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I belong to the Cult of the Next Thing. It's dangerously easy to get enlisted. It happens by default—not by choosing the cult, but by failing to resist it. The Cult of the Next Thing is consumerism cast in religious terms. It has its own litany of sacred words: more, you deserve it, new, faster, cleaner, brighter. It has its own deep-rooted liturgy: charge it, instant credit, no down-payment, deferred payment, no interest for three months. It has its own preachers, evangelists, prophets, and apostles: ad men, pitchmen, celebrity sponsors. It has, of course, its own shrines, chapels, temples, meccas: malls, superstores, club warehouses. It has its own sacraments: credit and debit cards. It has its own ecstatic experiences: the spending spree.

Most of us spend more time with advertisements than with Scripture.

The Cult of the Next Thing's central message proclaims, "Crave and spend, for the Kingdom of Stuff is here." Sanctification is measured by never saving enough: for the cult teaches that our lives are measured by the abundance of our possessions. Those caught up in the Cult of the Next Thing live endlessly, relentlessly for, well, the Next Thing—the next weekend, the next vacation, the next purchase, the next experience. For us, the impulse to seek the Next Thing is an instinct bred into us so young it seems genetic. It's our paradigm, our way of seeing. It's our unifying Myth. How could the world be otherwise?

For Christians, this is a problem. The problem is ethical, spiritual, theological. And, of course, practical. The one time Jesus got violent was when the temple had been made into a marketplace. Jesus brooked a lot of things with uncanny calmness—demoniacs yelling at him, religious leaders plotting against him, thick-headed, slow-hearted disciples bossing him. But moneychangers and holy-trinket sellers put a wildness in him. And lest we miss the object lesson, Jesus puts his opposition to the Cult of the Next Thing in plain speech:

No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. … So don't worry about having enough food or drink or clothing. Why be like the pagans who are so deeply concerned about these things? Your heavenly Father already knows all your needs (Matt. 6:24, 31–32, NLT).

Paul, too, had a thing or two to say about the cult:

People who long to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many foolish and harmful desires that plunge them into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is at the root of all kinds of evil. And some people, craving money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows (1 Tim. 6:9–10).

We know all this, but simply knowing it doesn't usually help. The cult is big, powerful, well organized, flawlessly run. It is so dominating it can usurp almost any impulse—even the impulse toward simplicity: You can package it, market it, and make a profit off of it. It renders even its enemies into minions, turns even protests against it into pithy slogans. Recently, a whole range of ads—from cars to clothes to CD players—have traded on a growing resentment against commercialism. Forty-thousand-dollar sports utility vehicles are touted as the magic means of escaping the artificiality of a world locked into work and shopping. These ads are put together without any hint of irony.

No satisfaction
I am writing this on a computer I bought a little over a year ago. Then, it was one of the most powerful and advanced machines available to the ordinary consumer. Now, a year and some months later, it is, by industry standards, sluggish and clumsy, unable to handle the latest innovation in software.

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September 6 1999, Vol. 43, No. 10