In summary fashion, I consider several long-term trajectories impacting followers of Jesus that yield anti-intellectualism and biblical ignorance: the schism between revelation and reason, consumerism and the church, and communication technologies and the mind.

Consumerism
The essence of consumerism consists in a commitment to autonomous self-definition. Individuals alone provide themselves with meaning and purpose. Human happiness is something constructed for ourselves in the here and now in what we choose and buy.

Consumerism cultivates unbounded desire and insatiability. We consist of unmet needs and inadequacy that can only be appeased by commodities and experiences, which is the deification of dissatisfaction and desire.

In my article “Economics and the Present Evil Age’” I wrote:

Mass consumerism is an all-embracing reality with imperial ambitions, seeking to homogenize peoples and cultures into a global civilization of manufactured expectations and engineered through the advent of modern communication. In one sense, it is the Enlightenment’s myth of progress in the form of luxury for all.

Benjamin R. Barber depicts consumerism as the process of global “infantilization,” or an “induced” and “enduring childishness” packaged and exported as a totalizing narcissism expressed through Western symbols typified by Hollywood lifestyles. It has infiltrated every sphere of our existence: personal identity, spiritual aspiration, ecclesiastical life, education, sports, spatial organization, and systemically in social and economic policy.

Consumerism, therefore, functions as an alternative gospel and a false view of reality. The authors of StormFront: The Good News of God (7) summarize the ecclesiastical impact:

When Christians accept a consumerist culture’s definition at face value, they look to the church primarily to provide them with the means to improve their private lives, enhance their self esteem, and give them a sense of purpose. Worship becomes a form of therapy whose sole aim is to improve the emotional state of individuals and to energize them for the week ahead.

Does your church participation function to boast “your self esteem”? Is your worship experience mostly a self-help “form of therapy”?