John Carpenter, on the ways that consumerism has colonized our imagination, and particularly our view of church:

Consumerism provides the interpretative grids through which we see all of life. We accept no fault divorce or “at will employment” for pastors in which they can be fired for any or no reason or the lack of covenant commitment to a particular church as normal because those are the values of consumerism.

To the person shaped by consumerism — which is nearly everyone in our modern society — the church is intuitively approached as a service provider, like the restaurant and the theater. The restaurant provides food; the church provides religious nourishment. The theater provides entertainment; the church provides liturgy. The school provides education; the church specializes in religious curricula. If told to shut down during a pandemic, it insists that its services are essential. It might argue that it is as useful as the grocery store but it rarely argues that it is something that is beyond consumerism, something that cannot be consumed, akin to the family.

Consumerism has, like a wild fire, burned up everything in its path, even the institutions, like the family and the church, we thought, at first, it would serve. Consumerism’s modern-self bends institutions to become “servants of the individual” so that they “cease to be places for the formation of individuals…. They become platforms for performance.” The local church, then, is seen as akin to a community theater: the venue for the consumer to demonstrate his or her piety or aspiring actors to try their talent and for theater-goers/church-attendees to get their entertainment. When they no longer serve the purpose they were bought for, they can be discarded — thus Packard’s waste culture. “Relationships . . . rather than being the basis for an economy, start to become a marketable product.” Even piety, the relationship with God, is marketed as a product with the church being its retail out-let. As David Wells lamented, “In the marketplace, everything is for us, for our pleasure, for our satisfaction, and we have come to assume that it must be so in the church as well.”