointed my wife and friend to two related articles that I’ve written (you can read those by clicking here and here). The first article is more directly related to my point and the second, while less directly related, fleshes out more of the philosophy, I believe.
The next day, after reading the two articles, my friend emailed me this:
Curiosity question: do you hold to an actual, historical Adam and Eve, and if so, was Adam fully human prior to Eve? Was he solipsist? Or was it his relationship with God that helped define him in this way?
In reading these [articles], I kept thinking that there are absolutely things that are dependent upon another for the full expression (any relational definition), but is it also possible that there are inherent definitions that are inherent, or would you say it is just a definition of scale?
Say for instance: a child raised in the wild without human interaction. Is he inherently human, a son, a survivor, (add any other definitions here) despite the lack of interactions and relationships with others OR is he just a “bad human” because he does not display the positives and growth that comes with relationships? Is it spectrum or binary?
Here’s the response I emailed back:
I do believe in a historic Adam and Eve. As far as a lot of the particulars, I’m not sure and don’t think we (at least this side of the eschaton) can ever know. For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that the young earth creationists’ story is correct (which, to be clear, I don’t). Even then, *we don’t know how long a time period passed between the creation of Adam and the creation of Eve. But let’s assume it was a significant period of time. During that time, Adam communed with God and had relationships with the environment around him. Regardless, he was fully human (the feral human discussion below). If I said or implied otherwise, I misspoke. Our relationships aren’t what make us human; our relationships make us who we are as humans – as a human. So, what makes us human (or an image bearer)? The only answer I’ve found that holds up under scrutiny is that our vocation as God’s sons and daughters (our vocation to reflect who He is) is what makes us image bearers. Is that the extent of it? I don’t know and don’t really care. Ultimately the ethics of image bearing are the only things that seem to be within our conceptual paygrade. Like I’ve mentioned to you, I don’t treat others with love and dignity because they’re made in the image of God; I do so because I’m an image bearer and because of that I have a duty – a vocation, if you will – before God to treat them with love and dignity. Maybe it (image bearing) is more than that; I don’t know. But I do know that for the ethic to be lived and worked out, more isn’t necessary.
I’ve been fascinated with the relationship between feral humans (I’m not sure if the word feral is politically correct anymore) and language after I watched the Jodie Foster movie Nell when I was in my twenties, which was way before I began studying linguistics and semiotics. I’ve always wondered what language feral humans think in. We know that language is somehow innate to the human experience (and many animals). We don’t have to be taught to assign signs to the things signified. We don’t even really have to be taught which signs go with which signified thing in our social context. As a general rule, parents don’t sit kids down and teach them how to speak English, or whatever language their culture uses. Reading and writing are different, though. We have to be formally taught those skills. So, what signs do feral people have for the things signified in their world. What language do they think in or dream in? Whatever it is, and they do have a semiotic, it’s something. And it’s something that connects them to reality outside of themselves. And that “outside” shapes who they are. We can talk about aspects of flourishing, as in, are they really flourishing/experiencing their humanity fully? Even though in many contexts (I don’t think necessarily in regards to feral humans – that discussion is an outlier), those discussions are the outworkings of a type of hierarchical colonialism.
Solipsism is ultimately a lie. To be clear, I don’t think anyone can achieve solipsism. But many of the prevailing ontologies and epistemologies, especially in conservative America, steer us into the lie that we are self-defining, that we are an autonomous individual. That creates further epistemological problems and hinders us from living out Kingdom ethics (it also helps create bad theologies, I think).
I realize that there are many potential conversation pathways extending from my friend’s questions and my answers. To help keep this article narrowly focused, I want to draw attention to my belief that “many of the prevailing ontologies and epistemologies, especially in conservative America, steer us into the lie that we are self-defining.”
Our collective embrace of the Cartesian cogito – the I of expressive individualism – is produced and sustained by the mechanisms of consumerism, including, if not especially, marketing. I’m going to use myself as an example to help illustrate this.
If my friends and acquaintances were to be polled about my sartorial choices, a few things would dominate the answers. I’m sure at least some of you are saying them in your head as you read this: black Dr. Martens boots, rock band t-shirts, and a baseball cap worn backwards are three things that I believe would be towards the top of the items listed. So, why do I wear those things?
Many of you know my story about how I grew up in a super-strict fundamentalist Christian family. My dad was an IFB pastor and my mom a Christian school teacher. I, on the other hand, didn’t believe in God as a kid and desperately wanted to communicate that to whomever was watching. I wanted to make clear who I believed I was, and I thought that clothes were the best way to demonstrate my self-definition. By the end of high school, but especially as I entered my twenties and had complete “freedom” to choose what I wore and how I presented myself, I grew my hair long, got my ear pierced, wore black Dr. Martens boots, etc. At the time, I believed that I was expressing my individualism, that I was choosing how to represent myself. I now realize that every clothing choice I made was a product of marketing, as MC Lars’ witty song “Hot Topic Is Not Punk Rock” makes clear. I was being told how and where to spend my money under the guise of individualism. MTV and their advertisers did their job well.
