The religions of consumerism and Christ

Janice Turner reflects on the false god of consumerism in today's edition of The Times reflecting young protestors on tuition fees and tax breaks are raging against consumerism's broken promises:

"Consumerism, the religion they grew up with, has let them down. The infrastructure of their lives - shiny shopping malls and coffee shops - led them to believe that living standards would keep being upgraded like mobile phones. And since less than half of under-24s are registered to vote, they believed in the power of shopping more heartily than in democracy.

How apt that they will show their political frustration, not just in angry protests, but by withdrawing their consumer support. Student unions are cancelling Vodaphone contracts and encouraging their members to do the same. The young built these companies; they can hurt them too.

As Naomi Klein pointed out in No Logo, brands win us by insinuating themselves into our hearts: a can of Lyle's Golden Syrup makes me feel warm and nostalgic; wearing my one pair of Prada shoes, I feel chic, though, in truth, they're nothing special ...

But those emotional associations matter ..."

A different attack on consumerism comes from comedian Richard Herring, currently touring Christ on a Bike: The Second Coming, who says that how show "is by no means as disrespectful to the Christian myth as all the barefaced commercialism that is going on in suposed celebration." He says that, though he is an atheist, he loves Jesus and thinks he is amazing - "It's just all the people who follow Him who tend to be such idiots. He's like the Fonz in that respect" - and notes that "if our society ran on genuine Christian principles of not judging or stone-throwing and looking after the weakest rather than rewarding the richest, then maybe we'd be better off."

There appear to be more than one artist publicly reconsidering the possibility of faith this Christmas. Tony Jordan, the writer of The Nativity (BBC1 from Monday), interviewed in Christianity says:

"I think I represent a huge swathe of people that say: 'Yeah I believe in God and all that,' but don't tend to do much about it ... It's true to say that I had a faith. I had a faith that wrestled daily with my intellect. I really struggled with God as something I could see and touch and that had some sort of physical presence that I would know if I saw it. But then the more I thought about it, I did find a route through."

For him that involved a discussion with a scientist about dark matter, while researching The Nativity, leading to the thought that this thing without which the laws of physics do not work could be God:

"... I think that whoever God is and whatever God is, it's beyond my comprehension. I can't even get my head around what it must be, or what he must be, I can't do it. And once you understand that, I think it suddenly makes sense. So the story of the Nativity for me, I kind of found I reinforced my faith along the way."

As a result, he says he genuinely hopes that people are converted through the series: "I'd love to think that people are moved enough to believe it, to find faith, but to find the beauty of faith and not to say, 'my denomination is right.'" What he hates about religion is the contrast between the beauty of "faith and religion and the teachings of Christ" - the simplicity of 'let he who is without sin cast the first stone' - and the many people who have been killed in wars over denomination and interpretation.

Andrew Motion is another who is reconsidering. He writes about being in the ambivalent middle, with millions of others, "where faith flickers off-on like a badly wired lamp ... where honest doubt comes and goes, and in so doing keeps alive the argument with and about God."

For him, the catalyst has been a priest; clever, funny and moving, whose talks made him think about things he hadn't thought about for a long time and "then in not quite the same way." This has led to:

"the conviction that my faith is not proof of a God-down Universe in which human beings scurry around trying (or not) to do His bidding. But of a Universe in which the primitive hunger to imagine beyond ourselves is manifested in a series of overlapping stories that give us the possibility and permission to do so. They shape our ambition to think bigger and to live better, and they help to define our place in the scheme of things."

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Jakob Dylan - Nothing But The Whole Wide World.