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Not the Americans. They debated over 20 minutes, then an hour. Some wanted a rock song; others suggested a series of country songs. At last they settled on the Coca-Cola jingle "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing." The tune ringing in his ears, Lendol realized that commercial culture was what really bound these Americans-these American Christians- together.

It is not just consumerism in its most undisguised, hackneyed manifestations that should concern us, but consumerism as an ethos, a character-cultivating way of life that seduces and insinuates and acclimates. This, too often, is consumption that militates against the Christian virtues of patience, contentedness, self-denial, and generosity-almost always with a velvet glove rather than an iron fist. It speaks in sweet and sexy rather than dictatorial tones, and it conquers by promises rather than by threats.

That is what envelops us, as surely as the air we breathe. But not as naturally as the air. Consumerism and the capitalism that created and has sustained it is not a force of nature. It has a history. Of course it cannot, and should not, be reshaped overnight. It did not itself appear overnight, but instead over the course of centuries. Yet the fact that it cannot be changed wholesale immediately is no excuse (at least not for Christians) for failing to engage it critically, understanding it as best we can, and resisting its ill effects wherever and as vigorously as we can. People can make history and change the course of cultures, though not within circumstances of their own choosing. Consumer capitalism, both for good and for ill, is a pervasive and foundational reality of our day, yet people can significantly respond to it and potentially change its course.

I. When Capitalism Was Unthinkable
Several essential features of today's capitalism were either unimaginable or positively condemned throughout most of Christian history. We no longer question the legitimacy of making money with money. But throughout church history, up through the Reformation, the charging of interest was proscribed. In earlier eras, the church would have regarded stock market speculation as nothing more than profligate gambling. We suffer no crisis of conscience, nor even a second thought, about consuming goods or experiences solely for relaxation and amusement. Yet Puritans and our Christian forebears of other strains understood consumption principally for pleasure as sinful indulgence.

We presume the obvious rightness-as long as it is done legally-of making a profit, and indeed, maximizing that profit. It did not so easily make sense to the church fathers. "Business is in itself an evil," Augustine flatly declared. And Jerome suspected, "A man who is a merchant can seldom if ever please God." At the end of the first century, the author of the Didache would not have gone in for building a mutual fund portfolio: "Never turn away the needy; share all your possessions with your brother, and do not claim that anything is your own. If you and he are joint participators in things immortal, how much more so in things that are mortal?" In the second century, The Shepherd of Hermas counseled directly against investment and the accumulation of profit, arguing that Christians are aliens to this world and have no call to amass worldly wealth. "Instead of fields, then, buy souls that are in trouble. … Look after widows and orphans and do not neglect them. Spend your riches and all your establishments you have received from God on this kind of field and houses!"

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October 7 1996, Vol. 40, No. 11