Mennonites and consumer desire

Mennonites don’t talk much about consumer desire. Some of us are good at consuming, and others are just as adept at critiquing such consumption. Many Mennonites—and this includes me—are some combination of both: blithely going about the business of trying to acquire more stuff even as we criticize everyone else for doing the same thing. As sociologist Juliet Schor found in one of her studies of U.S. consumption, 78 percent of respondents considered most North Americans to be “very materialistic,” but only 8 percent identified themselves as such.

Yet in both cases—whether we’re judging other people for their expensive new gadget or figuring out how to buy one ourselves—we are less adept at admitting to the visceral nature of our desires for more and to the ways such desires might form or warp our faith. Indeed, both mindless consumption and self-righteous judgmentalism can function as distractions from the more hidden urges that cause us to buy—or judge—in the first place. Yet if Christ dwells within us, then it is those deep-seated desires to which God attends and which God can redeem.

Desire: individual sin or corporate condition? It’s tempting to quickly label all consumer desire as sin. Certainly there are countless biblical injunctions against this kind of desire. The 10th commandment tells us not to covet anything that belongs to our neighbor (although it may help to update the servant, ox and donkey listed in Exodus to the Blackberry, new bedroom suite and Prius). Christ spoke against storing up treasures on earth, reminding his listeners that their security and hope lies in him, not in bigger barns. Religious ethicist John Haughey resurrects a Greek word, “pleonexia,” to describe what we know as greed, avarice or covetousness. Pleonexia can be described as “a passion for more,” Haughey writes in Virtue and Affluence: The Challenge of Wealth, “an insatiability for more of what I already experience or have.” He says that Christ’s words in Luke 12:15, “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed,” can also be translated, “Avoid pleonexia in all its forms.”

Yet while it is important to repent of our greed and to ask God to replace our acquisitive cravings with desire for the Spirit, there are several problems with labeling consumer desire only as individual sin. One is that is makes way for convenient self-righteousness, especially for those of us in the middle and upper classes. It’s easy for those of us who have achieved a certain level of comfort—including many North American Mennonites—to call all desire “greed” and to bemoan the ways it prompts people living paycheck to paycheck to go into debt in order to buy large-screen TVs and daily lattes. Too often, at least in my life, a “more-with-less” ethos is possible only because of class privilege, and too often it becomes a stance of judgment rather than a stance of grace: I could buy it if I wanted it, but I don’t—and you shouldn’t either.

Labeling all consumer desire sin may also move it to a more subterranean level where we’re less willing to talk about it, less able to examine it and less equipped to figure out how it works. We may be tempted to cordon off our desires from our buying habits; if we see desire as sin, it becomes easier to convince ourselves that we weren’t acting out of insatiable desire when we bought the new living room furniture or redid the bathroom and that the planning and saving and shopping didn’t actually take up a significant portion of our thought life. Indeed, even as North American Christians own more and more stuff, we may be less willing than others to own the desires that led to their purchase.

It’s also important to realize the ways pleonexia goes beyond the borders of the individual heart. Greed and avarice work within the dim reaches of our interior selves, but if they were confined to those spaces they would not carry so much power. Consumer capitalism requires us to be a nation of “pleonexics”; only by cultivating pleonexia in large numbers of people has it survived so long. “We have enough stuff; most Americans have more than enough,” writes Judith Levine in Not Buying It: My Year without Shopping. “Yet capitalism needs us to want what we do not have, and desire for what we do not have is an infinitely renewable resource.” Indeed, it is only through the corporate nature of pleonexia, the underwriting of consumer desire by our entire economic system, that we can have arrived at the absurd position where, as Schor writes, “half the population of the richest country in the world say they cannot afford everything they really need. And it’s not just the poorer half.”

Seeing greed as both individual sin and corporate condition may help us move beyond that standoff between unconscious acquisitiveness and haughty judgment. Pleonexia, that insatiable desire for more and more stuff, cannot be seen as only his problem or her problem or even my problem; it’s our problem.

Discussing desire. Intentionally considering the ways consumer desire forms us best occurs in the context of community. Realizing that we’re not alone in our appetites for more—that we’re not the only ones looking greedily at our neighbor’s oxen and donkeys—might help us move out of the cycle of self-blame and self-righteousness that spirals into paralysis. It is in naming our desires that they begin to lose power over us. We hope small groups and house fellowships are places where we can become honest and vulnerable about our desires and be strengthened to find ways to redeem them.

These honest self-assessments will probably require that we be able to laugh at ourselves. My husband and I are slowly learning to find humor in our seemingly endless ratcheting up of expectations for more things, more house, more money. After visiting friends or acquaintances with particularly nice homes or furniture or cars or gadgets, we’ve taken to quizzing each other on the trip home about which items we particularly coveted, often chuckling at our predispositions to certain types of consumer envy. While initially it can be painful to recognize the insatiability of our desires, there’s also freedom in diagnosing our own pleonexia, liberation in finding out that others have it, too.

Redeeming desire. In addition to talking about our pleonexia with others, we may be able to find ways to harness our desires rather than simply repudiating them. Instead of denying we have any consumer desire, perhaps there is a way to sift through our desires, examine them for what they are and figure out what deeper messages they hold.

As sensory creatures, we exist in the material world and perceive value and goodness through the objects and substance of our habitation. We experience the spiritual and the intangible through the physical and make sense of our world through the things that surround us. Rather than berate ourselves for desiring the beautiful countertop or the sleek luxury car, perhaps we can ask ourselves what those objects represent to us, what deeper qualities they mediate for us. Does the designer purse stand in for something else we crave, such as belonging? Does the new car signify escape, which we can never seem to find? Does the expensive spa treatment symbolize rest, something we keep hoping we’ll catch up with on the weekend?

Only when we are aware of the cravings behind our consumption can we learn to look in places more likely to provide their fulfillment—such as church community, the natural world or worship—than things that moth and rust destroy. Each time we consciously name our desires, we are given the opportunity to detach from our cravings and offer our wants to God. Spiritual disciplines such as prayer, fasting and meditation may help us identify our hungers and then more accurately trace them to their roots.

This idea—attempting to redeem rather than repudiate our consumer desires—should not be seen as waving off a weighty issue. Indeed, it is incumbent on those of us in the United States, Europe and Japan—who make up 18 percent of the world’s population and who consume 80 percent of its natural resources—to honestly assess where our pleonexia is leading the planet. Perhaps within our communities of faith we will be able to find the right balance between urgency and hope, between buying what we need and detaching from what we crave. Hopefully as we talk together about the seeming insatiability of our consumer desires, we will be led into a deeper awareness of the Source for which we truly yearn.

Valerie Weaver-Zercher is a writer and editor in Mechanicsburg, Pa. She is part of an Anabaptist house fellowship and the mother of three young sons.