Hey Pastor! The Real Crisis is Capitalism
Interested in learning more about this topic? Check out our upcoming Wellington event: Can Christianity Be Saved from Capitalism? More info below…
Pastors are an interesting breed of people. At their best, they are people who deeply care about their communities, about studying their faith tradition and the world around them to see their flock flourish. With the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other (to misquote Karl Barth), many of them are likely looking around and thinking “What the f**** is going on?” (the stars refer to “frick,” of course).
This leads us to crisis. Crisis-talk has really reemerged in a particular prescient way for my generation. Turns out history isn’t over, the Last Man was resuscitated in 2001, or maybe 2008, or maybe 2016, or maybe 2020 (only to die again during the pandemic). Crises abound with such vigour that it has even become vogue to talk about the “metacrisis” (unrelated to Mark Zuckerburg’s recent glow up) or “polycrisis,” described by Ville Lähde as “denoting this particular stage of world history … this historical epoch, when humanity has created a world interconnected and interdependent to an unprecedented degree, combining vast material wealth with radical inequality and teetering on the threshold of ecological collapse.”
Pastors also know plenty about crisis. Their giving continues to go down each year. Their parishioners don’t attend Sundays very often. Their building costs are going up and their risk continues to grow. They are often desperate for answers, for solutions, for new initiatives to deal with crisis. A whole industry is devoted to diagnosing this crisis, replete with think pieces (sorry not sorry), research reports, calls for revival, church planting workshops, for doing-the-same-thing over and over again, for doing something slightly-different-but-still-ultimately-the-same-thing over and over again.
Here’s my thesis: the real crisis isn’t church decline, or the secular age, or the apathy of the youth, or under-baked discipleship, or whatever they’re talking about on “This Cultural Moment.” People aren’t leaving Christianity because they are rejecting it per se. They are leaving because neoliberal capitalism has stripped their lives of meaning, of tradition, of action, of rootedness, of community. All that exists is the entrepreneurial self, the lone individual whose investments must turn their own existence into profit. The real crisis is capitalism.
The irony of this misdiagnosis of the crisis is that is commonly-prescribed cure reinstates the disease. Every single “solution” to the crisis we face, every new podcast, “cultural commentator,” book series, leadership conference, discipleship program becomes another product to be sold, a commodity to be exchanged in the quest for the self-betterment of already existing structures.
Frankly, it’s only a matter of time before a participant in this system recognises that there are better products to consume than the ones offered by churches. And the ones that do stick around, the committed remnant, hang around long enough only to find the same tired bullshit parroted out as “the new.” The reality is, under capitalism, there is no new, there is no genuine action—there is only the continual cycling of profit with no recourse to any other social, ethical, or environmental responsibility. Perhaps history is over after all, the afterlife is just an endless shopping experience mediated through our personal devices.
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Take, for example, Mark Fisher’s incisive analysis of what he calls “capitalist realism,” a way of describing our neoliberal era which not only presents capitalism as the only viable economic system but as one which forecloses any possibility for alternative ways of being in general. Capitalist realism convinces those within that possibilities exist for something better, something which resolves the contradictions created by our current political order but really just extends them or pushes them elsewhere.
Consider what Fisher observes as “the establishment of settled ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, and in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.” (This basically describes every church leadership conference that I’ve ever been to.) After all, “nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV.”
The problem is that this constant cycling through what feels like “the new” but is actually the same system repeated over again is that there is ultimately no escape. All meaning is stripped from life, there is no struggle or dream for a better future. “Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified,” Fisher writes. “A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all … Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense … The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way their capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history … Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual and symbolic collaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.”
“The reality is, under capitalism, there is no new, there is no genuine action—there is only the continual cycling of profit with no recourse to any other social, ethical, or environmental responsibility. Perhaps history is over after all, the afterlife is just an endless shopping experience mediated through our personal devices.”
Capitalism doesn’t just destroy religion; it replaces it. William Cavanaugh has recently argued, contra Weber or Taylor, that we live not so much in a disenchanted plane of immanent secularism but a new form idolatry magnified through the capitalist world order. Mammon is of course an idol as old as the gospel itself, but under capitalism, our worship of never-ending profit accumulation costs us more than ever. The global hegemony of late capitalism has instead created the conditions for rampant inequality, an increasingly volatile climate, the mass extinction of other-than-human species, the horror of twenty first century genocide and violence (as Andreas Malm has written, “The destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the earth”). Yes, we are in crisis. And the crisis is capitalism. It replaces all appeals to a better world with the justification that “hey, it could be worse.” It closes in on our ability to dream, to share, to create a more radically equal future, and instead replaces it with a smothering appeal to the current status quo.
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The worry I have with the account I have just provided is that there is a certain type of reader will agree with me, the crisis is related to consumer Christianity, or neoliberalism, or whatever, and then conclude: this is why we have break the apathy of young people by discipling them out of consumerism. But this simply blames young people for the system they have been placed in, a system which has stripped them of all hope for a future.
Because we misdiagnose our crisis, we are impotent to respond. In my experience, very few church leaders are willing to dream alongside the youth, to take risks in breaking with existing orders. There is instead a suffocating emphasis on preservation, on PR-management, and stakeholder interest. As Fisher asks: “how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?” The Western Church may very well be the first institution to find this out.
Andrew Clark-Howard is editor at Metanoia.
If you’re interested in this topic, we are hosting a conversation alongside our friends at SCM Aotearoa titled “Can Christianity Be Saved from Capitalism.”
When: 7pm, Wednesday 30 October
Where: Ramsey House, 8 Kelburn Parade, Kelburn, Wellington
What: Guest speakers, interesting kōrero, free wine!