Blessed are those who buy and sell. For theirs shall be the brand of their choice.
This “beatitude” is basic to American capitalism. The argument is that the consumer is king, ruling through free choice among available products, “voting” for the toothpaste or yacht of one’s choice. A slogan that summarizes this marketplace Darwinism is “the survival of the fittest product.” Defenses of the “free” market, as in William H. Peterson’s pamphlet, The Private Sector and the Public Sector, derive much of their appeal from insisting that the consumer’s choices determine which corporations survive and which go under. Lockheed, ITT, and other corporations seem to have found other ways to survive under free enterprise with the present administration.
Anyway, the “free” market model is simplistic, if not mythological. I accepted it for several years; from my reading in Christian Economics, National Review, and The Freeman, I don’t recall a frank discussion of the role played by advertising (among other factors) in determining what products consumers “vote” for. Regarding many products, I’d say I have no more satisfying choices than are usually offered in American elections.
An ironic sidelight is that many who hold to the free market model also espouse some conservative sort of Christianity. These people would violently reject biological Darwinism as atheistic, but gullibly accept economic Darwinism as “Christian economics”!
In this article I want to offer some observations on how American lifestyles are affected by the American marketplace, especially by advertising.
A popular belief among liberals is that advertisers, through “hidden persuaders,” manipulate the consumer into becoming an automaton who blindly buys, not knowing what or why. This belief is the reverse of the free market myth, but is equally simplistic, even though advertising does create markets—often by creating false needs that no one had until there was a new product to sell.
What actually seems to happen is that the images in advertising reflect American life, but reflect it selectively, and by doing so, advertising reinforces some social styles, and ignores others, the result being that lifestyles themselves become commodities in the marketplace. Of course, most advertising is concerned to sell shaving cream or soapflakes, but in the process, the copy and the illustrations present certain images intended to appeal to the consumer.
There’s a circular reinforcement: the consumer develops “brand loyalty” because he identifies with the imagery used to sell it; then his “brand loyalty” reinforces his association with the imagery. In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Daniel J. Boorstin points out how we tend to identify with products made successful by our buying them.
For instance, an ad in Redbook sells tampons with this image: a girl with long, straight, undyed hair, wearing a very faded and frayed denim jacket. The copy asserts that the tampons are “Soft and natural … like you.” This ad exploits the “natural” movement in clothes, foods, and general lifestyle; one of its probable effects is to strengthen the identification of its audience with the “natural” look—whether or not they buy the product. As Boorstin says, “more and more of our experience nowadays imitates advertising.” And advertising imitates our experience, creating a cycle of increasing superficiality.
The constant repetition of an image in the mass media cheapens it and stunts its development. This happened to the hippies, who received so much publicity and were so exploited by the media that whatever authenticity Haight-Ashbury had in 1967 was quickly submerged by tourists, junkies, and identity-starved teenagers “looking for an angry fix” from the image mongers. Pretty much the same fate awaits any movement that attracts wide attention in the media.
But beyond creating or reinforcing the consumer’s identification with a certain lifestyle, the media, advertising especially, also help to create social acceptance of deviant lifestyles—the increasing acceptance of masculine long hair, beards, mustaches, and sideburns is an example. Another is increasing acceptance, against strenuous opposition from some quarters, of nudity in movies, plays, nightclubs, and soon, I suspect, TV.
This battle is more fierce than the opposition to hair, which was mainly mounted by barbers: “Beautify
Of course, advertisers aren’t concerned with promoting beards and naked women. They’re interested in selling cereal, soap, cars, airline tickets, shirts, and liquor—if not razor blades and bras.
This marketing of lifestyles along with deodorant may be seen as nothing more sinister than an exploitation of the variety of American life. However, the commercial exploitation of lifestyles does have detrimental effects: it reduces personal identity and fulfillment to a concern with appearance (the frayed jacket of the model in the Redbook ad); it debases social movements by proliferating distorted images of them (the hippies and the Jesus People); it destroys authenticity by substituting specious needs and false solutions for the real issues of life (body odor as an index of personal worth).
The image of American life reflected in advertising isn’t necessarily accurate. The American portrayed by Madison Avenue is affluent, a nation where problems are solved by swallowing aspirin, tranquillizers, or a better coffee.
The noted economist Paul Samuelson, as quoted in the December ‘72 Ramparts, deflates this image:
“In the absence of statistical knowledge, it is understandable that one should form an impression of the American standard of living from the full-page magazine advertisements portraying a jolly American family in an air-conditioned mansion, with a Buick, a station wagon, a motor launch, and all the other good things that go to make up comfortable living. Actually, of course, this sort of life is still beyond the grasp of 90 percent of the American public.”
