God: half-off.

Christianity Incorporated How Big Business Is Buying the Church Michael Budde and Robert Brimlow Brazos Press, $22.99, 191 pp.

One evening this past summer, I struck up a conversation with a fellow parishioner at a neighborhood block party. Knowing that she's a stockbroker who's well aware of my politics, I feigned shock at the latest ruling-class crime wave. She agreed that the scoundrels should be jailed--just like, she added, miscreant priests and their duplicitous protectors among the bishops. "Now that would help restore investor confidence in the church," she concluded archly.

Underlining the faith essential both to Christianity and to capitalism was a clever way to tie the two scandals together. But as Michael Budde and Robert Brimlow might have interjected, my neighbor's remark also reflects "a conception of the church that makes it just another corporation among corporations." To them, the cultural synergy of church and corporate business--"Christianity Incorporated"--is a corruption far more malignant than sexual abuse.

Aligned with "radical orthodoxy" (see my "Theology at the Barricades," July 13, 2000), Budde and Brimlow deploy some of that movement's concerns and ideas in this book of theologically informed cultural journalism. A political scientist at De Paul, Budde is the author of The (Magic) Kingdom of God (1997), a study of the global culture industries and their impact on spiritual life. A philosopher at Saint John Fisher College, Brimlow collaborated with Budde in editing The Church as Counterculture (2000), a collection of essays that condemn what they call the church's "Constantinianism," its largely uncritical support for the American Way of Life. Although this volume redirects that general indictment toward American "civil religion"--the belief that Christianity, as well as other faiths, must enable us to be "good citizens, employees, consumers, patriots, and family members"--the more specific charge is fealty to corporate capitalism.

In the authors' view, the temple of Christ has become a den of shills, and they provide copious evidence of ecclesial complicity in the cultural-industrial complex. The Vatican's numerous licensing, merchandising, and television deals; the routine reliance of church leaders, clerical and lay, on corporate managerial models and publicity techniques; 1993's World Youth Day, which degenerated into suits and countersuits by promoters and church officials disappointed by the take; American churches' deference to the profit imperatives of the funeral industry--all these and more indicate a pattern of capitulation to business prerogatives. (The discussion of the church and "McDeath" is an absorbingly sordid chapter where Saint Paul meets Jessica Mitford.)

The authors also note how business now fosters a brisk "trade in transcendence" which mandates, in their words, a "corporate expropriation of Christian cultural capital." They cite, for instance, the growing use of religious imagery in television and direct-mail advertising. From vapid "mission statements," to inspirational seminars, to wretched "Christian business literature" (is Jesus your CEO?), to "positive visualization" exercises, corporations peddle toxic brands of "spirituality" that are deliberately free of theology--and hence of any potential for, shall we say, negative visualization.

The current situation has emerged, the authors contend, because the "political economy of formation" has been transformed by global capitalism. In the contest for minds, hearts, and souls, the balance of cultural power has shifted decisively toward capital, whose advertising, marketing, and other forms of symbolic production compose rival sources of spiritual formation. For, just like Christianity, capitalism "depends on formation processes to sustain itself ... making people `fit for capitalism' is no less important to the workings of the world economy" than production and finance.

These are strong and harsh assertions, and many will wonder if they aren't overwrought, even naively so. Didn't Tocqueville and Weber demonstrate that religion and capitalism have always been bedfellows, however rocky the affair? Since when does the church have a copyright on its imagery, and would it want one? Are Christians, particularly Catholics, as spiritually deformed as the authors suggest?

To be sure, there are very good radical orthodox answers to these questions. Christianity and capitalism may indeed have an ongoing and fruitful affair, but adultery remains a sin. True, there is no copyright on religious imagery (and these should not be), but the larger point is that images acquire meaning in use, and their use in advertising is to sell commodities, not to build a community of faith. Perhaps Christians are profoundly deformed, but that's precisely why the problem is so invisible and intractable. Still, while I'm largely convinced by the authors' exposition, and hugely sympathetic to their analysis, I wonder if critical overkill hasn't obscured some signs of vitality. This penchant for overkill lames what could have been a superlative critique of Pope John Paul II--"the world's most desirable product endorser," in their words. It's true that, for all the pontiff's wailing about "materialism," he's been largely silent about the commercial use of his image to sell CDs, cars, soap, and potato chips. Like William Bennett's bellowing about "moral clarity" in the midst of a consumer culture, the pope's pronouncements seem cluelessly incongruous.

It's also justifiable, I think, to fault the "confused and incoherent" moral imagination that informs Centesimus annus. Berating the encyclical as "John Locke in ecclesial drag," the authors maintain that John Paul II tries to square the "personalism" of Catholic social thought with "individualist" notions of liberal capitalism. Because, they believe, the pope (like Bennett, Michael Novak, and the scolds at First Things) wants to have a capitalist economy without its inevitable moral and cultural consequences, Christians are left with moralistic pablum about "lifestyles" and a failure even to suggest "a substantive alternative to the dominant secular notions of the common good."

But if Centesiaius annus is "confused and incoherent," doesn't this point to some dilution of a clearer, salutary, and redeemable message--namely, "personalism"? I'm a bit surprised that the authors don't do more than gesture toward the lay tradition of personalism articulated by mid-century French and American Catholics. One could also maintain that other and arguably better encyclicals--especially Evangelium vitae--attack a "culture of death" that looks very much like corporate capitalism and its pecuniary, utilitarian conception of selfhood.

A similar narrowness vitiates their suggestive "alternative" to "Christianity Incorporated." Echoing John Milbank, they remind us that the gospel contains an economic imagination of abundance and generosity that is squarely at odds with the scarcity and competition enjoined in freshman economics. On the basis of this uncommon sense, the authors urge Christians to experiment in an "economics of discipleship" that includes "church-based consumers' cooperatives and workshops," "labor tithes," "labor currency," and other practices that will seem, they concede, "absurd and irresponsible" to many.

There's much to like here, however critically. Budde and Brimlow challenge a rhetoric of "realism" that always turns out, in the end, to be camouflage for resignation or collusion. They return attention to the workplace, where, as Barbara Ehrenreich, Juliet Schor, and Jill Fraser have shown us, capitalism is at its most pressurized and undemocratic. Still, nothing in the authors' program, as I see it, is likely to really threaten the systemic imperatives of capitalism. Any "economics of discipleship" still needs to make common cause with secular actors such as labor unions, anti-sweatshop activists, and political parties.

I'm hopeful and watchful but not optimistic about the authors' brand of ecclesial-based militancy. In the wake of the sex-abuse scandal, the cry for "greater lay participation" has only increased. But one must question whether a larger role for the laity really promises a more open and prophetic church. Are the laity really up to the job? Righteous talk about "lay power" obscures both the spiritual formation of the laity in corporate culture and the related possibility that laity can form an elite every bit as insular and undemocratic as the clerical fogies they'd replace.

Eugene McCarraher teaches in the humanities division at Villanova University.