Consumerism in Today’s Culture

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

RICHARD LAND: Dr. Mohler, welcome to For Faith & Family.

AL MOHLER: Dr. Land, it’s always good to be with you.

LAND: So, you’ve written this book, Culture Shift: Engaging Current Issues with Timeless Truth. Now, you know, we were talking about this yesterday, that Carl Henry, in this little book, Has Democracy Had its Day? that he did for us at the ERLC, and in a presentation that he made to the commission at one of our conferences, you know he wrote The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, which is really a call to reengage the culture and it had an enormous impact on starting Christianity Today and being the founding editor of it. Evangelicals have had a revival for which we have prayed and we have had a reengagement with the culture; but a half century later, he said, you know, we have to acknowledge that the culture has influenced us as much or more than we have influenced the culture. It is almost as if, can evangelicalism survive its success.

MOHLER: We talked about the issue of divorce as being one sign that the culture has changed us more than we have changed the culture. I want to throw out another one today and that is consumerism. And I think it is one that many people don’t expect conservative evangelical theologians to talk about; but it is a big problem because consumerism, as a dynamic, that is the desire to define one’s state of existence and to find significance in things, and that constant buying and collecting of things, that really fuels a lot of other things such as the idea that you have to have both parents working, which in at least some cases would not be a necessity. And the fact that you have to work more and more to get more and more and store more and more, then have a bigger house in which to put more and more. You know, it’s very hard to break that cycle.

LAND: Well it is. And we ought to at least be asking the question, should we be living in a bigger house than we need, should we be driving more cars than we need? Should we have more clothes than we can wear? I think that we have gotten into this mindset of consumerism where we don’t even ask that question. I don’t want the government answering that question for me. But I think we as Christians need to be asking ourselves that question, and that question is just how big a house do I need? My Bible and, you know when I was a Royal Ambassador and going to those same kind of camps you were and using those same quarterlies that you were using, I was always taught that everything we have is a gift from God, and that includes material possessions or talents or abilities or time, and that we are going to give an account to God for our use and how we used those resources. So, if God has entrusted to us financial resources, and we use them to build, what is it John Edwards has—a 27,000 square foot house? The biggest house in North Carolina? Now, I don’t think that the government ought to tell John Edwards he can’t build the biggest house in North Carolina, but I think that the Lord might have something to say about whether or not we ought to be taking resources that have been entrusted to us to build a 27,000 square foot house where, if his air conditioning ever failed, he could have his own atmosphere.

MOHLER: You know, I think another real danger sign here is not just how much people have, because it is almost even to take that into account, I’ll just admit that myself. It is hard for me to know sometimes what is enough and what is too much. Sometimes you only know that even in retrospect when you say I evidently didn’t need that suit because I bought it and didn’t wear it. But I do know that one big problem is when you look at giving patterns among American evangelical Christians, when we had less we gave more. And that, to me, is one of the most frightening, humbling aspects of all of this. Now that evangelical Christians are not only engaged in the culture and all the rest, but tend to be far more fabulously wealthy than before, evangelical Christians are keeping it by and large, rather than giving it away to the cause of Christ, giving it away to the church, to mission causes and all the rest.

LAND: No, I think it is a real issue that we have to contend with and, look, all of us belong to a generation. We have a generational cohort. Now you and I are the same generation; we come from different halves of that generation, and it is a very different generational cohort that Barack Obama is really sort of the first poster child for the last half of the baby boom, whereas I’m the first half of the baby boom.

MOHLER: And Bill Clinton is your poster child.

LAND: And George W. Bush, but we are all, God created us as social beings. We are social beings. He created us for fellowship with Him and for fellowship with each other, and it is not good for man to be alone, so He made him a helpmate, a completor, and so, we must acknowledge that part of our creatureliness is that we are going to be impacted by our culture.

MOHLER: Seduced even.

LAND: That’s right. That’s why my parents used to always say, be careful who you associate with because you are known by your friends, your friends are going to influence you, and we know that the more we spend time around people who reinforce us and who minister to us, the better we do and the more time we spend around people and around influences that are baneful to us, the more damages it causes to us. Now, as a result, we have to at least acknowledge that we are all impacted by our culture. You know, you and I are both impacted by a consumerism that our parents were not impacted by. My parents were impacted by the Depression, the mark of the Depression is on my parents for their whole lives. They can never fully escape it. The mark of Vietnam is on me in a way it is probably not on you because you don’t have classmates who died over there, I do. I have a childhood teammate that I played little league baseball with who died at the age of twenty over there and every time I am in Washington and I see that Vietnam Memorial, I think about the fact that Jimmy died when he was twenty years old in a war he didn’t want to fight. He was drafted, and I believe his country let him down. It seems to me that churches have got to be conscious counter cultures.

MOHLER: Let me tell you one of the difficulties in this is that there are evangelicals who don’t think they are involved with the culture. There are evangelicals who think the culture is limited to Hollywood and the media elite and all the rest. Let’s define culture for a moment. Culture is the sum total of a system that includes language, symbols, dress, habits, moral intuitions, laws, social customs, political structures, educational structures. You put all that together and everyone is involved in the culture. You’ll appreciate this, just one little anecdote of the late Patrick Daniel Moynihan, former Senator from New York, a very intelligent man. Even when I disagreed with his policy proposals, I did admire his intelligence. He told about going to upstate New York and talking to an Amish father, and this Amish father had every reason to believe that his children in that Amish community would be protected from the world, and this Amish father said to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “My daughter, sixteen years old, is flirting with Catholicism and it bothers me.” Now, Moynihan, of course was Catholic. Moynihan, he says, “Well, I was very curious in how that could happen,” and he said, “Why do you think that?” And he said, “Well I heard her talk about Madonna.” It turns out that Catholicism was the least of his worries. Now, if Madonna can find a 16-year-old sequestered away in an Amish community, then we better know the culture has found us where ever we are.

LAND: You cannot withdraw to a mooted castle and pull in the drawbridge. There is no way to do it. And, so I think we as Christians, and we as Christian leaders need to be encouraging our churches to be conscious Christian countercultures. Countercultures on sexuality, countercultures on marriage, countercultures on the sanctity of every human life.

MOHLER: On education, on understanding what it means to think about the economy, politics, art, and everything else, from a Christian perspective, to inculcate that in our children and to live out together what it would mean to be faithful.

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