Shared rituals in an era of consumerism
Photograph by Sheeyam via Unsplash
Rev. Clint Schnekloth
Sometimes I wonder whether the draw to holiday observance is more energized by consumerism or faith. I admit some markers for my own “feeling” the holiday spirit are entirely capitalist. I know it’s fall when pumpkin spice lattes return to Starbucks, and when I try to get in the spirit of Advent and Christmas I consider going for a walk at the mall because I know they’ll have the decorations up and Santa arrives early.
Some holidays have been amplified, perhaps even thoroughly invented by, the success of marketing them, chief among these Halloween, which much of the rest of the world recognizes as a thoroughly American holiday that is now spreading their way with the globalizing tendencies of market culture. I used to live in Slovakia, and our entire time there my family saw very little if any of the cultural trappings of “American” Halloween – instead, families went to graveyards on All Hallows’ Eve to place candles on crypts and graves. I guess in this sense somebody still sold candles, but that was the extent of it.
At that time in Slovakia, there were little singing bobblehead toys resonating a tinny version of “Silent Night” in Slovak, but mostly there were just simple lights and carolers and giant tanks of carp outside the grocery stores for people to bring home and place in their bathtubs for Christmas day consumption. I guess that is marketing of sorts, but of a very different kind.
Where I’m struggling with the blend between free market capitalism and seasonal religious observances is simply with how meaningful some of these holidays are and how they are made more meaningful by being swaddled in the trappings of what we buy. I bought a costume for our church’s annual Halloween party (which we call Nightmare Before Gay Christmas, because the event is also a reunion for campers from our summer Queer Camp), running around as Forrest Gump in his running phase, and it was fun to acquire it. The potluck was chock-full of many different things, including meatballs and chili and seven-layer dip, but in the mix was a large selection of wrapped candies and buckets and buckets of candy corn, and this made me glad.
I’ve found over the years that I tend to chastise myself for so seamlessly weaving together my consuming and my Christianity, and even this chastisement has a market. It seems about half the books you can buy for the season of Advent, not to mention the socks and the kitchen placards and gift cards, all mention something about simplicity, and keeping Jesus the reason for the season. I think I have six or seven books on my shelf just about Advent and simplicity.
So many of our traditions in America are simultaneously heavily material and anti-material. We love a huge feast for Thanksgiving and lots of wrapped Christmas presents under the tree. These are iconic and cherished aspects of our observances, and we are at the same time nervous that if that’s all that the holiday means, then somehow we’ve missed the point.
If this is the paradox we’re living, with the latte cup as both indulgence and sacrament, and the aisle display as both hollow and holy, then the question is not how to escape it, but how to live with intention inside of it.
What we are actually looking for in the seasonal aisle or the latte or the mall decorations is not the product. We’re looking for the reassurance that we are part of a story that returns. That’s what I think is so wicked smart about companies like Starbucks and their seasonal flavors. Holidays are the places where time circles back. They’re how we feel time as shared, not just endured. Our neoliberal economic system is particularly good at subsuming religious practices not yet native into itself and making them native, and this is what is going on in our feeling attached both to the capitalist aspects of our faith and the faith itself. We are looking for belonging, and consumer culture does a particularly excellent job at giving us things we can buy that help us get that sense of belonging.
Which means: the decorations and candies and costumes are not the “cheap, fake version” of a spiritual holiday. They are the ritual debris of longing, an emptied peppermint latte cup in hand is simultaneously excess and holiness (of a sort).
I suspect this example (and many others) are what happens when a culture does not have enough shared liturgical language, sets of rituals to engage in that one can do corporately with others separate from a market economy, stewarded by trusted institutions. So the longing for meaning, return, memory, and warmth pours into whatever vessels are handy: coffee cups, aisle displays, party supply stores. And once that has begun to happen and the corporations, which are excellent at psychology, see the methods for monetization, the vessels turn around and become not just handy, but the essential equipment for our continuing observations.
There’s probably some psychoanalyst out there that could offer insights into this paradox. The question is whether your health insurance would cover the cost of the sessions. In the meantime, offer the following insights into the mitigation of the paradox (because it is not a paradox that can be resolved, given current realities).
If this is the paradox we’re living, with the latte cup as both indulgence and sacrament, and the aisle display as both hollow and holy, then the question is not how to escape it, but how to live with intention inside of it. One gentle way is to adopt practices that neither reject nor rely on consumption. For example, choosing one evening each week in Advent to sit with a single candle and a short reading, speaking one small prayer aloud. This practice, or others like it, requires nothing to be purchased. It’s a kind of phenomenological bracketing without wholesale rejection or burdensome guilt. Nothing needs to be performed. Just breathe, return, and feel the sense of time circling back. These small unmarketed rituals help restore our capacity to belong to seasons without having to buy them.
Another way is to re-story the objects that already surround us. Each week, choose one holiday thing – a favorite ornament, a packet of cocoa, the leftover candy corn – and ask where it came from, who made it, and what need it meets in you. Then answer with one small act of solidarity: a donation, a thank-you, an advocacy e-mail on behalf of laborers. This practice doesn’t dismantle the economic system shaping our holidays, but it does gently reattach our celebrations to real people, labor, and more. In both of these practices, we are not trying to purify ourselves of consumption, nor to shame our joy. Notably, they may be difficult to build in because they will not at first feel quite as exciting as the release of nutmeg matcha cold foam holiday brulée. But they are simply learning to recognize what we are always, already doing: reaching for meaning, trying to remember, and being for one another.
Rev. Clint Schnekloth is pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a progressive church in the South. He is the founder of Canopy NWA (a refugee resettlement agency) and Queer Camp, and is the author of “A Guidebook to Progressive Church.” He blogs as Lutheran Confessions at Substack.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
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