Lasn leads an organization of “culture jammers” called Adbustersin which they use advertising in an ironic manner to expose the so-called evils of corporate capitalism and the branding of America. See Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes, 396–397; Schor, The Overspent American;
Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam: The Uncooling of AmericaTM(New York: Eagle Brook, 1999).
174. Cross, An All-Consuming Century, 242.
175. Ibid., 239.
176. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011011–7.html.
177. Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes, 428. Italics added.
Chapter 4 Religious Dimensions of
Sustainable Future, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994); Cobb, Jr., Sustaining the Common Good; Sallie McFague, Life Abundant:
Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril(Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2001); M. Douglas Meeks, God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989); and Mark Kline Taylor, Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural–Political Theology for North American Praxis(Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1990).
16. Tanner, Theories of Culture, 87.
17. John Macquarrie, Mediators between Human and Divine: From Moses to Muhammad(New York: Continuum, 1996).
18. Ibid., 11.
19. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, 121.
20. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 2 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), 93.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 169.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. One might assert this as a capitalist atonement theory.
27. Paul Tillich, “Aspects of a Religious Analysis of Culture,” in Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 46.
28. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 3 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), 189.
29. In the tradition of Durkheim, sociologist Peter Berger also recognizes this cultural phenomenon.
30. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 3, 189.
31. Baudrillard calls this the “presumption of collectivity.” This is a con- sumption process whereby the individual believes that he or she is buy- ing a product that will differentiate oneself from other people, but, in fact, everyone is purchasing the same product. The purchase is actually a “regressive identification with a vague collective totality, and hence an internalization of the sanction of the social group.” Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 178, 179–180. See also Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 272.
32. McFague, Life Abundant, 93.
33. Ibid., 96.
34. Ibid. According to an article in The New Yorker, the United States spent
“more than five hundred billion dollars” on advertising in 2004, “half the world-wide total.” Auletta, “The New Pitch,” 34.
35. McFague, Life Abundant, 97.
36. Meeks, God the Economist, 158–162.
37. Ibid., 160.
38. Meeks lists three concepts of God that support human desires as coded into needs: “Divine aseity and the liberty of the independent human being, divine sovereignty and needs as necessity, divine infinity and human insatiability.” Ibid., 162–170.
39. Ibid., 158.
40. Ibid.
41. Harvard economist Juliet Schor does an extensive study of the confla- tion of needs with desires in the Unites States and how some people are choosing to “downsize” in response to the “tyranny of the Joneses.” See The Overspent American.
42. Meeks, God the Economist, 161. See also Cobb, Sustaining the Common Good, 33.
43. Meeks, God the Economist, 161.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 162.
46. Ibid., 168.
47. Cobb, Sustaining the Common Good, 56–57.
48. Meeks, God the Economist, 169.
49. Franz J. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death: A Theological Critique of Capitalism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), 15, as quoted in Meeks, God the Economist, 169, italics added.
50. See chapter 2.
51. See my analysis of the American Thanksgiving shopping ritual in chap- ter 3.
52. Italics added.
53. Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 173.
54. Meeks, God the Economist, 173.
55. Ibid., 172.
56. Kavanaugh, Following Christ in a Consumer Society, 26, as quoted in Meeks, God the Economist, 170.
57. McFague, Life Abundant, 97.
58. Ibid., 94.
59. Ibid., 95.
60. Meeks, God the Economist, 170–171.
61. Ibid., 171.
62. Ibid.
Notes to Pages 108-113 171
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., 172.
65. Cobb, Postmodernism and Public Policy, 103.
66. McFague, Life Abundant, 97.
67. Meeks, God the Economist, 174.
68. Ibid., 177.
69. Ibid., 180.
70. Ibid., 173.
71. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 133.
72. In no way is this argument meant to diminish or trivialize the faith of Christians and their understanding of the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper.
My argument is that advertising contains religious dimensions, and one of these dimensions is a form of sacramentality akin to the Christian understanding of sacrament. In the culture of consumer capitalism, things have become sacred, and do tend to have a type of religious sym- bol since the ultimate concern of our society is the maintenance of mar- ket capitalism.
73. Mark C. Taylor, About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5, italics added.
74. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class(New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 25–26.
75. Ibid., 29.
76. McDannell, Material Christianity, 19.
77. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 3, 120. See also his lecture “Nature and Sacrament,” in Taylor, Paul Tillich, 82–95.
78. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 3, 120.
79. Ibid, 125.
80. Ibid., 122.
81. Ibid., 124.
82. McFague, Life Abundant, 99–123.
83. Taylor, Remembering Esperanza, 234–235.
84. McFague, Life Abundant, 173.
85. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography(San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 73–74 as quoted in McFague, Life Abundant, 175.
86. McFague, Life Abundant, 174.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid., 175.
89. Ibid., 174.
90. Mark McClain Taylor, “Tracking Spirit: Theology as Cultural Critique in the Americas,” in Changing Conversations: Religious Reflection and
Cultural Analysis, ed. Sheila Greeve Davaney and Dwight N. Hopkins (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 135.
91. Ibid., 134.
92. Taylor, Remembering Esperanza, 233. Also see chapter 3 concerning the difference between the material and materialism.
93. Ibid., 234.
94. Ibid., 238.
95. Ibid., 240.
96. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 3, 349.
97. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, 211.
98. “Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” ’ ”The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
99. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, 12, italics in original.
100. Ibid., 1, 14, italics in original.
101. Although he does add later that “God is . . . the name for that which concerns man ultimately.” Ibid., 211.
102. Ibid., 14.
103. Ibid., 50.
104. Ibid., 48.
105. Ibid., 211.
106. Ibid., 215.
107. Ibid., 216. This argument may also be applied to advertising as sacra- mentality.
108. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 2, 116.
109. Ibid.
110. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 3, 130.
111. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 2.
112. Ibid.
113. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, 218.
114. Tillich, “Aspects of a Religious Analysis of Culture,” 41.
115. Ibid.
116. Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, 217–218. Tillich seems to collapse the two categories of holy and secular in much the same way as Durkheim envelopes the sacred and profane. Tillich’s binary does not seem to be a true one of parity. However, he does, unlike Durkheim, recognize that religion or the holy contains things that are also secular. See chapter 2, Poggi’s critique.
117. Ibid., 221.
118. Ibid.
119. Ibid.
Notes to Pages 123-127 173
120. Ibid., 273.
121. Tillich, “Aspects of a Religious Analysis of Culture,” 42.
122. See also Paul Tillich, “Religon and Secular Culture,” in Taylor, Paul Tillich, 119–126.
123. Cobb, Sustaining the Common Good, 49.
124. Ibid., 49.
125. Ibid., 28.
126. Ibid., 46.
127. Mark Lewis Taylor, e-mail correspondence, March 11, 2005.
128. Although Cobb does believe that earthism is the best alternative to the ideology of growth, as a Christian theologian he cannot give full sup- port to this theory since he does not believe that the earth is God.
Cobb, Sustaining the Common Good, 40.
129. Ibid., 61.
130. Ibid., 67.
131. For an insightful critique of Nike’s unfair labor practices see Cynthia Enloe, “The Globetrotting Sneaker,” in Ms., March/April 1995, 10–15.
132. Cobb, Sustaining the Common Good, xii, 44.
133. Ibid., 65.
134. Ibid., 130–131.