Taking this a step further, my relationships, even with my desired negation of them, played large determinative roles in who I was becoming in ways that allowed MTV to then tell me what I was supposed to look like and how I was supposed to dress. And I don’t care how you identify yourself and how you communicate that identity via what you wear and how you present yourself, you too are a product of relationships that in turn feed marketing loops in your life. Furthermore, the belief that we are self-defining individuals is vital for the system to work; marketing/consumerism needs us to first buy that lie before we are willing to open our wallet at the Structure store inside Pensacola’s Cordova Mall[4] and plop down money for clothes we don’t need and could get for much cheaper if what they expressed wasn’t the more important variable in the decision.[5] And this brings me to the third conversation.
Another friend recently asked me if I had read Wendell Berry and what my thoughts were if I had. I laughed and replied, “To be fair to Wendell Berry, by the time I read him I had already become annoyed by his fans.” I then admitted that I need to read him again with a less cynical perspective than when I first read him over a decade ago. My friend, while a Wendell Berry fan, knew exactly what I meant. This is why our conversation pivoted to how annoying it is when people valorize their consumer choices.
Look, raise chicken in your back yard, make your own soap, buy local, eat organic, eschew TV and plastic toys, do whatever you want (obviously not whatever, but you get my point). My concern here isn’t with other people’s consumer choices; it’s with how some people have swallowed the marketing lie that their consumer choices mean that they’ve transcended consumerism. A quick, short definition of consumerism is the defining of my identity by my consumer choices. That’s the sad irony of much of what used to be called the crunchy movement.
In 2026, raising chickens in your yard, making your own soap, buying local, and eating organic requires access to specific markets that many Americans can’t access to because they lack the socio-economic privileges to do so. Marketers have created the identity of the anti-consumerist in order to create new markets for corporations to profit from.[6] It’s not surprising that one of the pioneers of modern marketing, Edward Bernays, was Freud’s nephew and relied heavily on psychology to develop the field.
And this brings me to the fourth and final conversation (not chronologically).
Sunday morning, before heading to church, I asked my son, “Do you know that today is the least Eastery of all Sundays?” Since Sunday was Easter, that puzzled him.
“Technically every Sunday is Easter,” I continued. “We gather corporately on Sundays instead of Saturdays to celebrate the Resurrection.”
I explained that for many people today – Easter Sunday – is less about the Resurrection and more about the many other things associated with the day: dressing up, garish hats on women, family gatherings, flowers, egg hunts, lunch, and even the act of going to church. The Resurrection is in the mix, to be sure, but it’s simply one of many identities tagged to the holiday. And this is a microcosm of how our consumerism effects our relationship with God, faith, and church at large.
Christianity is an identity tag among many tags for us. It may even be the most important tag to someone most of the time. The fact remains, though, that our consumer culture causes us to view our faith through an expressive individualistic lens. Our identity isn’t in Christ; our identity includes Christ. And even that aspect of our identity is often controlled by outside narratives that have little to do with faith and more to do with how we want to define ourselves within certain contexts that we’ve been sold.
Reaching the point where our faith – our identity in Christ – is the singular controlling aspect of who we are demands a leap of faith that eschews our consumer culture. Letting go of our expressive individualism is a release of control that demands embracing dependence and the realization that we are not self-defining. It’s a faith identity that can only – in most (normative) circumstances – be worked out and expressed communally through the power of the Holy Spirit, recognizing that who I am is defined by others. Even beyond being defined by others, our faith should be one that subsumes our individual pursuits to the communal pursuit of Kingdom building (loving God and loving our neighbor). And those are hard things to do because almost everything about our society/culture screams at us otherwise. To even begin moving in this direction requires the acknowledgment that my faith – your faith – is imbued with the syncretism of consumerism. Unfortunately, white evangelicalism is one of the worst purveyors of this syncretism; it’s built on it. …. To be continued ….
[1] I’m waiting for one final collection of Billy Graham sermons to be delivered (and read) before I can put a bow on the research phase.
[2] Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the ‘American Way’: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 18.
[3] Without getting into the weeds on this, Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” is not technically solipsism but it’s difficult to get to solipsism without it.
[4] I don’t know if it’s still there, but I still vividly remember where it was (still is?).
[5] One day I’m going to write an article about how the modern stay-at-home mom is the quintessential postmodern identity.
[6] I suspect that out of all the things I say, this will be the thing that prompts the most resistance. Identifying as an anti-consumerist is very important to those who identity as such.
Practically Known Theology 