This article originally appeared at the Center for Faith and Culture.
We hear the standard diagnosis, and it goes something like this: Americans spend too much, they save too little, and they love their stuff more than they love God. The remedy, so we’re told, is better financial training—sermons on contentment, stewardship campaigns, maybe a Dave Ramsey Financial Peace course on Wednesday nights. If we’ll just give people the right information, and the right motivation, then better habits will surely follow. Right?
Not if the diagnosis is wrong. If it is wrong, then these remedies won’t work.
Consumerism, at its core, is not a spending problem. It is not a moral lapse that simply requires better teaching to correct. It is a comprehensive formation system, with its own vision of the human person, its own account of desire, its own path toward satisfaction, its own rituals, its own liturgy, and its own hope. Consumerism is a worship system.
The market is discipling our congregations every day of the week, with extraordinary consistency and creativity
James K. A. Smith has argued that human beings are not primarily thinking creatures who happen to have desires, but are desiring creatures who are shaped by what we repeatedly attend to and practice.[1] Habits and rituals don’t just express who we are; they form who we are. Worship is not merely the activities we engage in on Sunday morning, it is whatever practice most consistently orients our desires toward a vision of the good life.
The shopping mall, as Smith observes, is a cathedral—with its own architecture of aspiration, its own seasonal rhythms, its own promise of transformation through acquisition.[2] The advertisement is a kind of sermon, preaching a particular anthropology: you are defined by your desires, your desires can be satisfied, and satisfaction is always only one more purchase away. The credit card is a sacrament of that promise.
And if the mall is a cathedral, we now carry the Vatican in our pocket. Every push notification from Amazon, every algorithmically curated scroll through Facebook marketplace or the TikTok shop, every one-click purchase is the liturgy made frictionless and inescapable. The formation that once required an intentional outing to the mall now happens continuously—on the couch, in the bed, at our desk, and in the moments in between that once belonged to silence, solitude, and prayer. The market no longer waits for us to come. It follows us home.
This is not mere hyperbole. It is a sober description of what consumerism actually does to people over time, through repeated practice, most often below the level of conscious choice.
What makes this particularly devastating for the church is that consumerism doesn’t primarily produce atheists; it produces people who relate to all beliefs and practices, including religious ones, as consumable commodities. The congregant who shops for a church that meets their felt needs, who treats theological convictions as a personal buffet, who exits when the worship style changes or the teaching gets uncomfortable—that person has not rejected Christianity. They have consumed it.
This is the category error that makes standard responses so inadequate. Stewardship campaigns assume that the problem is what people do with their money. The deeper problem is what the market has done to their spiritual formation. You cannot address a formation problem with an information solution.
We are not the first generation to face this issue. John Wesley watched the same dynamic unfold among early Methodists. His fear was not that prosperity would make them immoral. It was that it would make them comfortable; that the slow accumulation of security would extinguish the spiritual vitality he had watched God kindle.[3]
John Chrysostom, preaching in fourth-century Antioch to a prosperous congregation, argued that wealth didn’t just tempt people, but that it reshaped their perception, slowly eroding the capacity to see the poor as fully human.[4] This was not a moral accusation but a diagnostic one. Affluence, Chrysostom observed, forms a kind of practical blindness through its associated habits.
The solution is not a better curriculum. It is the recovery of practices that are non-consumable by nature; practices that resist being turned into products because they require submission and loss rather than satisfaction and gain.
We need strong covenant membership, rather than the low-commitment attendance that lets people easily exist without accountability. The Lord’s Supper, which proclaims that the deepest human hunger is met by gift, not purchase, acts as a direct counter to the market’s promise of self-satisfied acquisition. Confession between one another, and prayers for one another, forces an honest reckoning with disordered desire. Fasting, which is a bodily practice of saying no to appetite, trains the whole person. We need genuine economic sharing with the poor, not charity from a comfortable distance, but the kind of material solidarity that imbues the bonds of the community with real meaning.
These are not programs. They are the ordinary, regular practices of a church that takes seriously its identity as a biblical community, not merely a religious service provider.
The market is discipling our congregations every day of the week, with extraordinary consistency and creativity. The question every pastor must answer is not whether their people need a budget class, but whether the church’s formative practices are prepared to compete for their hearts, minds, and affections.
