Instead of rotting our souls, money may make us contemplate the profound
Designer clothes, cell phones, SUVs, mutual funds--modern materialism seems
the enemy of all that is spiritual. Advertising screams out insatiable consumption.
Movies and television blast us with images of runaway wealth, instilling the
notion that too much is never enough. New books such as Luxury Fever and The
Overspent American lament that the cycle of work and spend is sapping away all
that matters in life. And prosperity continues to increase: we have more stuff
each passing year. If materialism and spirituality are inversely proportional,
it would seem that the soul is doomed. Where Nietzsche, Darwin, and Freud failed
to destroy spiritual belief, perhaps Nike, Disney, and American Express will
succeed. As Jonathan Twitchell argues in the provocative new book Lead Us into
Temptation, losing themselves in fashion, cars, electronics, and other forms
of consumption "is how most of Western young people cope in a world that
science has pretty much bled of traditional religious meanings."
That's the conventional wisdom, anyway. Yet a nationwide increase in religious
and spiritual interest is happening at the very time America enjoys unprecedented
physical prosperity. Perhaps the upsurge in concern for the sacred is not happening
in spite of materialism, but because of it.
Consider that Rev. Jim Henry, pastor of First Baptist Church of Orlando, Florida,
a mega-church that is among the country's largest evangelical houses of worship,
notes, "People today find that the things they're buying and turning to
are not fulfilling. Interest in spiritual subjects is the highest it's been
in the 35 years that I've been preaching, and I think disenchantment with consumerism
has a lot to do with that." Henry's church, being in Orlando--home of Disney
World and its satellite parks and hotels and malls and stores--sits at the epicenter
of runaway consumption. This fact seems to be driving people toward the church,
not away from it; First Baptist draws almost 10,000 worshippers per week.
Scholars see the same trends nationally. Robert Fogel, an economist at the
University of Chicago and a leading free-market conservative, is already projecting
that the 21st century will see another "Great Awakening" of spiritual
concerns in American life, as people turn toward faith and questions of higher
purpose to escape the emptiness of commuting, the career ladder, and shopping.
Thoughts of the sacred surely do seem to be on the increase in contemporary
life, leading barometers being the popular "spirituality" movement;
the rise of evangelical Christianity; the growing membership of Roman Catholic,
Orthodox Jewish, and traditional Islam denominations; and the end of the decline
in membership in the mainstream Protestant churches; the growth of retreats
and hermitages; the width of the religion and spirituality aisles at any bookstore.
When such trends are noted, a common explanation is that "baby boomers
are coming back to God" after discovering they have children to raise and
realizing that no matter how many vitamins they take and how long they pump
the Stair Master, mortality will come knocking.
But equally important may be a much less noticed aspect of end-century society,
that prosperity increases both the time available for spiritual reflection and
the number of people who may avail themselves of it. Every year more Americans
acquire the means to be materialistic, and discover that materialism does not
satisfy the soul. Every year more Americans advance enough into the middle class
that they have the time or money to read books on spiritual subjects or attend
meetings or classes. A century ago, there were at very most a few million Americans
with enough material security to wonder whether the buy-and-spend life was really
worth it. Now there are 100 million, or more. This suggests that as prosperity
keeps increasing, in the century to come belief may become more important, not
less. The signs of increasing national affluence are everywhere. Though the
boom economy has not lifted all boats (a shocking 13 percent of American families
remain at or below the poverty line), as a nation the United States "has
become so rich that we are approaching saturation in the consumption not only
of necessities but of goods recently thought to be luxuries," Fogel said
in a 1999 speech. Think about your holiday gift shopping list: how many friends
or relatives are "hard to buy for" because they already possess every
material thing that a person could reasonably require--and then some?
