In light of this year’s ‘Black Friday,’ when some stores opened at midnight, others were the site of violent grabs for cheap bath towels, and one woman injured 20 individuals with pepper spray to get a gaming console, it would be difficult to argue America does not have a consumerism problem. Some, such as the Occupy Wall Street folks, might say this issue comes from a “greedy” capitalist system and could be solved by more government control of corporations. But the problem of excessive consumerism is deeply personal, and cannot be solved politically, according to Metropolitan Jonah, Archbishop of Washington and Metropolitan of All America and Canada for the Orthodox Church in America.
In a recent talk at the American Enterprise Institute, the Metropolitan discussed the challenges Christians face in a consumerist society. He explained “the real cultural battle is not against consumerism or capitalism, it’s against secularism,” which leads us to live by “values economically determined.” “Consumerism is perhaps the most powerful tool of secularism,” because it results in the “reduction of the human person to an object: a buyer and consumer,” the Metropolitan said. Relationships and community are increasingly defined “as wanting the same stuff,” as the cult-like following of Apple illustrates. Buying iPods, iPhones, and iPads is often “about buying into a community,” and this generation “treats each other as if they were actually iPods …we want our friends to look like people in commercials.”
Metropolitan Jonah warned, “if we focus all of our values on material accumulation … poverty terrifies us.” The Metropolitan continued, “I’m not talking about government programs. I’m talking about how do we see others, how do we see ourselves.” Instead of “determining our success as human beings by how much we own,” we should live by “the spiritual values that come from faith,” those that find “infinite value in each person and motivate us to a whole different way of living our lives.”
“Do we let those spiritual values define our lives?” Met. Jonah asked, and stressed this question is of utmost importance because “if we lose everything, according to one set of values, we’re a worthless piece of trash to be thrown away.” “In a society that determines a person’s value by how much they earn, [poverty] is a tragedy because there is despair. And the last thing our country needs is to have despair,” he said. By instituting a set of material values to live by, secularism and consumerism have made us “incapable of loving others because we don’t know the love of God,” he said. This is a deep problem, exacerbated by how “we are perpetually trying to define ourselves instead of going deeper and finding identity in God.” Worse, the Metropolitan lamented, “we use those we love in the project of defining ourselves.”
Solving the despair of secularism and consumerism requires “a personal change,” the Metropolitan explained, “I don’t think we can do this as a political movement, I don’t see it as political. It’s way too personal, and yet it has a major social impact.” What matters, he said, is “how we answer these questions: what do we do about the unemployed, what do we do about the poor, what do we do about the disenfranchised. What do we do with the vast numbers of uneducated and unemployed people in our society … How we answer those questions is going to differ tremendously if we are oriented toward looking at our population in terms solely of economic production, or whether we see them as each person as a valuable individual who simply by their existence … is of infinite value to the whole community.” Viewing society through a spiritual and compassionate lens will “create a whole different approach. With the former approach, legalize abortion. With the latter approach, it’s unthinkable,” he said.
Because the isolation and despair is ultimately about relationships and community, Met. Jonah said to solve it, “we have to think about the family … we have to recover the family.” The family is “a fundamental social institution that supports authentic person-hood,” but “the last 50 or 60 years have been an unequivocally absolute disaster for the family in America.” The Metropolitan told how American families have “gone from the multi-generational family living in a small region, to the nuclear family, to the autonomous individual.”
Met. Jonah encouraged attendees to use the Christmas season as a time to be charitable to loved ones and strangers, and most of all to reflect on “what is our life and where are we going?” Perhaps ‘Black Fridays’ of the future would be less hazardous if Americans took the Metropolitan’s advice to heart.
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