| In his book Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture, Professor Vincent Miller examines how habits assumed in a consumer culture help to explain the breakdown of organized religious communities. Miller states that religious believers do not understand themselves as members of a church community, or as preservers of a tradition, partly because they are used to thinking of themselves as individual consumers. The habits they have developed as consumers guided only by their desires include consuming commodities, which Miller defines as objects separated from their origin and history. This practice of consuming something while remaining ignorant about its origins is unwittingly transferred from the marketplace to the spheres of religion and culture, and it renders people happy to accept cultural and religious beliefs and customs without having any sense of what they meant in their original context, or how the beliefs and customs may or may not be compatible with each other. One result, says Miller, is an incoherent pastiche of beliefs and traditions that are, sometimes, incompatible. |
Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (Continuum, 2003) |