Each person needs to be materially secure, of course: America of the present
is historically favored in that regard, and the majority of its citizens who
enjoy material security should give daily thanks for that fact. But does the
onrushing saturation of consumer items bring anyone a sense of satisfaction
in life? Andrew Delbanco, in his new book The Real American Dream: A Meditation
on Hope, notes that the cycle of consumption leaves us with an "unslaked
craving for transcendence," the desire to find the larger connections to
life and purpose that no material thing can ever offer. For some, consumerism
is the new opiate. But for most men and women, the better off the country becomes,
the greater the chance we will step back and ask, "Is that all there is?"
And the greater the chance we will have the time to entertain such questions.
The conventional assumption is that Americans are ever-more squeezed for time--books
like The Second Shift depict Americans as so frantically time-stressed as to
be close to losing their minds, while cell phones and pagers and laptops and
similar devices are cited to represent the assumption that today there is never
a moment away from the demands of job, kids, and stuff. But actually, studies
show the reverse: leisure, as defined by time not working, is ever-increasing.
In 1880, the typical American adult male spent just 11 hours per week at nonwork
activities; today the figure is 40 hours. When paid employment and household
chores are combined, women of 1880 had only fewer than 10 "nonwork"
hours per week; today, like men, they average about 40.
Of course many activities including child rearing impinge on "nonwork"
time, but generally the trend is toward more reflective hours, not less. Studies
by John Robinson of the University of Maryland and Goeffrey Godbey of the University
of Georgia have shown that most Americans have more free time than in 1969,
with total housework hours and daily commutes both in slight decline. And despite
the popular canard that Americans are now so fantastically busy they don't even
sit down to eat together, a 1997 study by the Pew Research Center study found
that 80 percent of parents with children regularly take their meals together.
Add to this the historically new, large demographic class of healthy, financially
secure seniors--a century ago fewer than 15 percent of males over age 65 were
retired, today more than 85 percent are--and the number of Americans with the
time and repose to contemplate spiritual issues is steadily increasing.
To the extent people are stressed for time, often it is the pursuit of the
material that causes the condition. Wanting a 4,000-square-foot house with a
three-car garage and two SUVs forces you to take on a huge mortgage and accept
long commutes. Then you find that you're rarely in the house because you are
working to pay off the monthly note, or stuck on the freeway trying to get home.
It would not be difficult to trade back some of this material superfluity for
time and a less stressful day.
Does the rising education that accompanies affluence mean belief must decline?
This has been a standard assumption since the early-century drive for universal
public education began. In 1916, the Bryn Mawr University psychologist James
H. Leuba published a book, The Belief in God and Immortality, based on studies
of religious sentiment among college students and their professors. His conclusion
was that "the proportion of disbelievers in immortality increases considerably
from the freshman to the senior year in college" and that, because of the
increase in higher education, American belief "has utterly broken down."
Leuba's studies of the effect of higher education in diminishing faith were
influential in triggering the early-century fundamentalist movement, which took
the name fundamentalism to show that it opposed modernism, assumed to be mainly
a phenomena of the university.
Recent studies by Benton Johnson, professor of sociology at the University
of Oregon, find, in contrast, that in the contemporary world there is little
correlation between levels of education and degrees of belief. People with doctorate
degrees do tend to be atheists, Johnson has found, but below that level, basic
belief in God or divine agency is approximately the same for all education strata.
Fundamentalists, Johnson has found, as a group are just as well-educated as
members of the mainstream denominations, while college graduates are as likely
to believe in God as those who did not attend college. "College may not
strengthen faith, but for most baby boomers it did not initiate doubt,"
Johnson has written. "Most of those who lost their faith did so before
going to college, not after."
It cannot be claimed that affluence is already the cause of any general spiritual
awakening: for most people, material concerns still come first in life, and
may always. But it's enough to contemplate the notion that consumer culture
is not necessarily an ultimate foe of higher contemplation. As the political
scientist Ronald Inglehart wrote in the 1990 book Culture Shift in an Advanced
Industrial Society, "post-materialists may have more potential interest
in religion than materialists do" since "a sense of meaning and purpose
might fill a need" that no purchase or possession ever will.
| Authors
Details: By Gregg Easterbrook |
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