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Christianity Today, September (Web-only), 2008 |

Consuming Faith

Tyler Wigg Stevenson says real Christianity isn't the kind you can buy.

Review by Read Mercer Schuchardt | posted 9/26/2008 11:17AM

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Stevenson admits that his is "a dour diagnosis, but the situation strikes me as being that grim."

"Telling American churchgoers to shun Brand Jesus in their churches is like telling swimmers not to get wet. The way that we have set up discipleship of the living Lord as a consumer identity is itself the problem" (emphasis added).

Stevenson's solution to Brand Jesus is where his book veers away from all the others on the same theme. Likening Brand Jesus to a demon, Stevenson declares that there are no easy answers, and urges a faithful remnant of the church to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice. His prescription is the same one Christ gives his disciples in Mark 9:29: Fast and pray. Fasting and praying is not a solution, but rather something done in order to find a solution.

Stevenson's book confirms that this de-Christianization is now all but complete in American culture. Hopefully a remnant will read Stevenson's book, take a break from eating, and start praying.

Read Mercer Schuchardt is Assistant Professor of Communication at Wheaton College.

Related Elsewhere:

Brand Jesus: Christianity in a Consumerist Age is available from Amazon.com and other retailers.

HomileticsOnline interviewed Stevenson about Brand Jesus.

More reviews are in our books section.

CT's earlier articles on consumerism include:

Why the Devil takes VISA | A Christian response to the triumph of consumerism. (October 7, 2006)

Consuming Passions | One man's testimony from the First Great Mammon Awakening. (July 9, 2001)

Christmas Unplugged | Why spending less and turning off TV should be part of the church's mission to the world. (Dec. 9, 1996)

The Bobo Future | "Bourgeois bohemians" wield inordinate power over how we think about consumerism, morality—and faith itself. (July 25, 2000)

Trapped in the Cult of the Next Thing | If ever there was a cult that gave us stones when we asked for bread, this is it. (Sept. 6, 1999)

Keeping Up with the Amish | We evangelicals have made a too-easy peace with the inroads of consumer culture. (Oct. 4, 1999)

Shopping for the Real Me | Why nothing ever quite fits right. (Nov. 15, 1999)

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September (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52

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Tim	Posted: October 08, 2008 4:33 PM


Wigg-Stevenson's book gives us the reason why the Christian bookstore is neither Christian nor bookstore. The industry has sold its soul to the gods of materialism. There is a special place in the hereafter for the religious robber barons. May their tribe decrease.

Mark	Posted: October 06, 2008 3:48 PM

As long as I can remember, commercialism, t-shirt piety and bumper-sticker evangelicalism have been contrasted with the means of grace, the mission, the doctrine and the diaconate of churchly orthopraxy. But that's not what I perceive being offered here. Here I sense another attempt to swing the direction of error from one low Christology to another, from Jesus in a business-suit to Jesus the activist, from flippant consumerism to guilt-ridden liberationism, from one worldly way to another.

Ephrem Hagos

Posted: September 27, 2008 2:33 AM

The antidote for the nominal and heavily commercialized Christianity we have is to invest all of one's individual study and prayer in knowing Jesus Christ, firsthand and personally, i.e., just as He is, from the "tree of life" (yes, the cross)! This is the self-sufficient life exhibited in the diacritical death at the end of the hard way and narrow gate few people find (Matt. 7: 13-14). What a glory!

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