Out of grasp, but not out of sight, and the 90 percent of us whose lives do not match the image in advertising may well feel either that we are failures for not having achieved affluence, or else that our society has failed by not providing it for us.
The capitalist ideology represented by Christian Economics or The Freeman is unabashedly materialistic, proclaiming capitalism the best system because it delivers our vaunted standard of living— which seems to be mostly a matter of color TVs and new cars. These periodicals neglect such truths about our system as that pointed out by Samuelson, and their values are secular and pragmatic rather than biblical.
The person who would reject this false image of affluence may very well find a choice of alternative lifestyles restricted or distorted by the marketplace: If you don’t dig brand X, there’s always brand Y. And if you don’t like any of the brands on the market, what then? The myth of “Mrs. Housewife” making or breaking giant corporations by “votes” at the checkout stand falls through at this point: The marketplace tends to circumscribe our choices, tends in fact to form the boundaries of our reality.
But Americans are enchanted with it. Despite all the pro forma complaining about ads, we love them. Boorstin writes, “The citizen-consumer enjoys the satisfaction of being at the same time the bewitched, the bewitcher, and the detached student of witchcraft.”
All Americans are consumers. The newborn American is deluged in advertising and promotional material, the first swell of a tide that doesn’t ebb until after one is buried, even death being an occasion for consumption. The Christian in the marketplace is thus also a consumer. How does one reconcile commitment to Jesus the Lord with the marketplace’s debasement of human values into advertising copy and its reduction of human pain, sorrow, and sin to problems that can be solved by a new deodorant or a new car?
I earlier mentioned the Jesus People as a group exploited by the media, mostly in pop music, but it seems that some of the Jesus People brought this on themselves. There is a kind of “bumper sticker” Christianity that exploits the slogans of advertising in its effort to “witness”: “You have a lot to live—Jesus has a lot to give” or “Things go better with Christ.” These slogans put Christ on the same level as soda pop, a sorry reduction of the content of the gospel.
On the other hand, some conservative churches still have trouble accepting the Jesus People because of their “freak” appearance. While the Jesus People have generally projected a “freak” image of Jesus and his followers (and this has been shamelessly exploited by some Christian publishers), other Christian publications, especially in their visual material, equate the Christian lifestyle with middle-class “straight” values.
Misunderstandings and tensions between Christians with different lifestyles illustrate one difficulty arising from our being in the marketplace. I’ve no desire to judge those who bumpersticker their car or whose taste in dress and grooming differs from mine. What does perturb me is the ease with which we pick up the values of the marketplace without discerning the gap between those values and the values of the Bible.
Greed and covetousness are sins. Yet greed—the profit motive—is the mainspring of capitalism, and covetousness is ripened and brought to harvest by advertising. Thus, there appears to be an unresolvable conflict within “Christian economics.” Godless commerce is an intrinsic part of the great city,
The Bible stands in judgment on all economic and social systems, and on all lifestyles. The Christian lifestyle isn’t a matter of whether I wear a beard or am clean-shaven, or whether my wife wears a miniskirt or a maxidress. It is a matter of embodying in our lives the kind of self-giving love that Jesus lived. Yet I must either shave or not; my wife’s dresses must be hemmed at some length. My beard and her ankle-length dresses cause many people to identify us with “hippies”—whatever they are.
It’s impossible to avoid such trivial classification; surely Paul’s principle applies here:
“We are allowed to do anything—but not everything is helpful. No one should be looking out for his own interests, but for the interests of others” (1 Corinthians 10:24, 25; TEV).
We must not “buy” the lifestyles sold by mass advertising, but instead proclaim freedom from coercion to be affluent, from pressure to conform to any particular image society offers, from the false values at the root of advertising.
The “American captivity” of the church has its special horror in the comfort and seeming security it offers its slaves. Christ is Lord, not the marketplace, not the state, not the president, not the Gross National Product, nor any other of our current Baals.
As John Howard Yoder emphasizes in his excellent book, The Politics of Jesus, the New Testament does not call us to imitate Jesus’s “lifestyle” of wandering, his celibacy, or his clothing. We are enjoined only to imitate his self-giving love, even if it leads us to a death like his, because the Resurrection is our surety that God’s foolishness is greater than humanity’s wisdom. The marketplace cannot exploit or cheapen a lifestyle like that. It can only crucify those who live it.
When this article appeared, Eugene Warren taught English at
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