Dying of consumption: four new books examine the dangers of consumerism and show how Americans are getting less from our "buy more" culture.

MILLIONS OF AMERICANS TOOK OFFENSE at President Bush's suggestion that we respond to 9/11 by going to the mall. Regardless of our shopping habits, most Americans don't believe consumption is a virtue, and very few of us in those horrific days and weeks were interested in showing terrorists that they hadn't toppled our precious "consumer confidence."

Indeed, long before Bush's comment many of us had concerns about our consumer culture. For more than two decades Catholic university and high school students have read Jesuit Father John Kavanaugh's critique in Following Christ in a Consumer Society (Orbis, 1981), and for nearly as long Catholic parishioners have nodded at homilies based on Pope John Paul II's criticisms of a "civilization of consumption." Like many other Americans, we (and our children) worry about being too materialistic and about cultural pressures to buy more and more stuff while deriving less satisfaction.

Still, unlike vegetarians and recovering alcoholics who can abstain from meat and grog, we cannot give up buying goods and services. In a free market we have no other way of securing food, clothing, shelter, education, and health care for ourselves and our families. So we find ourselves trying to be the kind of consumers who don't forget that they are also citizens and believers. Sailing between the sirens that call us to "buy, buy, buy" and the prophets who decry consumerism's greed and injustice, we try to set a course that will let us work and live in this global economy without robbing the poor or selling our souls to mammon. Four recent books offer us a guide in negotiating this path.

In Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (Continuum, 2004), Vincent J. Miller asks what sorts of dangers a consumer culture poses and what kinds of responses Christians ought to offer.

Miller does not believe consumerism is a heresy with a specific set of beliefs, and he is not confident it can be defeated by an opposing set of Christian truths. Nor does he think consumerism teaches us to desire things while Christianity teaches us to hunger for God. The truth is more complex and more dangerous. As he sees it, consumerism is a set of social practices that feeds on and distorts our deeper hungers for meaning, intimacy, and self worth. A consumer culture does not teach us to find ultimate satisfaction in the possession of this or that product. Rather, it subverts our unqueuchable desire for the divine by setting us on an endless quest for the happiness that is promised but never delivered by any particular purchase.

Tracing the history of industrial and global capitalism, Miller shows how social structures that shape how we work and where we live combine with marketing and advertising strategies to train us to see and treat everything--including culture and religion--as a commodity. So a consumer culture is just as ready to encourage millions of us to buy Christian books critical of consumerism as it is to have us purchase new cars of stereos. The challenge, Miller argues, is to develop Christian practices that unmask the commodification of culture and religion and that give us ways to be more than passive consumers plugged into the shopping channel.

TOM BEAUDOIN LOOKS AT THE PRACTICE OF branding in Consuming Faith: Integrating Who We Ate With What We Buy (Sheed & Ward, 2003). Multinational corporations spend billions to brand juvenile shoppers to create lifetime customers. Beaudoin, who wants to avoid a moralizing screed, acknowledges that young people need to establish their identity and that in a consumer culture purchasing is an important (but not adequate) way to do so. He also points out that adolescents who seek to establish their identity by becoming a "brand name" guy of girl are not seeking to become crass materialists, nor are they particularly interested in the specific products they purchase. Instead, they are attracted by a set of values (not always bad) represented by the brand or by the idea of belonging to an attractive group of people, like those in the brand's ads.

Still, these brands have their downside, and Beaudoin uses the metaphor of the Body of Christ to unveil the connection between the bodies of young customers branded by these companies and the impoverished and oppressed bodies of the (often young) workers who slave away in sweatshops owned of run by these companies. Often, he points out, the brands hide as much as they reveal, inviting their young customers to join a party being thrown on the backs of the poor.

If Christianity is to respond to the attraction of these brands, Beaudoin argues, we need to appreciate and respond to the hungers of young people who identify with better values and want to belong to something important. It is not enough to prophesy against the brands, we need to offer alternatives.

ARTHUR SIMON'S HOW MUCH IS Enough? Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture (Baker Books, 2003) looks at consumerism as a spiritual and moral malaise that fails to satisfy affluent First World consumers while robbing and disenfranchising the world's poor. Many middle- and upper-class Americans will recognize themselves and their frustrations in Simon's description of an escalating treadmill of work, consumption, and debt that is increasingly less satisfying and more burdensome. In a series of concise, concrete chapters the former head of Bread for the World describes the ways in which our quest for happiness, meaning, and purpose are undermined by a rising set of expectations and appetites.

But Simon's book is not just a jeremiad against the addictions of consumption. It is also a cry for the victims of a global economy skewed by greed, and an appeal to practice the love and justice that will make both consumers and oppressed whole. And it is a book that offers us a way out of the spiral of consumption--a way embracing spiritual practices that feed and nourish our deepest hungers and a way committing ourselves to communities of faith and hope and love that offer us both consolation and support as we seek to respond to and resist consumption's worst elements.

In Selling Ourselves Short: Why We Struggle to Earn a Living and Have a Life (Brazos Press, 2003), Catherine M. Wallace argues that the reason most of us (and especially working moms) find it so tough to make a living and have a life is that our culture has shoved compassion and care to the margins and raised up competition and consumption as the core virtues of our public lives.

Answering the complaint that there is no longer anyone to care for our children and elderly because so many women have entered the workforce, Wallace argues that the problem is not that women are working outside the home, but that our culture does not value or support the work of compassion and caring. Those who take up this labor are devalued and discouraged, while those who pour their lifeblood into competing aggressively with others so that the might earn and consume more and more wealth are esteemed as heroes.

REVIEWING THE HISTORICAL BELIEFS and social structures that brought us to this crisis, Wallace criticizes gender roles that separate women and men into caregivers and breadwinners, as well as notions of work and home that split the public world of economic labor from the private world of housekeeping and child of elder care. These divisions, Wallace argues, relegate compassion and care to the domestic--and feminine--sphere, banning them from the public--and masculine--world of paid work and politics.

Making a living, then, must be done in a world that does not value compassion of care but honors only the bottom line. And as those in the workforce are expected to be ever more competitive and productive, they are pressured to pour more and more of their energy into labors that will produce more profit, leaving less and less time and energy for the work of building lives, friendships, families, and communities.

PATRICK MCCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.