"Lord, how they've changed things in our 'parlors' these days. Christ is one of the 'family' now. I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He's a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn't making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshiper absolutely needs."
--Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
At the Revealer, an excerpt from Jeff Sharlet's new book The Family on 73 years of commodified faith. (Also: a longer excerpt from the same chapter at Counterpunch).
"Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, and the business-friendly fundamentalism of the post-Christian Right era don’t set off liberal alarms the way the pulpit pounders such as John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson do. The irony is that the agenda of this new lifestyle evangelicalism is more far-reaching than that of the traditional Christian Right: the Christian Right wanted a seat at the table; lifestyle evangelicalism wants to build the table. It wants to set the very terms in which we imagine what’s possible, and to that end it dispenses with terms that might scare off liberals. It’s big tent fundamentalism -- everybody in.
"But the ultimate goals remain the same. True, Osteen steers clear of abortion for the most part, and Warren, every bit as opposed to homosexuality as Jerry Falwell was, prefers to talk about AIDS relief. But both men -- and the new evangelicalism as a movement -- continue to preach the merger of Christianity and capitalism pioneered three quarters of a century ago. On the surface, it’s self-help; scratch, and it’s revealed as a profoundly conservative ideology that conflates church and state, scripture and currency, faith and finance."
Is religion-as-product-- or, worse, product tie-in-- a precursor of dystopia, or am I just being hyperbolic in putting these two quotes in the same post? Admittedly-- yes, I am, and the last two paragraphs of Sharlet's excerpt hope to lay such fears to rest, at least a little. But I think the extent to which American Christianity has become a commodity is a big, big problem, a stale cake on which militarism is just the frosting. Read and discuss.
Ray happens to be a dear friend of mine. If you email my private address, I'll send you a photo of Ray and me together at his home just recently. RW
Posted by: Rick Warren | June 26, 2008 at 05:47 PM