Cure for Consumerism

The Cure for Consumerism by Fr Gregory Jensen, 148 pages

Christianity has always had an ambivalent relationship with the world.  The world is, after all, simultaneously what the Lord overcame and what He died to save.  The world belongs to God, and yet His people are not of this world, and the world hates Him and them.  The goods of the world participate in the goodness of God, for otherwise they would not be goods, and they can serve as a ladder to Him, but divorced from their relationship with the Supreme Good who is their source and purpose, every ideal becomes an idol.

It is in light of this that Fr Jensen considers and reconsiders the Orthodox attitude towards capitalism.  He argues that the marketplace may be reimagined, not merely as an unfortunate necessity that must somehow be accommodated, but as a realm of genuine goods that ought to be nurtured.  The Christian can properly order the goods of the marketplace, and thus escape from the perils of idolatry, through a personal practice of asceticism.

Unfortunately, it is here that Fr Jensen's exposition seems naive, as he seems to fall into the peculiarly modernist delusion that a tool is a purely neutral object void of its own logic.  This causes him to neglect the reality of the free market as a social sphere which inevitably tends to totalize its own values.  While this may be resisted on the personal level, it can only be counterbalanced by a greater social force.