Abstract
Mark Clavier,
Rescuing the Church from Consumerism
, SPCK: London, 2013; 160 pp.: 9780281070381, £10.99 (pbk)
In the opening pages of Rescuing the Church from Consumerism we learn that its writer was raised and ordained in ‘a tiny, conservative Anglican jurisdiction’ wedded to the Book of Common Prayer, one of the ‘continuing Anglican’ churches in America. This oddment turns out to be no mere trivia. His upbringing gives him a distinctive outlook on the stage of Western culture, from which he offers a salutary critique of today’s Church of middle England.
Mark Clavier is now priest in a mainstream Anglican parish in Oxfordshire. Fortunately for us he retains that fresh perspective, and he fixes it on the challenge of consumerism to human identity. By turns empirical, quizzical and poetic, he confronts the Goliath of corporate greed.
The first half of the book is a close and informative analysis of the character of contemporary consumerism as a totalitarian secular vocation. He convincingly uses the Christian sacraments – all seven of them – to expose and denounce its power. Cogent narratives of critique of, and emancipation from, consumerism are hard to come by, but this is one.
He rounds on the Church for colluding in consumer models of religious provision – therapeutic, self-oriented, schismatic. Particular scorn is reserved for ‘Fresh Expressions’, Messy Church and other such accommodations which, he argues, only hasten the fraying of social fabric.
As a prophetic alternative, the last chapter offers a vision of church as ‘home’. This is the book’s freshest contribution. The role of church is to reconnect people to the household, both local and global, a vision which is both congregational and catholic, social and ecological. Not cited as a source, but very much an antecedent (indeed of the whole book) is Robert van der Weyer’s testimony from the Little Gidding community of the 1980s.
For me a further chapter must still be written. The author does not tackle the state’s sponsorship of consumerism. We have to work out for ourselves the practical implications of his homely ecclesiology for the long haul of economic and political transformation.
I also missed an anthropology of the desire which consumerism co-opts, and an account of the conversion of desire to its rightful end. Consumerism succeeds because it manipulates those sacred human passions which, as Augustine prayed, are ‘restless till they rest in Thee’. That is why its conspiracy with policy makers is so successful – and also why it is renegotiable. Today’s satiated, indebted, harried consumer has much to learn from the ascetic tradition. We can be reconciled with our passions, and we can use our power to bring about a humane economy.
Without this putative final chapter, there is a risk that readers will be left feeling they are mere hapless victims of a gross conspiracy. Nonetheless this is an engaging and thought-provoking read. It will equip ministerial students and practitioners to make wise choices in the market-place of mission à la mode, and whet the appetite of those in the catholic tradition for the biggest evangelical challenge of our time.